The Orgon
The term “orgon” was invented by Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957), an Austrian student of psychiatrist Sigmund Freud and a leading expert of psychoanalysis himself in his youth. While he was continuing Freud’s work between 1936-1940, Reich put forward the hypothesis of the existence of the orgon,. He stated it was a vital force or a primordial cosmic energy, and a basis for sexual and psychosomatic neurosis. Like Reichenbach, he considered that the orgon penetrated all things and beings and that it existed as a biologic energy of a blue colour. It could be perceived, measured and highlighted from a thermal and electroscopic point of view in the atmosphere by using a Geiger counter. Reich published his theory in 1942, in a work called “The discovery of the orgon: the function of the orgasm; sexual and economic problems related to the biologic energy” and in another work, “The Biopathy of Cancer”, published in 1948.
In the United States, Reich practised therapies based on the orgonic force and had major problems with the American legal system. He invented a device called “the orgonic energy accumulator”; a metallic box multilayered with organic and inorganic coverings, which concentrated the orgonic energy for therapeutic purposes. He used his device with patients suffering from cancer and he sometimes he achieved successful results. The American Department for Food and Drugs tested the device and declared it as “lacking a scientific value”. Reich was forbidden to manufacture, distribute and use the device and, moreover, to use the term “orgon” in his works. Refusing to do so, he was fined and sent to prison where he died. As an eloquent expression of the intolerance and the dogmatism of the new “religion” of scientific materialism, all orgon accumulators were destroyed and all Reich”s books burnt.
