Wilhelm Reich

1. A Life Spent In Inverted Commas

Wilhelm Reich was born in Austria in 1897, and died in prison in Lewisburg , Pennsylvania in 1957. In between he led an extraordinary life as a ‘therapist’, ‘inventor’, ‘bio-physicist’ and inspired crackpot. At the core of his life’s work was his ‘discovery’ of orgone energy, the primal sex-stuff of the universe.

2. Orgastic Potency: The Pursuit of the Table-Bitingly Good Orgasm

After returning from service in World War One, Reich settled in Vienna where he met Freud and became his assistant. Among his first important work was his theory of ‘orgastic potency’, which he defined as ‘the ability for total surrender to the involuntary contractions of the organism and the complete discharge of the excitation at the acme of the genital embrace.’ Not just a good hard come, this was an ecstatic release from all psychological and physiological constraint, usually involving a small bill for re-decoration. Reich argued that our administrators and politicians were suffering from a deficit in this area, which explains why Gordon Brown walks the way he does.

3. Your Anal Mucosa Is Meat and Drink to Me: The Early Development of Reichian Erotogenic Psychogalvanism

Fleeing the Nazis in 1933, Reich moved to Oslo, where he began to develop Freud’s idea of the libido, arguing that it should be measurable in terms of electrical potential on the skin surface, particularly on the surfaces of the glans penis, vaginal mucosa, anal mucosa, ‘and, in some intellectually oriented subjects, the forehead’. Couples were wired up so that opposite electrodes were placed into separate bowls of electrolyte solution, with the man sticking his finger in one bowl and the woman in the other. When the couples engaged in any sexual contact, such as light forehead-sucking, the circuit would be completed and the results recorded on an oscillograph. Other experiments in which the electrical potential of an ejaculating penis were measured had to be called off because the subjects, thrashing orgastically in the approved manner, tended to dislodge the electrodes.

4. Irrational Streams of Cum are Staining Earth: The War Years

In 1939 he emigrated to the US , though not, perhaps unwisely, to California . With therapeutic concerns now to the fore, he began working on a technique he called ‘character-analytic vegetotherapy’, described in his best-known book in English translation, The Function of the Orgasm (1942). The human body was considered as a sort of segmented insect, with its seven segments held in place by a ‘muscular armour’. A regime that involved forced vomiting, kicking, rolling the eyes, biting on soft objects and screaming was intended to break down the armour and release the flow of energy.

5. Spunk Dripping from the Trees in Great Foamy Lumps

In the early 1940s Reich achieved a synthesis of all his work so far by positing the idea of orgone energy. Orgone energy was not just bioelectrical sexual energy, not even merely the life force, but the essence of matter itself. Small particles he called ‘bions’ were concentrated orgone energy, and were the basic units that Democritus and Rutherford had unaccountably missed. ‘Orgonotic’ pulsations filled the universe, and the galaxies themselves were hilarious orgone streams in space. When the body had soaked in enough of this background radiation it discharged it in the form of an orgasm. Luckily for people who like a lot of orgasms, Reich invented an ‘orgone accumulator’, a sort of hut made with walls of alternating organic and metallic layers, that one could sit inside to recharge. And all this when Woody Allen’s orgasmatron was still some years off.

6. Deadly Orgone: Negative Alien Ejaculate

By the ‘50s Reich began to get into serious trouble with the US authorities, who banned his orgone accumulators mainly on the grounds that they didn’t work, and called in and burned any material related to them. Meanwhile Reich was distracted by the flying saucer problem, claiming that increasing desertification in the USA was the result of alien beings spreading orgone’s evil twin, Deadly Orgone Radiation.

7. Imprisonment and Insanity in Late Reichian Thought

The authorities were unappreciative of his contribution. In 1957 they arrested and convicted him on charges that included ‘transporting orgone accumulators over state lines’ and handed him a two-year sentence. He died after a few months in jail.

8. Epilogue: Jack-Off of All Trades

Reich thought he had made fundamental discoveries in fields including psychoanalysis, sexology, biology, physics, astronomy and sociology. He gloriously hadn’t. But his bioelectrical experiments stole a march on Masters and Johnson by two decades; he was a sexual liberationist in a period of repression and fascism, projecting human sexual energy into the universe at large with the ardour of a Whitman or a Lawrence; he left behind thousands of dedicated orgonomists and many such august institutions as the American College of Orgonomy; and he had so many devastating orgasms that his hair was left permanently standing on end.