Dr. Wilhelm Reich


          Scientific Genius – or Medical Madman?

 

          Wilhelm Reich in 1941

Dr. Wilhelm Reich  Scientific Genius – or Medical Madman? By ALAN CANTWELL, Jr., M.D.

Who was Dr. Wilhelm Reich and why has history tried so hard to erase him? by Jerry Morton

Wilhelm Reich's 'Contact With Space'  By Alison Davidson

FURY ON EARTH, A Biography of Wilhelm Reich by Myron Sharaf Paperback,                                                                   St. Martin's Press, NY (1983) Reviewed by Mary M. Leue

Bibliography and listing of outside links from Wikipedia The Free Encyclopedia

      Cloudbuster

         Dr. Wilhelm Reich


            Scientific Genius – or Medical Madman?

           By ALAN CANTWELL, Jr., M.D.

In my medical research into the infectious cause and origin of cancer, I never imagined I would become enmeshed in the strange world of Wilhelm Reich. For two decades I had studied the work of scientists linking bacteria to cancer, but never once did I come across Reich’s important experiments with the deadly “T-bacilli” that he discovered in cancer.

I first learned about Reich in 1982 from Lorraine Rosenthal who heads the Cancer Control Society in Los Angeles. Her mother worked in his laboratory in the 1950s, and Lorraine was sure his cancer work was related to my cancer microbe research. She recommended I read Reich’s two most revolutionary books: The Bion Experiments on the Origin of Life (1938) and The Cancer Biopathy (1948). These two volumes provide valuable and fascinating insights into the origin of the cancer cell and his discovery of cancer “T” bacteria.

During his life, Reich was portrayed as a mad psychiatrist and scientist who advocated free love, abortion, communism, and a multitude of other so-called perversions. The medical establishment regarded him as quack who tried to dupe the public into believing he had a cure for cancer. Eventually the US government took legal action to suppress Reich’s research, and the closing years of his life were filled with tragedy. Persecuted and hounded by the government, he was finally sacrificed on the altar of science.

Who was Wilhelm Reich? And why was he condemned for his beliefs? Was he merely a crack-pot psychiatrist? Or was he one of the greatest and most misunderstood scientific geniuses of the twentieth century?

      Reich’s Sex Experiments and Orgone Energy
 

Reich was born on March 24, 1897, on a small farm on the eastern outreaches of the Austro-Hungarian empire in what is now known as the Ukraine. At age twelve his childhood was shattered by his mother’s suicide. Provoked by marital unhappiness and infidelity, and beatings by her husband, she swallowed a kitchen poison. Reich watched her die a slow and agonising death. His father died of tuberculosis in 1914, and twelve years later his only brother also died of TB. Orphaned at age 17, Reich entered the Austrian army and experienced the brutality of World War One and the ensuing breakup of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

After the war he resumed his studies in Vienna and entered medical school. He was a brilliant student who developed a strong liking for the new speciality of psychiatry. At age twenty-three he became one of Sigmund Freud’s prized associates and began private practice as an analytic psychiatrist.

As a pioneer in the study of human sexuality, he used novel experimental methods to examine, analyse and measure various aspects of physical lovemaking. He concluded that the ability to love was dependent on one’s physical ability to make love with “orgastic potency.” Reich coined this term to denote a kind of super-lovemaking in which the mental, physical and emotional aspects of sexuality were all functioning at a high level. Experimenting with electrical stimulation of erogenous zones, he showed that sexual feelings of touch, pleasure, and pain could all be measured in the laboratory.

The physiologic process of erection of the male penis provided the beginning formula for Reich’s great scientific discoveries. Before male orgasm, he noted four distinct and separate processes that had to take place physiologically. First is the necessary psychosexual build-up or “tension.” Second, the “charge” that accompanies tumescence of the penis, which Reich measured electrically. Third, the electrical “discharge” at the moment of orgasm. And fourth, the final “relaxation” of the penis.

Reich observed these four essential stages (tension, build-up, discharge and relaxation) in all aspects of life forms he examined. In the orgasm process of sex, he discovered a unique energetic life force that pervaded all nature. Reich named this force “orgone energy.”

With Freud’s professional support, Reich quickly rose to the highest ranks of academia. His classic book, Character Analysis (1933), recounts his original contributions to psychiatry and introduces Reich’s novel concept of “body armoring.” Reich discovered that unreleased psychosexual energy could produce actual physical “blocks” within the muscles and organs of the body. These blocks act as an unfortunate “armor” preventing the release of blocked sexual energy. The orgasm, along with the convulsive body spasms which accompany orgasm, is the mechanism through which “orgone energy” is released by the body.

Reich believed a healthy and loving sex life is everyone’s right. In fact, he considered a good sex life absolutely necessary for the proper functioning of the body. He stressed that the social and political ills of the world stemmed largely from society’s repression of sexuality. This repression leads to unhappiness, depression, and the inability to express joyous sexual love. For countless people the sexual energy is blocked because of personal body armoring. As a result of this armoring, such people often fall victim to various aspects of the “emotional plague.”

In his practice of analytic psychiatry Reich broke with tradition. Instead of sitting passively, notebook in hand while his patients talked, Reich took an active role in the therapy. He frequently touched his patients, felt their chests for breathing, and repositioned their bodies. Sometimes he badgered and goaded them to physical action. In order to observe their body response during analysis, he sometimes insisted that all or part of the clothing be removed. Men were often reduced to shorts; women to bra and panties. Reich’s colleagues publicly protested against these unorthodox and radical psychiatric practices, and his most vociferous opponents accused him of immorality.

   Reich, Communism and the Nazis

 

As a young man in post-war Vienna during the 1920s and 30s, Reich was active politically. Disliking the anti-sexual right-wing conservatives and repelled by the fanaticism of the fascists, he migrated to Marxism and the sexual freedom proclaimed by the communists. Although Reich was a sex expert, his expertise did not carry over to the state of matrimony. In 1922 he married Annie Pink, a psychiatrist. Their first child Eva was born in 1924, and a second daughter in 1928. No matter how hard he tried, it was impossible for Reich to conform to marital convention and the marriage was chaotic.

In his writings the outspoken Reich went so far as to propose that a series of romantic relationships (“serial monogamy”) was a better alternative to marriage. In The Function of the Orgasm (1927) he declared: “Marriage is only one of the many issues where social scientists go astray, especially since they fail to see marriage for what it really is – a sexual union, based primarily on genital love. They prefer to ignore that fact and merely view it as an economic union or means to perpetuate the human race. Actually very few people marry for money or to have children; marriages of today really limit peoples’ freedom and may lead to economic deprivation.”

For professional, political, and social reasons, Reich moved his practice to Berlin in 1930. He joined the German Communist party, convinced the sexual freedoms of Marxism would liberate the common man and foster his mental health. As a spokesman for the Party, Reich advocated free contraceptives, birth control, abortion on demand, and sex education in schools.

By 1933, Reich’s marriage was on the rocks and he was already in another passionate love relationship. The German communists were increasingly disenchanted with the controversial Reich due to some of his outrageous ideas on sexual-political matters. The Party finally expelled him. He was also in a career crisis. His psychiatric writings and left-wing political activities became progressively more out of tune with Freud’s ideas and their relationship cooled considerably. In a supreme blow to Reich’s career, the Psychiatric Association revoked his membership.

All this personal turbulence was compounded by the rise of Hitler and Nazism. The Nazi press damned Reich as a radical psychiatrist, an anti-Nazi communist, a womaniser, and a Jew. Berlin was no longer safe. Disguised as a tourist on a ski trip to Austria, he luckily got out of the city by the skin of his teeth.

Returning to Vienna, he soon realised he was no longer professionally welcome there either. He emigrated to Denmark but soon became embroiled in disputes with Danish communists. From there, he relocated to Sweden, but was again harassed by the authorities. Finally, through the help of Norwegian colleagues, he secured residence in Oslo, where he had a new laboratory and enough money to continue his research.

By 1934 Reich’s divorce was finalised. Escaping the Nazis, Annie and his children resettled in Austria. Reich was madly in love with Elsa Lindenberg who had dutifully followed him in his exodus to Austria, Denmark, Sweden, and finally to Norway. In Norway he was determined to continue his research into the orgone life force that he had discovered in his orgasm experiments.

