Is Orgone Theory Really so Weird?

Placing Reich's theory in the Western Tradition

Wilhelm Reich is one of those thinkers who seems to forever lurk on the outskirts of modern Western thought. Now and again, it looks like he’ll disappear completely. Now and again, it looks like he’ll become mainstream. Yet we seem comfortable, in general, to allow him to hang on the periphery.

The fact that he died in an American prison, following the investigation of his work by the FDA, gives Reich a certain “martyr” or “victim of state conspiracy” status. He is a near-perfect fit for that archetype.

The British singer Kate Bush further reinforced the image of Reich as a “tragic mad scientist” in her 1985 hit single “Cloudbusting” - an open paeon to him, written through the eyes of his son, Peter.

All in all, I think that there is easily enough archetypal fit to ensure that Reich keeps his place in history.

Yet certain questions remain. Was Reich really the victim of a state-sponsored conspiracy to marginalise non-profit-making treatments? And was he really a mad scientist?

Myron Sharaf’s excellent biography of Reich seems to me to repudiate the first notion - that he was the victim of a high-level conspiracy. Not so much because Sharaf directly addresses the idea but rather because of how clearly he documents the events that led up to Reich’s imprisonment in the mid-1950s. Yet the mad scientist part remains. Let’s dig into that.

Reich’s most contentious concept was his Orgone Theory - the notion of a universal energy that pervaded all existence including the human body. If the orgone was blocked, then health conditions would result. If it could flow freely, then we would experience good health and a high level of personal drive. Similar concepts could be applied to societies - those that allowed the free flow of orgone versus those that did not.

Reich invested much of the profits from his work as a psychologist in scientific equipment. He formulated and carried out heaps of experiments to try to prove to the scientific world that orgone was real, trying at one time to convince Albert Einstein. I think that it’s fair to say that he got essentially nowhere in this endeavour. Reich’s psychological theories retained at least some level of respect but his attempts to “barge into” physics received nothing but rebuttal and ridicule.

The issue with orgone theory was that it required the physicist to throw out way too much accepted wisdom. Science and physics proceed from axioms - accepted truths on which the scientist then builds. It’s okay to knock down the tower and rebuild it as long as you have the background and the data to do it. Albert Einstein did just that with his Theory of Relativity. But Reich, a scientific unknown, on the basis of a few personally financed experiments, was never going to be able to tear down so much accepted wisdom and install some quasi-mystical theory in its place. It was not that orgone theory was categorically wrong. It just proposed way too much change for very little obvious return.

Seeing that science was never going to stand behind orgone, proponents of the theory tended to look eastwards to find support. They looked at qi or prana. They delved into kundalini. And this is pretty much where orgone theory landed. Because Reich tried to convince specifically scientists of the reality of orgone, orgone theory has remained regarded as a pseudo-scientific theory.

Yet, if instead of looking East, we remain in the West but simply shift from science to philosophy, orgone theory might find its place.

US philosopher Mikey Downs gives an excellent summary in this video of how will or drive came to be a big focus of European philosophy in the nineteenth century.

German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer developed Immanuel Kant’s notion of noumena and phenomena, reducing its complexities to core components - Will and Representation. Schopenhauer considered Will to be an impersonal force that pushed individuals towards their desires. And that Will was a problem because no desire could be categorically satisfied long-term, leaving humans terminally unhappy. He considered that there were only two ways that people could avoid a life of misery:

• Either they needed to find activities that kept them very present in the moment, such as viewing art.

• Or they had to get into extreme aesthetic practices that stopped them from chasing their desires.

A generation later, along came Friedrich Nietzsche. He liked Schopenhauer but considered that his theory was way too anthopocentric - it was all about humans trying to feel happy.

Nietzsche, taking a view from above, proposed that this impersonal Will was merely operating through humans to forward its own ends. And that it was thus short-sighted, and cloyingly human, of Schopenhauer to not consider that something greater than humanity might be being trying to be born through the action of this will, which he termed Will-to-Power. He developed his theory of the Uber-man (Ubermensch). This Uber-man represented a kind of Mankind 2.0, something that impersonal Will was trying to bring into being.

We thus see two opposing perspectives as to the meaning and value of impersonal Will - that of Schopenhauer and that of Nietzsche. The former saw it as a problem that needed to be somehow got around. The latter as a higher-level driving force, trying to create something better than current humanity.

Returning to Reich’s orgone theory, we can see that it represents a kind of negotiated coalition of these ideas. Orgone is believed to have two basic attributes:

• driving energy

• intelligence

The Will-to-Power, whilst never fully explained by Nietzsche, seems to be a driving force, operating at a noumenal level (outside human sensory perception), which is directed by some form of noumenal intelligence. Reich’s orgone is thus simply a fusion of these two notions - noumenal drive and intelligence.

As to its meaning and value, Reich again fuses the ideas of the two German philosophers. Reich, in contrast to Nietzsche and in line with Schopenhauer, is a humanist. Yet he rejects Schopenhauer’s contention that this impersonal, noumenal Will is simply a problem. He asserts that if the human body is freed from its acquired physical rigidity (muscular armouring) then orgone can flow through it freely and be properly discharged in sexual orgasm.

Reich thus rejects Nietzsche’s trans-human interpretation of Will - that it is not there to be discharged but rather to create the Uber-man. Yet he does leave the door open, so to speak, to higher forms of social order developing through the correct use of Will (orgone).

What is also interesting here is that Reich, like both Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, rejects the Kantian proposal that Will should be properly directed by Reason (man’s capacity to be rational). Yet, once again, he does not fully oppose the position. Rather he considers that Reason is okay, as long as it not so excessive as to result in muscular armouring - a block to the flow of orgone.

Placed within the context of nineteenth and early twentieth century German philosophy, Reich (born in Austria in 1897) and his notion of orgone seem to me an entirely reasonable fit. In this, their historically natural framing, orgone doesn’t even appear especially bizarre, simply a reformulation of already well-established principles.

All that actually happened was that, by trying to assert that he could track orgone physically, through scientific experiments, Reich became a focus for ridicule in post war America. Secondarily, because Reich tried to persuade scientists, his theory has become pigeonholded as “pseudo-scientific” and rarely placed within the philosophical context of his day, where it clearly also belongs.

With the devastation of Germany that happened in the wake of the two world wars in which it played a leading role, and the rise of science in the West, so Nietzschean philosophy specifically and German ideas generally, became increasingly marginalised in the Western world. Reich’s notion of orgone suffered a double-hit here and has remained poleaxed ever since.

Yet, with the power of science now on the wane, following its ongoing failure to answer certain big questions, interest in philosophy is once again gaining ground. Wilhelm Reich and his orgone theory may yet emerge from the periphery and get serious reappraisal.