Wilhelm Reich and Orgone Energy Accumulator

Biography

Wilhelm Reich was a psychoanalyst who developed a number of radical psychoanalytical and physical theories. An apprentice of Freud, he believed that neuroses, as well as physical illnesses such as cancer, derived from a lack of “orgone energy” in the body.

Reich proposed that this energy could be restored through treatments such as generating sexual organisms and sitting in an orgone-accumulation box.

Although his experiments were unbacked and largely explainable by other physical phenomena, Reich mostly received criticism for the role his Marxist political views took in his research.

Although his theories of personality remain popular and influential in psychoanalytic therapy, Reich’s orgone theory is largely ignored and considered pseudoscientific in modern psychology (Morris, 1985).

Early Life

Wilhelm Reich was born in 1897 in the eastern part of what is now Ukraine. Reich grew up on a farm and was tutored until age 13.

Both of Reich’s parents died during his adolescence: his mother by suicide, his father from tuberculosis a few years later. The First World War broke out in 1914. The family lost its farm. Reich enlisted in the Austrian army and served as an officer on the Italian front.

Psychoanalytic Training

After the war, Reich enrolled in Vienna’s medical school. There he was admitted to the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, sponsored by Freud himself, while still a student. Reich became Freud’s first clinical assistant at his psychoanalytic outpatient clinic in Vienna during the 1920s.

Reich conducted research and gave lectures throughout the 1920s. His ideas sometimes conflicted with Freud’s, but they generally aligned with his written theoretical principles.

After his apprenticeship, Reich continued his research and clinical work across Europe and the United States (Morris, 1985). He was later convicted of contempt for violating a federal injunction against his orgone accumulators. His appeal failed.

Reich began a two-year sentence at Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary in Pennsylvania in March 1957. He died there of heart failure that November, before completing his sentence.

Reich vs. Freud

Although the apprentice of another iconoclast — Sigmund Freud, Reich formulated ideas and theories that psychologists considered to be far more revolutionary (Morris, 1985).

However, Reich, unlike his predecessor, was ultimately met with silence and dissension.

For one thing, Reich was an open advocate of communism during the late 1920s, while both Sigmund and Anna Freud were not.

Additionally, Reich shared outspoken views against Hitler and the rise of the Nazi party, which provoked dissension in both his Freudian and communist circles (Morris, 1985).

Reich also opposed Freud’s death instinct. The death instinct is a psychoanalytic theory that holds that people have a drive to reduce tension in their psyches to the lowest possible point — death.

The death instinct is first directed inward as a self-destructive tendency before later being turned outward as an aggressive instinct.

Freud used this death instinct theory to justify phenomena such as his patients” resistance to treatment and dreams about trauma after a trauma.

Unlike Freud, Reich believed that society should be built to conform to man’s needs rather than man conforming to society’s needs. Reich also notoriously gave lectures about women’s civil rights and advocated for sexual freedom (Morris, 1985).

Like Freud, Reich agreed that sexual development was the origin of mental disorders. Both psychoanalysts believed that most psychological states are dictated by unconscious processes: infant sexuality develops early but is repressed, and this has important consequences for mental health.

A Marxist, Reich expanded Freud’s theories in a more radical direction. He argued that the source of sexual repression was bourgeois morality and the socio-economic structures that produced it.

In Reich’s view, sexual repression caused neuroses. The cure was an active, guilt-free sex life. Only a new morality, one not imposed by a repressive economic structure such as capitalism, could make that possible (Morris, 1985).

All in all, it was Reich’s outspoken political views that set him apart from psychoanalysis. This led to his official expulsion from the International Psychoanalytic Association in 1934. He was also expelled from the German Communist Party.

Reich also employed a bodily therapeutic method that contrasted greatly with contemporary psychoanalysts.

Reich accompanied his “talking cure” with touch, feeling his patients” chests to check their breathing, repositioning their bodies, and sometimes requiring them to remove their clothes.

Bion Experiments

Based in Oslo, Norway, in the mid-1930s, Reich conducted experiments seeking the origins of life. Reich examined protozoa — single-celled creatures with nuclei. He grew cultures using grass, beach sand, iron, animal tissue, potassium, and gelatin.

After heating the materials to incandescence with a heat torch, Reich noted bright, glowing blue vesicles. He claimed these could be cultured. They gave off an observable radiant energy he called orgone.

He called these vesicles bions and believed that they were halfway between life and non-life. When he poured the cooled mixture onto the growth media, bacteria grew.

Based on various control experiments, Reich ruled out contamination from the air or from other materials used. That left him certain the vesicles were his own discovery.

Reich’s The Bion Experiments on the Origin of Life (1938) faced little scientific objection to its biological claims. Instead, the press attacked him over his cultural background, accusing him of meddling with the origin of life.

T-bacilli experiments

In his 1936 book Beyond Psychology, Reich described two types of single-celled organisms. One type, life-destroying, formed through organic decay. The other type formed from inorganic material that came to life (Reich, 1945).

This idea of spontaneous generation led Reich to believe that he had found the cause of cancer. He named these organisms T-bacilli. The T came from the German word for death.