    The Bion Experiments and the Origin of Life
 

His experiments began simply by close microscopic examinations of the smallest form of cell life known to man: the so-called “protozoa.” Reich marveled at the squirming amoebae that developed from his grass and water “infusions.” Swimming in his microscopic preparations, the one-celled organisms were seemingly structureless blobs, yet they were also exceedingly complex forms that ate, digested, contracted, expelled, and multiplied. He playfully applied a small electric current and watched the protozoa contract and elongate.

During the years 1934-1937 Reich was totally absorbed in his experiments on the origin of life. His preparations consisted of infusions of various substances, such as grass, beach sand, earth, coal, iron fillings and animal tissue. He tested various combinations and added potassium, gelatin and other biochemicals to the mixtures. Boiling the preparations resulted in a marked increase in the number of “vesicles” that could be cultured.

After much experimentation, Reich concluded the cultured vesicles were intermediate “transitional” forms which were “midway between life and non-life.” “Dead” inorganic substances (such as sand, earth, and coal) gave birth to vesicles which pulsed with life. Reich named these energetic vesicles “bions.” He suspected bions were a heretofore unrecognised elementary stage of life.

After cooling the boiled bion cultures, he poured some of the boiled material onto laboratory nutrient culture media designed to grow ordinary bacteria. An unbelievable phenomenon resulted: the boiled bion cultures gave birth to peculiar-looking bacteria, and amoeboe!

To eliminate the possibility of contamination, Reich heated the cultures to the intense, flaming, glowing temperatures of incandescence (150 degrees Centigrade), and repeatedly sterilised his lab culture media by autoclaving it at a high temperature (180 degrees Centigrade) and pressure. At the time it was thought no known bacteria or any other life forms could possible survive such a high temperature and pressure.

Reich believed he had discovered an indestructible life force that defied death. He concluded: Bions are preliminary stages of life; they are transitional forms from the inorganic and non-motile – to the organic, motile, and culturable state.

When Reich’s The Bion Experiments On the Origin of Life was published in Oslo in 1938, the book created a furore. His critics latched onto one paragraph in the book that intimated Reich might have inadvertently found a cancer cure. Reich wrote that preliminary studies showed bion-like structures could be cultured from human blood and “bion research proved particularly fruitful for an understanding of cancer.” He was attacked by the scientific and lay press as a “Jew pornographer” who was tinkering with life and promoting a quack cancer cure.

Instead of discouraging him, the attacks lured him deeper and deeper into orgone research. Reich was determined to prove, beyond doubt, the reality of the new life energy forms he had discovered.

    The T-Bacilli, Cancer and Reich’s Bions
 

The unfair accusations surrounding the publication of The Bion Experiments goaded Reich into trying to solve the mystery of cancer. Weeks earlier he had placed some sterile cancer tissue (provided by the surgeons at a local hospital) into flasks containing liquid nutrient broth. Now in his anger, he scurried around to retrieve the bottles. To his astonishment, “all these cultures showed a green-blue coloration. Taking material from the margin, [Reich] inoculated a new agar plate and saw, for the first time, the T-bacilli, the discovery of which would help break down the mystery surrounding the cancer problem.”

The finding of bacteria in cancer filled Reich with a curious mixture of fear and awe. With fear because he knew that solving the secrets of cancer would be a Herculean task, further antagonising the medical establishment against him. With awe, because he intuitively knew these bacilli were involved in the agonising cancer deaths that affected countless millions. After much study, Reich named his newly-discovered cancer microbes “T” bacilli, after the German word “Tod”, meaning death.

The years 1934-1937 in Norway were Reich’s happiest. The bion work was exceedingly productive, and he was deeply in love with Elsa Lindenberg. In August 1938, Hitler annexed Austria. Miraculously, Annie and his children had emigrated to America the month before. Reich’s lingering presence in Norway increasingly angered the authorities, and the newspaper attacks against him were unrelenting.

Aggravated by depression and bouts of jealously and pettiness, his relationship with Elsa cooled. An American colleague strongly urged Reich to emigrate to the United States. In August 1939, on the last boat to leave Norway before the war, Reich left for America. Half-heartedly he had asked Elsa to come, but their tempestuous love affair was over and beyond repair. By this time Reich was also completely disillusioned with the communists and their false promises and their perversion of Marx’s humanitarian ideals. Never again would their philosophy interest him, and he became an ardent anti-communist.

When he embarked for America, Wilhelm Reich was no longer young. He was 42 years old and he would again be a stranger in a strange land. He rented a house in Forest Hills, Long Island, and soon began a new love affair with Ilse Ollendorf, who was extremely helpful in assisting him with his research. They were married in 1946 and Ilse bore him a son, Peter.

The cancer work continued with the T-bacilli proving to be the key to the origin of cancer. Reich’s experiments showed that all life contains orgone energy and when this energy diminishes in the cells, either through injury or aging, the cells undergo a death process that Reich termed “bionous degeneration.” As a consequence of this degeneration, the deadly T-bacilli begin to form in the cells.

Reich could demonstrate these bacteria microscopically in living (and unstained) cancer cells. Cultures of T-bacilli injected into mice caused inflammation and eventual death from cancer. The T-bacilli that formed in the cells provoked a reaction in the tissues resulting in the formation of vesicular swellings. Microscopically, these vesicles gave off a bluish glow, and Reich called them “blue PA bions” because they resembled the clumped “PAcket” bions that were experimentally produced when he heated substances (such as grass and coal) to high temperatures.

In degenerating cancerous tissue, the blue PA bions seriously affected the orgone energy of the cells. In other mouse experiments, Reich injected blue bions into the tissue and observed the resulting cancerous cell changes and the development of actual protozoa. These cancerous changes were similar to what had occurred in Reich’s earliest experiments during the death process of cut blades of grass immersed in his water infusions. First the tissue cells swelled and formed vesicles; and eventually transformed into protozoa.

Reich found that cancer cells have less orgone energy than normal, healthy cells. As the energy-depleted cancer cells break down and degenerate into T-bacilli, putrefaction of the body occurs. It is the overwhelming infection with T-bacilli and the massive breakdown of cancer tissue that causes most deaths from cancer. Cancer is literally death in the living body.

Reich discovered T-bacilli not only in the cancer tumours, but also in the blood, the body fluids, and the excreta of cancer patients. He originally thought the T-bacillus was the specific infectious agent of cancer. But these cancer microbes were eventually found by Reich in persons with other diseases – and Reich also observed the T-bacilli in the blood and excreta of normal healthy people!

The blood of cancer patients produced T-bacilli easily and quickly. In contrast, normal blood produced the bacilli slowly. Reich concluded “the disposition to cancer is therefore determined by the biological resistance of the blood and the tissues to putrefaction. This biological resistance, in turn, is itself determined by the orgone energy content of the blood and tissues, which is to say, by the organotic potency of the organism.”

    Reich in America, the Oranur Experiment, and Orgone Energy

Reich’s early years in America were comparatively quiet compared to his turbulent years in Europe, but his biomedical activities did not go unnoticed by the authorities. In December 1941, under the guise of subversive activity, the FBI arrested Reich and detained him at Ellis Island for three weeks. The exact reasons for the arrest were never made clear, but the harrowing experience further embittered him against his real and imagined enemies.

Along with his cancer discoveries, Reich had first noticed biological energy radiating from a beach sand bion culture in his Oslo lab back in January 1939. Now, in America, Reich would follow his hunches that would lead him to discover a new energy pervading the entire planet.

Reich and his lab co-workers frequently experienced headaches, irritability, and other unpleasant psychological and physical effects when working with certain radioactive bion cultures. It was theorised the beach sand had absorbed considerable quantities of radiation from the sun. When the sand was experimentally heated to incandescence (1,500 degrees Centigrade), Reich believed the solar radiation energy contained within the sand was released. Whatever the reason, there was no doubt orgone radiation was real and bion cultures had to be handled with extreme care because of their radioactivity.

In July 1940 Reich discovered orgone energy in the atmosphere! In order to study the effects of this radiation, he designed a specially-constructed box to house and concentrate this energy. Boxes were constructed to house lab animals. Eventually larger boxes were constructed in which a person could sit comfortably. Reich was interested in determining the effect of atmospheric orgone energy on humans, particularly persons with far-advanced and incurable forms of cancer.

