Orgone energy was first proposed by psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, who saw it as a bioenergetic force that spans the universe and causes everything that goes on around us, all observable phenomena. Reich saw sexuality as the prime energetic force of life and so orgone was heavily tied to sexuality. The word itself is based off of the term orgasm’ and its relationship to psychological health. Outside of an accepting scientific community, orgone and its many ties to sexuality were looked down upon. Nowadays, the scientific and medical communities think little of orgone. It is an untestable and measureless substance.
The theory of orgone is based by Reich off of the Freudian concept of libido a sexual desire and psychic energy. Libido is also known as a free or creative energy that an individual may use for personal development, gaining wisdom and self understanding. Reich believed society keeps us from unlocking our inner potential, our libido. Freud, likewise, began the train of thought that said libido is stemmed by parental figures, and later by society itself. He said it was the control of libido imposed upon us that causes us to put up ego defenses, limiting our true selves.
Of course, Libido also refers to a being’s urge to engage in sexual activity. It is an instinct energy and force held within the ID, one of threes parts alongside ego and super-ego, a sprawling and unconscious structure of the psyche.
When libido is deducted, the cause is blamed on a loss of privacy or intimacy, stress, depression, or distraction. If libido is controlled, it leads to the tension of a subject, slashing at their libido.
Orgone, defined by Reich, was a massless and omnipresent medium that regulated electromagnetic and gravitational phenomena. It was a luminiferous ether from which all matter is created. Orgone is in a continuous and attracting motion with itself. It defies the law of entropy and has the force to create spontaneous generation of living matter out of non-living substances!
Albert Einstein himself agreed to participate in Reich’s study of orgone, but later considered Reich’s claims to orgone heat’ as lacking’.
Reich developed a personal therapeutic approach called vegetotherapy that focused on setting free our inner reflexes. The approach was aimed at breaking our body armor’, built up by restricting mental blocks. Our psychical well-being would soar if freed from the restrictions of the mind.
Reich, after coming to the US, and his students were defined as a cult of sex and anarchy’. Especially since his best known book is titled The Function of the Orgasm’. Many sought the prevention of Reich’s claims of orgone used in the medical field. Finally, when Reich defied the order, he was thrown into jail and his books were collected and burnt.
Psychotherapists working in the fields of Body Psychotherapy and Somatic Psychology continue to this day to implement Reich’s libido-release methods into their practices. Use of Orgone in equipment, however, is rare, limited only to those individuals who’d been trained in Reichian’ institutions.