Reich wrote that T-bacilli formed as the result of the disintegration of protein and that, when injected into mice, it resulted in inflammation and cancer in mice.

From these experiments, Reich concluded that when orgone energy diminishes in cells through aging or injury, cells undergo death.

At some point, t-bacilli form in cells, and the uncontrollable growth of these t-bacilli results in death from cancer (Reich, 1945).

Character Analysis

Reich formulated the basis of a field called character pathology. Character, or personality pathology, refers to the enduring patterns of cognition, emotion, and behavior that negatively affect a person’s adaptation to the social world.

These traits develop in childhood and, without treatment, persist throughout one’s lifespan (Morris, 1985).

Prior to Reich, psychoanalysis focused on the treatment of neurotic symptoms. Character Analysis became a major step in what is known today as ego psychology.

Reich believed that a person’s entire personality consists not only of individual symptoms and traits but of a whole neurotic system (Morris, 1985).

The most important work that Reich wrote in this field was “The Impulsive Character – A Psychoanalytic Study of Ego Pathology.

This work was later carried over into Anna Freud’s book, the Ego and its Defenses. Reich’s initial investigation into character pathology greatly influenced contemporary theories of personality.

Body Armor

Reich called this idea body armor, later renamed character armour. He believed chronic muscular tension, such as a stiff jaw, a rigid chest, or braced shoulders, physically holds and expresses an underlying psychological defence.

He argued that psychosexual energy which could not be safely released became locked into the body as this armor.

The blocked energy could not escape. Orgasm, in his model, was one way of breaking through it.

Orgasms were one way of breaking through this body armor. These ideas around sexual and psychological energy developed into a general theory that emphasized the importance of a healthy sex life to overall well-being (Morris, 1985).

In his book Character Analysis (1933), Reich addressed the idea of negative transference and formulated ideas about how to deal with latent negative transference.

Transference is the idea, first put forth by Freud, that people unconsciously redirect their emotions from one to another. This had a great influence on contemporary therapeutic practice and technique (Morris, 1985).

Body-Oriented Therapy (Vegetotherapy)

Reich’s second lasting contribution grew directly out of character analysis. If defences were held in posture and muscle tone, not just in speech, Reich reasoned, then therapy needed to work with the body directly, not just through talk.

What Is Vegetotherapy?

Reich called this approach vegetotherapy, from the “vegetative,” or autonomic, nervous system. It broke sharply with psychoanalytic convention.

Rather than relying only on free association, Reich watched a patient’s breathing and posture directly. He located areas of chronic muscular tension by touch.

Sometimes patients were partially undressed. Breathing exercises and repositioning were meant to loosen this body armor and release the energy trapped beneath it.

This use of direct touch was a major break from Freudian technique, which relied on verbal interpretation and the analyst’s studied distance. It anticipated much of what is now called somatic psychotherapy.

The approach rested on Reich’s related concept of orgastic potency, the physical capacity for full discharge of sexual excitation, which he believed was central to psychological health.

Legacy: Bioenergetic Analysis and Body Psychotherapy

Reich’s body-oriented technique survived mainly through his students, who kept the method while dropping the orgone theory used to justify it.

Alexander Lowen trained directly under Reich. Lowen developed bioenergetic analysis in the 1950s, keeping the focus on muscular tension, breath, and grounding within a more conventional psychodynamic framework.

Other post-Reichian schools followed, including Radix work and, more loosely, later somatic approaches to trauma. These trace their technique to vegetotherapy even where they reject orgone theory outright.

The lineage is direct. Reich is now generally credited with a lasting premise: the body itself holds emotional experience and defence, not just a separate mental life.

That idea outlived orgone theory. Modern body psychotherapy tests this premise against a different scientific evidence base, research Reich’s own claims never had to survive.

Orgone Energy

Reich developed a theory that the ability for someone to feel sexual love depended on their physical ability to have sex, as determined by what he called “orgastic potency.”

Reich attempted to measure the male orgasm and described four physiological phases:

• Build-up: psychosexual tension increases.
• Engorgement: the male sex organs engorge, producing an electrical “charge” that Reich measured directly.
• Discharge: an electrical discharge occurs at the moment of orgasm.
• Relaxation: the sex organs relax.

He believed that the force that he measured was a distinct form of energy present in all living things.

In psychoanalysis, Reich drew conclusions from working with patients and extrapolated his own experience into theory. Perhaps the most notorious of this extrapolation was “Orgasm theory.”

Reich adapted Freud’s theory of the sexual origins of neurosis and believed that sexual orgasms could be used as a treatment for such conditions.

Reich believed that the libido was not a psychotic disturbance but a system with a somatic function. He drew from Freud’s idea that sexual neurosis is like neurosis resulting from an intoxicating chemical substance.

Reich believed Freud’s substance was real and detectable. It drove sexuality. A block, or stasis, in it could cause neurotic symptoms.

To Reich, the orgasm was a way of liberating the libido and sexual energy in a human (Morris, 1985).

Reich said that Orgastic Potency “is to be understood as the ability to achieve full resolution of existing sexual need-tension” (Reich, 1980).

Reich connected the mind and body. He eventually deviated from psychoanalysis, believing that talking cures were not as effective as treating the body directly.