It was this “orgone accumulator box” and its use in human cancer experimentation that caused the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to begin an intensive investigation of Reich’s scientific activities in the late 1940s. There were all sorts of rumours that the accumulator was a “sex box” which induced uncontrollable erections and stirred up intense and immoral sexual passions. As a result, Reich was harassed and intimidated by the authorities. Condemnatory articles in the professional and lay press added fuel to the fire by alluding to Reich’s mental problems and his sex-tinged research.

In the early 1940s Reich bought a summer house and acreage in Maine. He dearly loved the clean air, the clarity of the atmosphere, and the peacefulness of the place. A research lab was eventually built on the site, and in 1950 he moved permanently to the site he named Organon. He was fifty-three years old and tired of the stress of his psychoanalytic practice. Over the years his continuing practice had helped tremendously to support Reich’s studies and family, but now he wished to devote the remaining years of his life exclusively to orgone research.

At Organon a dangerous experiment began. Reich was deeply concerned with the planetary dangers unleashed by atomic warfare at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and in the early 1950s it was feared the Korean War might provoke another nuclear holocaust. Reich believed orgone energy could be harnessed as a possible antidote for nuclear radiation. He began testing the effects of orgone energy (OR) on nuclear energy (NR), and named the experiment “Oranur.”

During the Oranur experiment, radioactive radium was brought to Reich’s lab and housed in a special room containing orgone energy. The slow mixing of the two energies produced a nuclear chain reaction with devastating consequences. As a result of this nuclear accident, Reich learned that nuclear energy drastically changes orgone energy – converting it into “deadly orgone energy” (DOR). The laboratory accident seriously affected the physical, mental, and emotional health of Reich and his co-workers and necessitated a complete shut down of the lab until the dangerous radiation levels cleared.

Reich’s daughter, Eva, almost died in the mishap. Eva had been estranged from her father for years, but after finishing medical school, she joined him at Organon to help with the Oranur experiment. The stressful changes wrought by Oranur, and the increasing harassment by the FDA, put Reich under great pressure. He was never quite the same again.

The experiment undoubtedly contributed to Reich’s worsening relationship with Ilse. The marriage become more and more stormy as he tormented Ilse with accusations of infidelity and was physically abusive. Few people understood the clinical nature of feelings and emotions better than Reich; and yet he could be cruel, unyielding, and insanely jealous in his love relationships. He preached sexual freedom for all but he practised a sexual double standard in marriage that allowed him to be unfaithful, but never his mate.

While Reich was immersed in the problems of Oranur, Ilse developed uterine cancer. She was convinced her cancer was connected with the radiation experiments at Organon. While she convalesced from surgery, Reich cruelly filed for divorce. After it was finalised in September 1951, he began another relationship. The following month he suffered a major heart attack.

According to David Boadella’s biography of Reich, “The Oranur experiment had exposed Reich and all those who worked with him to severe strains. The remainder of his life was to be devoted to working on the many problems that the atmospheric chain reaction provoked by Oranur opened up, and it was particularly unfortunate for Reich that just at the time when he was struggling to cope with the dislocation to the normal activities of the Institute, he should become victim of a sustained campaign to belittle, discredit and attack his work on many fronts.”

    Reich’s Trial, Book Burning and Imprisonment
 

Despite constant attacks by the FDA, Reich pursued his experiments undaunted. He built a “cloud buster” in order to affect the orgone energy in the atmosphere. In the Arizona desert he induced rain by forcing clouds to form and disperse. Like a god, he began to control the forces of nature, as no one before him had ever done.

He was convinced the scientific world would recognise the value of his work and would appreciate the great benefit orgone energy could bring mankind. Long before such subjects were popular, Reich was concerned about toxic waste, nuclear energy, and planetary pollution; he knew their detrimental and damaging effects on the atmospheric orgone energy. He was sure the FDA would never destroy his research which held so much promise for the planet and its healing. Reich also had implicit faith in the fairness of the American legal system. He fully believed that American justice would never allow his important work to be discontinued.

Whether from ignorance or arrogance, or both, Reich severely underestimated the power of the FDA and the campaign against him. In February 1954 the FDA issued an injunction forbidding the interstate shipment of orgone accumulators. The injunction also denied the existence of orgone energy, and proclaimed all Reich’s books and publications were promotional materials for the worthless accumulator.

As demanded by the terms of the injunction, Reich foolishly refused to appear in court. He was adamant his scientific work could never be properly argued or evaluated in court. His legal counsel pleaded with him to reconsider, but he stood firm in his position. His unyielding decision had disastrous consequences. The FDA won the injunction by default.

The legal maneuverings culminated in a trial that took place in Portland, Maine, in May 1956. Reich was arrested in Washington, DC, on contempt of court charges, and was forcibly brought to Portland in chains. His refusal to cooperate with the court did not bode well with the judge.

Time was running out for Reich. Years earlier he had been abandoned by the psychoanalytic establishment. The communists drummed him out of the Party, and the Nazis wanted him dead. He had offended the Austrians, the Danes, the Swedes and the Norwegians. Now the Americans would have the opportunity to destroy the mad psychiatrist and his new god of orgone.

Reich was finally done in. He had played into the hands of his enemies, and now they had him where they wanted him. Reich was sentenced to two years in federal prison.

Before imprisonment, the FDA had its final vengeance. On June 5, 1956, FDA officials came to Organon. Reich and his young son Peter watched in silence as the federal officials axed the accumulators. On June 26, Reich’s many books and journals at Organon were burned by government authorities. On August 23 in New York City the final destruction of Reich’s literature took place. Six tons of books, journals and papers were burned in a scientific holocaust. And not a single major newspaper in the Land of the Free protested this unprecedented action, so reminiscent of Nazi Germany.

In early March 1957 Reich was imprisoned at Danbury Federal Prison. The psychiatrist who examined Reich recorded the diagnosis: “Paranoia manifested by delusions of grandiosity and persecution and ideas of reference.” A few weeks later, Reich was transferred to the federal penitentiary in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania.

The United States government won. Officially, orgone energy did not exist. Reich was certified as a mentally ill, quack psychiatrist who tried to foist a sex box and a cancer cure on the American public. The Reich affair was terminated.

In his prison cell towards the end of October he began to feel poorly, but he was afraid to bring the matter to the attention of the prison officials. He told friends that his jailers would try to kill him in prison, and believed he would never get out alive. On November 3, 1957, Reich was found dead in his cell, an apparent victim of a heart attack.

    Reich’s Scientific Legacy
 

The body was taken to Organon for burial. A small band of loyal followers, including Ilse, Eva, and Peter, paid their last respects. Elsworth Baker, M.D., who had studied with Reich for eleven years, gave the eulogy. “Friends, we are here to say farewell, a last farewell to Wilhelm Reich. Once in a thousand years, nay once in two thousand years, such a man comes upon this earth to change the destiny of the human race. As with all great men, distortion, falsehood, and persecution followed him. He met them all until an organised conspiracy sent him to prison and there killed him.”

Years later, Dr. Baker also wrote: “Reich’s attitude, in fact his entire life, was unconventional and as difficult for the world to understand as were his discoveries. Many legends, probably even religions, will develop about him. Already, some people look upon him as a superman who could not err, or as a spaceman come to earth; others have rationalised and written articles attempting to prove him insane, a charlatan, or a fraud, He was very human, natural, and open, and foremost, a great and genuine scientist. He could be as soft and warm as a summer breeze or as violent and angry as a thunderstorm.”

Was he a genius or a madman? For those who consider Reich an enemy of the people, his official sins are duly recorded in the dusty archives of office buildings in Vienna, Berlin, Copenhagen, Oslo and Washington. For those willing to take the time to investigate Reich’s writings, a different sort of man emerges.

It is my feeling that Reich desperately wanted to show the world God existed in the realm of the orgone. Through the study of orgonomy, Reich believed man and science could prove, beyond doubt, that God is real. Like God, the orgone is indestructible. And like God, orgone energy exists everywhere in the universe. Man’s spirit constantly reflects the orgone, eternally imbued with new life rising from the ashes of death.

Almost a half-century after his death, his scientific legacy persists. Reichian (Orgone) therapy is practised by some psychiatrists and psychologists. The American College of Orgonomy publishes the Journal of Orgonomy devoted to his work, and maintains a web site ( www.orgonomy.org ). Reich’s laboratory and burial place at Organon is now a Museum with a bookstore open to the public. Cloud-busting followers like Jim DeMeo have established an Orgone Biophysical Research Laboratory in Ashland, Oregon. The lab conducts yearly seminars reproducing Reich’s bion experiments and demonstrating Reich’s blood test procedures.

Reich’s T-bacilli are obviously connected to still controversial and current bacteriologic findings of so-called nanobacteria, pleomorphic bacteria, cell-wall-deficient bacteria, and mycoplasma. In addition, newly discovered bacteria have been found in the blood of all human beings. All of these microbial life forms have been implicated as possible cancer-causing and disease-causing agents.

In some ways Reich was childlike and surprisingly naïve. His downfall was overestimating the goodness of science; and underestimating the dark forces of science. In human terms, he paid for this error with his life.

Science, as we know it, is becoming increasingly “dark.” As this new century begins, scientists continue to discover all sorts of new ways to kill mass numbers of people and other living things with chemical, biological, and nuclear warfare. Perhaps it is time to take another look at Reich’s discoveries and his dream to harness orgone energy for planetary healing. Rather than automatically placing Dr. Wilhelm Reich in the trash bin of medical science, he might eventually prove to be the most inventive and far-sighted physician-scientist of the twentieth century. H

References:

Baker EF: "My eleven years with Reich". Journal of Orgonomy 18:155-171, 1984.

Boadella D: Wilhelm Reich: The Evolution of His Work. Vision Press, Chicago, 1973.

Cantwell AR, Blasband RA: "Bionous tissue disintegration in AIDS". Journal of Orgonomy 22:220-228, 1988.

Cantwell AR: The Cancer Microbe. Aries Rising Press, Los Angeles, 1990.

Cantwell AR: "Bionous breakdown in degenerative disease". Journal of Orgonomy 25:191-202, 1991.

Cantwell AR: "Bacteria, cancer and the origin of life". New Dawn, November 2003, pp 71-76.

Reich W: The Bion Experiments on the Origin of Life. Ferrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 1979.

Reich W: The Cancer Biopathy. Ferrar, Straus and Giroux, NY, 1973.

Reich W: Passion of Youth; An Autobiography, 1897-1922. Ferrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 1988.

Sharaf MR: Fury On Earth: A Biography of Wilhelm Reich. St. Martin’s Press/Marek, New York, 1983.

_____________________________________________________________________________
Alan Cantwell MD is a retired physician and cancer researcher who believes cancer is caused by bacteria and AIDS is man-made. There is probably no other physician on the planet whose publications are as controversial. Many of his published writings can be found on google.com; and thirty of his published papers can be accessed at www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/PubMed/  (type in Cantwell AR).

In 1984 (the year HIV was discovered), his book AIDS: The Mystery and the Solution was published, showing the presence of cancer-associated bacteria in this syndrome. And in 1990, The Cancer Microbe: The Hidden Killer in Cancer, AIDS, and Other Immune Diseases was published, which documented a century of suppressed cancer microbe research. His other books are AIDS & The Doctors of Death and Queer Blood: The Secret AIDS Genocide Plot.

Dr. Cantwell is now happily retired from the clinical practice of dermatology for 10 years. He lives in Hollywood, California, with his partner of 30 years, and their five cats. To contact him, write: Aries Rising Press, PO Box 29532, Los Angeles, CA 90029, USA. Email: alancantwell@sbcglobal.net

© Copyright New Dawn Magazine, http://www.newdawnmagazine.com . Permission granted to freely distribute this article for non-commercial purposes if unedited and copied in full, including this notice.

 Reich with his wife Ilse and their son Peter, who wrote A Book of Dreams about his close relationship with his father, how they would go cloudbusting together, and his bewilderment when Reich died in prison when Peter was 13 years old.

Orgoneaccumulator

Wilhelm Reich's 'Contact With Space'
By Alison Davidson
8-6-2


 