Reich’s experimentation revealed that there were charges at the skin’s surface that fluctuated with both anxiety and pleasure (Reich, 1971).

He called this charge fluctuation a biological type of energy that existed throughout the body and the atmosphere. He named it Orgone.

By working directly with the body, Reich believed that he could cure ailments and neuroses related to the stress that a person experienced and retained in the body (Reich, 1949).

Reich claimed this energy maintained homeostasis in both humans and the environment. Disruption could bring harm. Its absence, he argued, could cause cancer in the body or desertification of the earth (Morris, 1985).

Reich (1961) built boxes intended to concentrate atmospheric orgone energy called orgone accumulators. These were built in various sizes to accommodate lab animals and humans alike.

Reich believed orgone was a primordial, omnipresent cosmic energy. He credited it with phenomena ranging from weather and the color of the sky to gravity, galaxy formation, and human emotion and sexuality.

Reich believed that his orgone accumulators could provide a treatment for cancer and other conditions.

Reich tested the orgone accumulator on people with various illnesses. During these tests, a patient would sit within the accumulator and absorb the “concentrated orgone energy.”

Reich claimed that these orgone boxes could boost the immune system, even to the point of destroying certain types of tumors.

Ultimately, Reich’s tests on mice with cancer and plant growth convinced him that orgone was a grand unified theory of physical and mental health.

Orgone Experiment with Albert Einstein

Reich collaborated with Albert Einstein on an orgone accumulator experiment. Einstein agreed with Reich, arguing that if an object’s temperature could be raised without an apparent heating source, it would violate the laws of thermodynamics, constituting a major discovery (Reich, 1961).

Reich supplied Einstein with two of his orgone boxes, one of which was stripped down, to compare temperatures. Einstein confirmed Reich’s finding, observing a rise in temperature.

However, upon discussing the matter with one of his colleagues at Princeton, Einstein interpreted the phenomenon as resulting from thermal convection currents rather than a novel orgone energy.

Reich also designed a “cloudbuster,” which he believed could manipulate streams of orgone energy in the atmosphere to induce rain by forcing clouds to form and disperse.

Controversy

Reich received criticism both at the journalistic and legal levels. In 1954, the Food and Drug Administration of the United States filed a complaint to stop the distribution of a number of Reich’s materials and books. Many of his works were destroyed.

Among these destroyed works was Reich’s Character Analysis, written before any reference to orgone.

Because Reich did not respond to the court, the injunction was issued by default. There was no investigation (Morris, 1985).

Reich is seldom mentioned in lieu of other psychoanalysis in mainstream psychology.

Historians of science treat orgone theory as a textbook case of an unfalsifiable claim. Because Reich held that orgone could explain almost any effect, no observation could count against it.

This is Karl Popper‘s test for pseudoscience.

There have been no objective scientific studies widely recognized by academia or the scientific community to clarify the validity or falsity of Reich’s more controversial claims.

Contemporary Research

Modern research has not tested Reich’s orgone claims directly. It has tested the body-oriented psychotherapy technique that grew out of his clinical work instead, using standard trial methods, independent of any claim about a detectable life energy.

Aim: Rosendahl et al. (2021) asked a simple question. Could structured body psychotherapy, treatment that integrates body awareness, breath, and movement with psychological work, help adults with diagnosed psychiatric disorders or significant psychological distress?

Method: The team conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis. They searched PubMed/MEDLINE, PsycInfo, and PSYNDEX for randomised controlled trials, screening 2,180 references and pooling 18 RCTs covering 1,297 participants.

Results: The effects were real. Body psychotherapy produced a medium effect on psychopathology (Hedges’ g = 0.56) and on psychological distress (g = 0.52), with both effects still significant at roughly seven months’ follow-up.

Coping ability also improved substantially (g = 0.68), though quality of life and body-experience measures showed no reliable difference.

Conclusion: The authors judged body psychotherapy a promising adjunct treatment. They flagged substantial heterogeneity between trials, possible publication bias, and small samples. They called for larger, more rigorously reported trials before its effectiveness for specific diagnoses is considered established (Rosendahl et al., 2021).

References

Morris, B. (1985). The rise and fall of the human subject. Man, 722-742.

Reich, W. (1933). On character analysis. The Psychoanalytic Review (1913-1957), 20, 89.

Reich, W. (1945). Experimental Demonstration of the Physical Orgone Energy. Int. J. Sex-Economy and Orgone Research, 4(2-3), 133-146.

Reich, W., & Wolfe, T. P. (1961). The discovery of the orgone.

Reich, W. (1971). The function of the orgasm: The discovery of the orgone (TP Wolfe, Trans.). New York: Meridian. (Original work published 1942).

Reich, W. (1979). Bion Experiments. Macmillan.

Reich, W. (1980). Character analysis. Macmillan.

Rosendahl, S., Sattel, H., & Lahmann, C. (2021). Effectiveness of body psychotherapy. A systematic review and meta-analysis. Frontiers in Psychiatry, 12, Article 709798. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2021.709798

Strick, J. E. (2015). Wilhelm Reich, biologist. Harvard University Press.