"There is no proof. There are no authorities whatever. No president, Academy, Court of Law, Congress or Senate on this earth has the knowledge or power to decide what will be the knowledge of tomorrow. There is no use in trying to prove something that is unknown to somebody who is ignorant of the unknown, or fearful of its threatening power. Only the good old rules of learning will eventually bring about understanding of what has invaded our earthly existence." The invasion that Reich refers to in his introduction to CONTACT WITH SPACE is the invasion of earth by intelligences from outer space. Very few copies of this remarkable book were made available, and Reich's extraordinary experiences during this turbulent period have been swept under the carpet by 'orthodox' orgonomy. To speak openly of UFO experiences still invites ridicule or polite smiles of disbelief. Consider then the atmosphere of the mid 1950's when Reich was not only claiming the existence of space visitors, but carefully documenting his battle with these 'invaders', while developing his now well- known cloudbusting techniques. Reich termed the space craft Ea - 'E' standing for 'Energy', 'a' for alpha or primordial. Ea also represented 'Enigma'... "Ea is a new event without precedent in our lives," he writes. "Humanity, with the exception of a few philosophers, had no idea of the possibility of visitors from outer space. Earthman had not developed any view, method or scientific tool to cope with the problem. In addition he has developed in his offspring a character structure and a kind of thinking which obstructs the approach to the new fact by way of ridicule, slander and outright threat to the existence of the pioneer of space engineering. Therefore our new approach must start from scratch, as if no science existed at all." Reich's ability to 'start from scratch' had characterized his revolutionary approach to psychoanalysis early in his career, long before he left the restrictive climate of Europe to pursue his ideas in 'free' America. He is best known for his research into the fundamental life-energy and for his controversial methods of sex therapy. His greatest contribution to real science was his discovery (or re- discovery) of what he called 'orgone', the life energy at the very roots of existence. Blockages in the free flow of this energy in the individual caused 'character armoring' which inhibited the spontaneous expression of joy and pleasure in life. The nature of this cosmic energy, depending on circumstances, functioned either as a 'life giving, life furthering, and reproductive force (OR), or in the absence of such conditions, turns into a killer of Life (DOR)." During his orgonomic research Reich was able to measure this orgone energy and he successfully treated many patients in the orgone accumulator, a specially layered box wherein the life-energy was concentrated. It was this unorthodox method of treatment which brought down the wrath of the Food and Drug Administration upon Reich, an attack which finally secured his imprisonment, and death, in a federal penitentiary. "Orgone energy does not exist," the FDA officials said to the Judge. Having declared that Cosmic Energy did not exist, it was obvious that its discoverer must either be a "quack" or a "lunatic". That, after all, is the rationale of orthodox, mechanistic science chained to its conceptions of a dead universe. For Reich, the Universe was very much alive and his approach to scientific research was functional, taking into account the subjective perceptions and emotions of the researcher. After all, he writes, "Classical knowledge may all be wrong, such with the perfect Copernican circles, the ellipses of Kepler, the empty space of Einstein, the airgerms of Pasteurian bacteriologists, the atomic nature of the Universe, etc. To see new things from scratch, to expect the impossible to be true, belongs to the emotional equipment of the true pioneering scientist." "We shall no longer hang on to the tails of public opinion or to a non- existent authority on matters utterly unknown and strange. We shall gradually become experts ourselves in the mastery of the knowledge of the Future." THE FIRST CONTACT "From the historic Oranur Experiment of 1951, Reich knew that nuclear radioactivity had a deleterious effect upon the living sea of energy in which we all live. From the observations made of the reaction of a milligram of radium put inside an Orgone Energy Accumulator, Reich knew that there was an antagonistic relationship between the energy of life (Ether, Prana, etc...) and the manmade nuclear energy so recently unleashed upon the planet. The effect of the nuclear 'irritant' seemed all out of proportion to the physical amount of radioactive material. The distance of this irritating and wildly exciting Orgone anti-Nuclear effect seemed to reach much farther than the actual radioactivity of the nuclear material would indicate. Perhaps, Reich reasoned, the Orgone Energy was a continuum; and this anti-nuclear reaction of the life energy (Oranur) extended and perpetuated itself in a chain reaction fashion far beyond the original limits of the nuclear radiation." (1) The development of the Cloudbuster was a response to the aftermath of the Oranur Experiment. Around Reich's Oranur laboratory near Rangeley, Maine, the atmosphere became polluted with DOR (Deadly Orgone Radiation). The black and bleak DOR clouds were remarkably similar to what would later be called air pollution or smog. These clouds were present even in the midst of sunshine, and where they gathered the atmosphere felt 'suffocating', the sky seemed to lose its sparkle and animals and humans felt lethargy and other symptoms of malaise. Not only were the DOR clouds a noxious presence, but a black powdery substance poured down onto the area, a substance that Reich came to directly associate with the presence of Ea in the skies above Rangeley. It was here that UFOs began to appear, big yellow and reddish pulsating 'stars' which were easily discernible from the planets and bluish colored fixed stars. Previous to this Reich had no experience with UFOs and had never studied the subject. Now he was faced with a direct confrontation. Some nights there would be 3 or 4 Ea hanging in the sky above Orgonon. They would make the atmosphere black, but by mobilizing the cloudbuster Reich was able to clear the air and make the sky blue again. It was under these peculiar conditions that the 'Spacegun' came into existence, and the war with Ea began. "I made actual contact by way of the cloudbuster with luminous objects in the sky on May 12, 1954...During this hour men on earth saw for the first time in the history of man and his science two "Stars" to the west fade out several times when cosmic energy was drawn from them." "Easy contact was made on that fateful day with what obviously turned out to be a heretofore unknown type of UFO. I had hesitated for weeks to turn my cloudbuster pipes toward a "star", as if I had known that some of the blinking lights hanging in the sky were not planets or fixed stars but SPACE machines. With the fading out of the two "stars", the cloudbuster had suddenly changed into a SPACEGUN...what had been left of the old world of human knowledge after the discovery of the OR energy 1936-40 tumbled beyond reprieve. Nothing could any longer be considered 'impossible'. I had directed drawpipes, connected with the deep well toward an ordinary star, and the star had faded out four times." Reich had first hesitated on using the spacegun on the Ea, considering the possibility of them being some kind of American craft, but the situation became so intolerable with the noxious OR influence, that he finally decided to. He found the power of the Oranur Spacegun tremendous due to the sensitivity of the OR energy ocean. The energy equilibrium of Ea could be disturbed or even put out of order by withdrawing energy from it directly. The affected Ea seemed at first to struggle, pulsating erratically, then shrink and even fade out completely. But the space visitors seemed to be retaliating by increasing the DOR pollution in the vicinity. "There was no doubt left as to the purposefulness of the activities of Ea: Energy was being drawn from the planet, with the consequences known now, 1956, far and wide as 'DOR-emergency'; decay of vegetation, the crumbling of granite rock, a feverish atmosphere. OR energy laws, mostly unknown to us earthmen, were used technically in the Ea operations." A detailed report on the Ea problem was forwarded to the American Air Force who appeared to be 'burningly interested' in the subject, but not particularly surprised. To further test the correlations between Ea and the desert forming DOR, Reich and the cloudbuster crew made their preparations to go to the fully developed desert, and the OROP Desert Expedition was underway. SURVEY ON Ea A simple chart Reich made to differentiate between stars and UFOs hovering high in the sky. Certain facts about the appearance of the UFOs such as their noiselessness, their shimmering lights, sometimes bluish in appearance, rotating discs underlying their motion, fell into place with some of the facts Reich knew well from cosmic OR functioning: The 'CORE MEN' (CORE = COSMIC ORGONE ENGINEERS), as he came to call them, apparently were thoroughly conversant with the laws of functioning in the cosmic OR energy ocean. They used cosmic OR energy in propelling their machines. Their 'blue lights' were in agreement with the blue color characteristic of all visible OR functions, sky, protoplasm, Aurora, sunspots, the color of OR lumination in vacor tubes, etc. The CORE MEN were obviously riding their space ships on the main OR energy streams in the Universe. Just as space is not empty, light does not 'come down to us from the stars and the sun'. It is an effect of lumination in the OR energy envelope of the planets. It is a local phenomenon. Therefore, there is theoretically no limit to speed in cosmic space, and the Ea were able to achieve tremendous speeds. DEADLY ORGONE RADIATION Driving across country to Arizona where the expedition would make its base, Reich closely observed the atmospheric conditions. DOR tended to concentrate over cities and became more pronounced as they entered the desert regions. Here it was observed to sink down into the valleys and hover low over the landscape like a ceiling. The tops of distant mountain ridges were seen to project clearly above the DOR shell, like islands above the ocean, and on these peaks the primal vegetation was still alive; while the lower vegetation, covered by the low-lying DOR blanket, died off, leaving only desert in the valleys - especially in the areas near atomic testing sites. Reich described the mountain ranges as being "eaten out", gnawed at by DOR as if a monster were feeding on the rock itself. The DOR functions were characterized by "a silent, invisible and inaudible gnawing away and insidious consumption of the life force of a host or organism." "The process of disintegration of trees and whole forests is due to progressive DOR prevalence in the atmosphere. A slight DOR prevalence causes dryness, dryness in turn increases DOR. Thus, in a vicious circle, the water-hunger grows together with diminishing precipitation. The process is slow and not easily discernible. Not much is known about its secret attrition of life." "It has great significance for the mastery of our future, that DOR surplus causes deserts in the landscape as it does in the organism. Desert souls will enhance desert development; and desert development will increase DOR or staleness in human emotions." DOR is hungry for nourishment, for water, for oxygen. As the DOR increases it vampirizes its host, in this case the abundant life energy indigenous to the planet. Reich observes that "the pestilential character shows the same type of behavior. He saps juicy, emotionally rich people, deprives them of their strength, akin to the behavior of a tapeworm, within the host victim. The pestilential character thrives on the energy loss in the victim, but in the end he perishes with the host. From here to sociological conclusions regarding the secret dynamics of political dictatorship is only a logical step: from here, too, a bridge can be built toward understanding the connection between desert development on our planet and visitors from outer space. These visitors are using fresh cosmic energy for their locomotion and pour the slag, DOR, into our atmosphere. Whether this is being done on purpose or by accident does not matter as far as the effects upon life are concerned." Reich foresaw the complete destruction of life upon mother earth looming on the horizon, unless DOR energy could be reverted again into OR or Life Energy. OROP DESERT Ea (1954-55) "Life holds only a narrow wedge as its own domain in the infinite vastness of cosmic energy." The desert around Tucson Arizona was chosen for Operation OROP, one of the hottest and oldest deserts (25,000 years) of the U.S. There was no primary vegetation growing; there had been no rain for five years. By October, 1954, the base was operating. It was not the primary objective of the expedition to "make rain over rainless desert". Reich had no ambition to impress anyone with rain making. Rather he wanted to find the borderline where their artificial efforts at a new atmospheric technology could end "and be replaced by the self- regulatory, self-sustaining laws that governed the behavior of cloud formation, rain cycles, cosmic energy metabolism in the atmosphere, etc, as they do in the living organism." He had observed that the living organism apparently metabolizes freshly taken in OR energy into DOR, which is expelled in the form of CO2, urine, feces and sweat. In the healthy organism the energy equilibrium between the charge and the discharge was easily maintained, however, during sickness more OR seemed to change into DOR. Thus, Reich concluded, a prevalence of DOR would be a basic feature of all disease. Subjectively Reich and his co-workers experienced the DOR atmosphere in the desert as oppressive and irritating, with the blinding heat seeming to draw the juice and life energies out of their bodies. "Thus, having seen and felt the desert, Expedition OROP proceeded to begin cloudbuster operations, in order to find out whether such a climate could be changed." "With cloudbusting operations, much DOR was removed and fresh Orgone Energy was brought in from the Southwest (along the Galactic Orgone Stream). The immediate result was a freshening of the atmosphere and environment: gone was the parching dryness and gone was the blinding whiteness of the sky. Rainmaking was not the goal; in fact, noticeable results occurred prior to any rain falling on the dry, sandy desert floor. By November, the barren desert north of Tucson began to turn green with a fine growth of new grass! In December, the greening of the desert had spread to cover an area 40 to 80 miles from Tucson with new grass up to one foot high! This happened without any rain falling, due solely to the fresh atmospheric Life Energy and attendant moisture from the Pacific Ocean, 250-400 miles to the Southwest."(1) The arrival of denatured Radium (ORUR), from the Oranur experiment at Rangeley dramatically increased the effectiveness of the cloudbusting operations. "While the clearing of the atmosphere had previously been done by drawing off the DOR clouds into a lake, now, within a few seconds, using ORUR material, the sky cleared and became blue...The change in the atmosphere was immediately felt by all observers. Even dirty steel-gray, DOR-affected rain clouds seemed to fill up and become white in a brilliant, formerly dull, stale atmosphere." However, Ea were also observing the operations. Whenever the familiar pulsating craft were seen in the sky, the rain clouds disappeared and severe DOR infested the atmosphere, making conditions extremely unpleasant for the crew. If the Spacegun was not used, the atmosphere became unbearable. One operator at a Spacegun was paralyzed by DOR while drawing from an Ea. Reich wrote: "There was no escape from the fact that we were at war with a power unknown to man on earth." But the ORUR was found to be extremely effective in combatting the Ea menace. "One could now reach far into space with ORUR: the range was limitless theoretically, since the OR energy ocean is endless and most sensitive to stimuli as demonstrated by the processes of dawn, dusk, and our actual operations over vast stretches of space." Another DOR-creating problem was atomic testing within the desert region. Reich was later to consider the possibility of immunizing the atmosphere against atomic explosions, much as living systems are immunized against infection. By creating a highly 'orurized' atmosphere, he reasoned, the DOR energy from atomic blasts or from Ea could be siphoned off. It was noticed that during the ORUR operations, there were 'coincidentally' many publicly announced postponements of atomic tests. It became apparent to Reich that although there was moisture in the atmosphere, the lack of actual rainfall around Tucson was due to a DOR barrier somewhere west of the experimental site in Arizona, preventing the clouds and moisture flowing in from the Pacific. The barrier was found to exist on the Sierra mountain divide, where a concentration of DOR was breaking up and dissolving the rain clouds coming in from the west. By March 1955, continuous DOR removal operations were set up just to the west of the divide. Within two weeks the barrier was breaking up with a black precipitate form of DOR ("Melanor") falling to the ground and turning the white sand dark. By the end of March rain began to occur in the desert. The breaking of the DOR barrier had accomplished the full breakthrough of fresh OR energy into the desert basin. The expedition was successful. The atmosphere had undergone a radical change, breaking a five year drought and turning completely barren desert land into green pasture again after thousands of years. It proved conclusively to Reich that desert development was clearly and doubtlessly reversible, that through a new kind of orgone technology, humanity could convert life-destroying energy back into life-sustaining energy. Winding up his affairs, Reich left the desert in April 1955. It was to be his last major operation. Within two years he was to die in prison, destroyed by a system that could not tolerate the free expression of live-giving energy. But the Enigma remains... REFERENCES: (1) 'The New Age' by Klark Kent, The Journal of Borderland Research, May-June 1987. CONTACT WITH SPACE by Wilhelm Reich, Core Pilot Press, New York, N.Y. 1957. THE WILHELM REICH MUSEUM, PO Box 687, Rangeley ME 04970. FURY ON EARTH by Myron Sharaf, St. Martin's Press, New York. 1983. This article first appeared in Borderlands Magazine. Reprinted courtesy of the author. © Alison Davidson. http://www.borderlands.com/archives/arch/contspace.html Reproduced from www.Rense.com

Wilhelm Reich and Cloudbuster

Like Wilhelm Reich, his biographer and fellow orgonomist Myron Sharaf died of a massive heart attack - on the 13th of May, 1997, in Berlin, Germany. It seems appropriate to recall once again the stunning achievement which emerged out of Sharaf's devotion to his mentor Reich in the writing of this passionate yet thoroughly detailed and objective biography.

We reprint this review, which first appeared in the English journal Energy & Character in April, 1986, as a way of honoring both Sharaf and the fallen leader whom he so signally honored.

 

 

FURY ON EARTH,

 

A Biography of Wilhelm Reich

 

by Myron Sharaf

 

Paperback, St. Martin's Press, NY (1983)

 

Reviewed by Mary M. Leue

I can hardly do better in characterizing this powerful new (1983) and, I believe, definitive biography of Reich than to quote some of the comments of reviewers which appear on the back cover of the paperback edition:

Remarkable and moving biography of Wilhelm Reich....Mr. Sharaf's deep emotional engagement, in constant battle with his urge for objectivity, conveys a powerful sense of what it must have been like to know Reich, to experience him and his work as one.

Walter Kendrick

Front-page review

The New York Times Book Review

 

Reading Myron Sharaf's passionate biography of his charismatic mentor and colleague is like being engulfed in an ancient drama about heroic intention. True to its literary analog and human source, Fury on Earth ends in catharsis. I felt like crying upon closing it.

- Webster Scholt

Front-page review

Washington Post Book World

 

 

Sharaf...is able to see his subject as he was seen by others - by wives, lovers, children, friends, and enemies. ... I am tempted to say that Sharaf's admiration for Reich is entirely functional: it has inspired him to devote long years to the reconstruction of a life that more skeptical minds would have found unworthy of the effort, and yet, miraculously, it has not interfered with his ability to recount that life so that even non-Reichians can appreciate it.

- The New Republic

I cite these reviews partly because they speak eloquently to Sharaf's achievement in terms with which I need not compete, but also out of an acute sense I experience of the demand for historical redress so profoundly needed in the circumstances of Reich's own life. It is this elemental dimension of injustice, of cosmic imbalance crying out for rectification so poignantly captured by Sharaf which both disturbs and stimulates my sensibilities. His faithful recounting of the life and work of this captive giant of a man whose categories of awareness and of life are still too large for us Lilliputian human beings addresses a paradox well understood by Sharaf and both understood and ignored by Reich himself - a paradox which I see as essentially the crux of this biography as characterized by its title and the quotation by James Agee from which the title was taken. In its entirety, Agee's quotation is as follows:

Every fury on earth has been absorbed in time, as art, or as religion, or as authority in one form or another. The deadliest blow the enemy of the human soul can strike is to do fury honor. Swift, Blake, Beethoven, Christ, Joyce, Kafka, name me a one who has not been thus castrated. Official acceptance is the one unmistakable symptom that salvation is beaten again, and is the one surest sign of fatal misunderstanding, and is the kiss of Judas.

- James Agee

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

The title of Sharaf's biography, plus the glowing responses of Sharaf's reviewers to his biography illustrate the point he is making - that praise of Reich, who was so calumniated during his lifetime, hounded to a premature and lonely death in prison, may indeed be a poignant tribute to the life and work of a great man which is long overdue, but at the same time, is a form of cooptation and thus of taming, of "castrating," if you will, a living, moving presence which was too disturbing while Reich was still alive to be acceptable to these same sorts of "authorities," of popular taste-makers, to say nothing of those professionals whose peer, whose natural leader Reich might have - ought to have - been!

I find it supremely ironic that the review from The New Republic should have been included among these reviews, in the light of the crucially vicious role played by this periodical in Reich's final fate, if for no other reason than that it provided an inspiration and source of conviction of righteousness to the man who directed the course followed by the Federal Department of Agriculture in pursuing Reich to his death in prison. The poetic perspicience of Reich's own personifications of that persecution by terms like "HIG" ("Hoodlums in government") and "Modju" ( a combination of the first syllables of the names of Mocenigo, the betrayer of Giordano Bruno and Djugashvili, Stalin's real name), idiosyncratic, even symptomatically neologistic, as it might appear to a classical Freudian, becomes acceptable to us in the context of this sympathetic history. I may be reading in an ambivalent note in the latter review, but it strikes me as such, using such phrases as "more skeptical minds would have found unworthy of the effort" and "even non-Reichians can appreciate it," which seem to me to be damning with faint praise - not, to be sure, the biography, perhaps, but, I suspect, its subject, even after all these years. Shades of the emotional plague, even if not on a conscious level!

Sharaf's second quotation concerns the other great paradox of both Reich's and the lives of many other great innovators and therapists, a role which Rollo May has characterized as that of "the wounded healer" who, like the shaman, is able to heal because of his woundedness, not in spite of it; whose greatness is directly related to the fact that that woundedness demands a creative response - either that or capitulation:

When confronted by a human being who impresses us as truly great, should we not be moved rather than chilled by the knowledge that he might have attained his greatness only through his frailties?

- Lou Andreas-Salome,

of Sigmund Freud

Following this notion, it is Sharaf's awareness of the meaning of the "interwovenness" between the events of Reich's life and his response to them as a source of his creative, restless, moving energy, which struggled both to resist and to encompass each such event, which informs this recounting of that life and sets it apart from other accounts of it. Citing the approach of one of Reich's biographers as falling into the trap of "psychoanalytic reductionism" in attempting to characterize it in terms of the tragic circumstances of its early years, Sharaf demonstrates great sensitivity to the demands of that life for depiction in terms large enough to avoid reducing his subject in any way, and thereby remains faithful to the man himself.

Throughout his lifetime, as Sharaf demonstrates clearly, Reich was both aware of and blind to the manifestations and implications of his own life circumstances. As is true of us all, both Reich's awareness and his blindness presented him with potential entry points into an enlarged understanding of the human condition, and ultimately, of the life energy itself. This, as Sharaf understands so well, is Reich's genius which made the difference between him and the rest of us "little men." Instead of being guiltily daunted by the implications of his own deficiencies or liabilities, throughout his lifetime he pursued these leads unstintingly and with great scientific exactitude, tracking down the life energy which he named "orgone" through all of its multitudinous yet unitary manifestations, from the most elementary particles of emergent life which he discovered and called "bions," through the entire biological kingdom and beyond, to the "empty" realm of outer space itself. One may call Reich's refusal to belittle himself through guilt "psychopathic," or even "megalomaniacal," as the psychoanalysts did, but no label one might be tempted to apply can contain the spirit or the accomplishments of so large a nature, as Sharaf has understood very well. Reading this biography allows us also to understand it.

Sharaf repeatedly points out the fact that Reich's far-ranging pursuit of the life principle was consistently systematic, led throughout its course by the internal logic of the investigative process itself and by the very nature of the "stuff" under investigation, which refused to stop at the boundaries of each discipline through which he pursued it. The search, starting for Reich from his first glimpse, in his teacher Freud's libido principle, of the "energy of the sexual instinct," a concept which would serve to bridge the gap between the "mechanistic" and the "vitalistic" models of life, neither of which had seemed to him a satisfactory one by itself, was thus a logical progression of effort to resolve each issue raised by his own observations as it presented itself to him in the contrast between his own experience and observations and the proposed explanations offered by others.

Freud's concept of the libido as the energy of the sexual instinct made more sense to Reich, fitted his own experiences more closely, than did the purely empirical description of life he had been offered in his medical training. It appealed to him initially as providing a dynamic and affectively significant focal point for understanding and making changes in the manner in which his patients functioned, as exemplified by Freud's own work of psychoanalysis. It also provided Reich with the impetus for pursuing Freud's initial suggestion - namely, that it ought to be possible to demonstrate a proof of the objective, quantifiable reality of this hypothesized energy, a project which seemed to Reich eminently worthy of his attention.

Sharaf is here pointing out to us the manner in which Reich approached the solution to problems and/or challenges as they arose naturally throughout his lifetime. Always, he started with a topic which was of vital interest to him, both on a personal and a professional level. Then he compared the views of others with his own natural response. The pattern Reich followed in this instance, the issue of how to view sexuality, is indicative of the pattern of his work throughout his life. Comparing his own views with those of the psychoanalysts, Reich was struck immediately by the contrast. Sharaf quotes Reich's comment on this in The Function of the Orgasm.

Sexuality, in my experience, was something different from the thing they discussed. Those first lectures by the analysts and others I attended made sexuality seem bizarre and strange.

A quotation from Reich's diary of March 1, 1919, which Sharaf also cites in this connection, elaborates the point, and as well, Reich's way of thinking about issues:

Perhaps my own morality objects to it. However, from my own experience, and from observation of myself and others, I have become convinced that sexuality is the center around which revolves the whole of social life as well as the inner life of the individual.

Reich's confidence in his own natural reaction allows him to stand back from these views of the self-proclaimed experts and to formulate a hypothesis which he will then use as a basis for further investigation. Whatever problems he encounters in this context, whether objective or personal, built into the investigation or created by the pursuit itself in its opposition to what has previously become established doctrine he will weave into a furthering of the conditions whereby his creative, always simple and unitary solutions to such problems will emerge. Sharaf seems to me to be suggesting that one principal explanation for the utter disbelief, condemnation, and ridicule with which Reich's findings have until now been greeted by most members of the scientific community rests in their very simplicity and unity. How can it be, runs the argument, that the numberless complexities and intricacies we have been explicating all these centuries could possibly be reduced to so ubiquitous yet so irreducible a principle as the concept of "life energy"? Surely, this is vitalism, not science! And surely, we laid this ghost to rest centuries ago!

Sharaf's presentation of the progress of Reich's work and life, which details graphically just how the two interacted with one another, is a marvel of "interweaving" in itself. He moves from a general characterization of each period in Reich's life - e.g.,

Part I The Viewpoint of the Observer,

Part II The Development of the Mission - 1897-1920,

Part III Reich as Insider - Building a Career and Marriage, 1920-1926,

and so on, into the particulars of each period. In some periods, such as Part III, the work takes up most of the section and Reich's personal life only a small part. In others, the historical chronology of the period is more important. In each section, the organization of the material reflects the actual pattern of the life being led during that period of Reich's life.

This might seem, at least potentially, a chaotic or discontinuous way of presenting Reich's work, diluting or obscuring the logic of its sequentiality, but Sharaf does it so skillfully and with such loving and faithful clarity and detail, sifting, looking at every aspect of each issue raised by those events, giving each differing view of the circumstances its due, yet without in the least compromising the integrity of the work itself, that a portrait of the man in all his complexity, strength and force of character emerges more and more vividly from the on-going narrative, and the inextricability of the work from the life of the man becomes evident, as well as the other way around! A couple of examples may help to make this clearer.

Take, for instance, Sharaf's handling of the oft-repeated charge against Reich that he was in the early years of his psychoanalytic period a superior and gifted analyst whose latent paranoia and grandiosity became more and more crippling, increasingly affecting the quality of his judgment and his work, ultimately terminating in his "going off the deep end" and becoming messianic, and in fact, hopelessly psychotic, as evidenced by his monomania with this weird entity, "orgone energy."

On pages 206-210, Sharaf describes the gradual process, starting in 1931, whereby Reich moved from his therapeutic observations of the energy "streamings" experienced by his patients as their anxiety and muscular spasms relaxed progressively in the course of the therapy, to an increasing interest in the nature of these streamings. Reich saw an analogy between this organismic response, which his patients described as intensely pleasurable, to the plasmatic, expansive movements of protozoa in "pleasure" as well as to the opposite protoplasmic response of shrinking, withdrawing, contracting of self-protective "anxiety." Observing the pulsatory nature of protoplasmic activity at rest, he postulated analogous processes at work in human beings, which he viewed as arising from the basic organismic commonalities of both.

Starting in 1934, following this analogical insight, Reich began a series of investigations of the physiological aspect of these reactions in human beings. He found the work identifying bio-electrical charges within the biosystem which had been described by Friedrich Kraus to be relevant to his inquiries, and developed equipment to measure the relative electrical flow in various states, particularly in relation to the pleasure function. His findings convinced him that he had discovered a quantifiable basis for the energy of the orgasm, which he characterized in a formula having four steps - tension, charge, discharge and relaxation - demonstrating graphically the fact that the strength of that charge was affected, not by a mechanical turgor of erotic tissues, but by the degree of pleasure reported by his subjects! To characterize this bio-electrical charge he coined the name "orgone," meaning the energy of the orgasm, which he considered a unitary pleasure function of the body.

Reading Sharaf's detailed account, both of the work itself and of the personal implications of that work, it becomes clear how almost inevitable, considering how defensive the analysts already felt, it must have been for men like Federn to atribute the extreme threat and antipathy of their reactions to Reich's impact to his psychological makeup rather than to their own. Reich was a natural target for a person with psychoanalytic training on the grounds of virtually every analytic criterion. What is remarkable is the length of time Freud continued to support him in the face of such consensual intellectual conviction. Too, Reich's conflicts with his first wife, Annie, also an analyst, led to the taking of sides against him by a number of analysts on personal grounds, which is understandable in human terms, especially considering what a threat his refusal to submit to the "compulsive monogamy" he decried must have been to them, struggling as they were for respectability. He insisted on pursuing the very most sensitive aspect of Freud's own original metapsychology, the libido principle, which Freud himself had by now essentially dropped in favor of ego psychology. To make matters worse, Reich had been a very visible activist for social and political change in a profession for whom such activity was considered "acting out" at its worst, irrelevant to their concerns at best, and certainly, both unscientific and potentially embarrassing!

Again, Sharaf makes it clear that Reich's subsequent discovery of the "bions" did not, as so many of his erstwhile psychoanalytic colleagues seemed to think, come from the same characterological defect which had led him to break so many psychoanalytic taboos. Their ad hominem bias against Reich's assertions now spread to the entire scientific community, whose outrage was easily stirred up and channeled into agreement with that ad hominem charge against him. Sharaf makes it easy to understand the position of the scientific community toward Reich, emerging as it did in response to a whole congeries of factors, personal, political, and theoretical. Like the hypothesis that there was a special pleasure energy hitherto unrecognized by biologists, this new assertion - that life came from non-living matter - could have been profoundly disturbing to both. Had not this issue been settled once and for all by the work of Pasteur, proven irrefutably against equally unsound claims of spontaneous generation of life?

In the face of such a challenge to their fundamental intellectual assumptions as well as their internalized social mores, adopting the explanation offered by his psychoanalytic colleagues and spread by the sensational press that Reich himself was both kinky and unbalanced obviated the embarrassing necessity of taking those findings seriously. Contrary to their beliefs, however, as Sharaf points out, Reich's findings actually were the result of very careful, systematic observations unimpeded by the ideological biases and societal fears which governed his associates within those communities.

To offer the truism in explanation of Reich's plight that he was "ahead of his time" doesn't help expiate our collective guilt as fallible human beings in refusing to resonate to the truths of ultimate reality but instead, turning on the one who calls them to our notice. One of Reich's most profound insights was into what he sometimes called "the emotional plague." The gist of this awareness was that the kind of truth Reich was asserting cannot simply be ignored by "little men" like the psychoanalysts and other professionals for whom it is a threat; it must be denied by destroying the one who asserts it. The response is proportionate to the profundity of the truth. The most poignant expression of this insight Reich embodied in his book The Murder of Christ , written at a time when "the world's" destructive process was well under way. Reich had a gift for seeing into and beyond his own dilemma to the nature of the human dilemma posed by this phenomenon. In this book, he has Christ saying to us all, "I have nothing to say to you. You will not grasp my meaning now, as you did not grasp it before and will not grasp it in the future." Reich's personal tragedy is that he tried to say it, over and over. Each time, he was greeted by more and more heart-breaking rejection - at first, by the psychoanalysts, then by the scientists, finally, by Einstein himself, to whom Reich turned in a final last resort for confirmation by his peers.

Sharaf describes very vividly the gradually accelerating assaults against Reich during this last phase of his life. These assaults can be viewed from a kind of mirror-like perspective which reflects a feedback phenomenon at every stage of that process. Sharaf describes Reich's manner of responding as one of moving "upward" into ever more fundamental research. For example, during the extensive nuclear testing period of the Cold War Reich developed a belief that orgone energy might prove to be an antidote to nuclear radiation. His proposal to the Atomic Energy Commission in 1950 that he study the biological effect of orgone energy on radioactive tissues led to their sending him two milligrams of radium for this purpose. This was certainly a project for which he was highly qualified, and its potential importance in the dangerous atmosphere of the Korean War undeniable, but the defensive aspect of this new project came at least partly out of his disappointment with Einstein earlier, partly in response to Mildred Brady's attack in theNew Republic.

Thus, it was at least partly Reich's pattern of mounting defensive self-aggrandizements following each public humiliation that led to the waves of counter-attacks by such "little people" as Brady, and ultimately, to the launching of the FDA campaign against him as a pornographer and a cancer quack! Reich's belief that orgone energy might prove to be an antidote to nuclear radiation, which led to the "oranur" episode with all its negative consequences can thus be viewed in a double light. It also appealed to him as providing him with a way in which he could gain recognition by the government both as a scientist and as a loyal patriot and thereby demonstrate graphically the falseness of the plague attacks on him. Sharaf expresses it thus:

Reich's undue optimism about the course of events was to lead to some major errors. However, it helped him rechannel his energies back to his work. The investigation by the FDA was finished, he had won, he did not have to worry about the FDA. At the same time, a more realistic side of him did continue to worry even if in a less direct form than previously. One way he expressed this concern was to search urgently for still more dramatic, socially needed applications of orgone energy.

Sharaf describes in detail the full scope of the consequences of the oranur experiment. He makes it clear that the consequences of the oranur experiment were manifold, enveloping Reich and his entire professional community of colleagues and followers in an atmosphere in which health, optimism, faith - even, in the case of Reich's daughter Eva, life itself - became seriously jeopardized. Reich's increasing isolation from all but a few of the people who had been working with him throughout his American years could truly be said to stem initially from this event, yet there is nothing in the event itself which can be pinpointed as directly causative. Sharaf's account makes no attempt to blunt the impact of this tragic downward spiral.

The course of the remainder of Reich's life takes on a sort of mythological character caught most poetically by his son Peter's Book of Dreams and detailed no less poignantly by Sharaf's faithful prose. It is important to remember that the charges of insanity against Reich come from a much earlier period, and are simply being repeated and reinforced by subsequent events, because Reich's own stability, defined objectively, did begin to break down at this point. He gave increasing signs of operating under stress by increased drinking and bursts of rage against those who loved him and/or worked with him. At the same time, he resorted more frequently to a kind of split awareness based on a sort of instinct for the existence somewhere of support on a very high level which grew more vivid in proportion to the actual persecution he was suffering at the hands of so many people. If he sometimes interpreted this support as existing literally in the government or in its embodiment in President Eisenhower, whom he admired, or in the Air Force, it is not so very surprising, especially when one remembers how eloquently he had written of his findings to these agencies, how little he had held back.

Reading The Einstein Affair , written in 1953, right in the middle of these disturbing events, about the rejection by Einstein of his accumulator research which had occurred in the period between 1940-1944, one is struck by the sense of deep hurt which underlies Reich's detailing of that episode, of the depth of his need for recognition by someone he looked up to as representing real peerhood. His final appearance before the federal judge in Lewiston might be said to flow directly from this ultimate drive for recognition, coupled with an equal drive for educating human beings concerning the nature of the reality he had been discovering and working with throughout his lifetime.

I find it necessary here to introduce my own bias in relation to the life of Reich and the people who surrounded him, particularly at the time of the trial. My belief is that, again like Christ, Reich's was a life which cannot be dealt with objectively without betraying its meaning - and especially the meaning of its ending. I keep coming back to the feeling I get from reading the ending of Sharaf's biography in this light, because I believe it is the real pivot around which this book turns. Truly, the account of the end of Reich's life reads like an ancient Greek tragedy, and the chief reason it does so is because of the sense one gets of inexorability. It is as though the wheels were set in motion, and everything which happened after a certain point was pre-ordained by Fate. It reads heavily.

It is only when one compares this account with the one Sharaf wrote for David Boadella's book, Wilhelm Reich: The Evolution of His Work, however, that the significance of this heaviness begins to emerge, unless I am greatly mistaken. It feels to me like the final resolution of agonizing guilt - guilt objectified, as it were - as though Sharaf has taken upon himself the guilt of all Reich's heirs. Unlike his earlier account of the trial in Boadella's book, in this one he does not point fingers. By the same token, his account is less personal, more universal. It may be important to reproduce his earlier words, if one is to understand fully Sharaf's accomplishment. That earlier Sharaf was well acquainted with guilt. Here is what he said then:

The situation with the followers was a pretty bad one. They - we - knew at least our own littleness and pettiness, our resistances, our fears, our smart-aleckiness, our laziness or emotional indifference or hiding or whatever it might be in the individual case. But to hang around in guilt-ridden anxious circles wasn't much help either. Nor was it any help to stop thinking and base your reaction solely on Reich's look or words. All the mysticism was there - Reich will find a way out, he "knows" things we don't know, we don't understand it all. This was partly rational, but it was also deeply sick. At one point in the judge's summation one person in the audience said, "It looks good, Reich is smiling," and he genuinely expected that the outcome could be different than it was. Or people mechanically parroted phrases or said that Reich would somehow turn the day.

 

I think Reich himself contributed in part to this atmosphere because he was clinging staunchly to his own line and didn't want to be disturbed by noise around him. He would have listened to respectful, strong-minded, strong-hearted, devoted persons who were willing to break their hearts and necks in the fight. But such persons were not around, or were only one or two. There was submissive echoing of "hoodlums" and "spies;" there