Some people are raised in a Catholic family.
Some people are raised in a Jewish family.
Me? I was raised in an Orgonomy family.
My dad became a True Believer in various aspects of Wilhelm Reich’s worldview when I was 8 years old. My mom kinda followed along for the ride. My dad built an orgone energy accumulator box big enough to sit in, convinced of its alleged therapeutic properties. (Reich believed that a blocked orgone energy flow within the body was responsible for everything from stuttering to sexual dysfunction to cancer.) When I was 9, the whole family went into Reichian therapy – not because we were having the kinds of real serious problems which require therapy, but because my dad believed that 70% of the population was neurotic and wanted us to be among that elite 30% that were orgastically potent. (Reich believed that the only criterion for emotional health was the ability to have a really really good orgasm involving “total surrender”.) Despite being sometimes referred to as “orgone therapy”, Reich’s therapy didn’t involve any orgone energy devices. It did, however, involve some personally unpleasant practices of “working on the muscular armor”; I recount some of my experiences with this form of therapy here.
For a while, I believed that orgone energy was real, and that Reich’s therapy was the be-all and end-all Way to True Emotional Health [TM]. I no longer believe either of these things. Orgonomy is a pseudoscience and, despite Reich’s insistence to the contrary, has many religious elements to it.
So … ever wanted to ask something to a former True Believer in Orgone Energy, who gave up the “family religion”?
Just the opposite. For the first 6 years I was in therapy, I learned all about the various things that were supposed to be “good for you” according to orgonomy, but I didn’t even know about orgone energy. So … because one of the things that was supposed to be good for you was gagging twice a day (!), there came a day when I gagged right in front of the rest of my 5th grade class, and later defended that action.
Of course, this didn’t exactly endear my classmates to me. But then again, by that time I was pretty asocial anyway and had given up on winning the approval of my peers.
My parents were very secretive about orgonomy. They pretty much toed the party line of the American College of Orgonomy, which believed that the general public will not accept orgonomy because orgonomy stirs up too many feelings that have been suppressed by the evil emotional plague. (The American College of Orgonomy also holds the position that all Wilhelm-Reich-based organizations other than the American College of Orgonomy are misinterpreting and abusing the works of Wilhelm Reich, and that they and they alone have inherited the torch of Reich’s work unsullied.)
When I was 15 or 16, my therapist-at-the-time finally told me about orgone energy, but in such a matter-of-fact way that I assumed it was established scientific fact. (I assumed I’d never heard about it before for the same reason I hadn’t heard of neutrinos until about the same time: i.e. that it was simply an area of science that was new and obscure enough that most people hadn’t heard of it yet.) And, to be honest, orgone energy wasn’t the only weird thing I believed in at the time. I was a teen-ager with feelings of personal disempowerment, like many other teens I’m sure, and so I turned to what I thought were the Secrets of the Universe.
Ever since I moved out of southern california, I haven’t talked to them much. We meet for Thanksgiving and Christmas every year, and I call 'em up on Mother’s Day/Father’s Day/Mom’s birthday/Dad’s birthday and on those few occasions when there’s something I want to discuss with them (or that they want to discuss with me), but that’s about it.
I’ve never actually come out and said to them, “Mom and dad, I no longer believe in orgone energy or Reich’s therapy, and in fact I’ve discontinued therapy,” but since they’ve stumbled across my anti-Reich webpages they must have had some inkling .
While I was merely afraid of my first therapist (the late Dr. Albert I. Duvall), my brother hated him. The fact that the two of us were forced to endure his sometimes-torture-like “therapy” drove me further into my asocial shell (my unconscious mantra became “do anything you have to do to avoid pain”), and it may have helped drive my brother toward the “seedy” crowd. The fact that my brother resisted therapy was seen by my parents as a sign of his incorrigibility, which probably fuelled his desire to be incorrigible as a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. They eventually shipped him off to a special school in Utah to “right” him.
My parents went to therapy half as often as my brother and I were forced to go. The therapy’s notion that, if you get angry, you should go hit and kick on your bed and yell and scream, may have actually helped them. I do know that before my dad took an interest in Reich, both of my parents considered spanking to be an appropriate punishment for rare and egregious transgressions, but after my dad took an interest in Reich they both stopped spanking. (It was as though the physical pain in my home life had shifted from my dad’s rarely swatting hand to the therapist’s frequently digging fingers.) My parents’ secrecy about their association with orgonomy minimized any social impact it might have had.
Ironically, the first seeds of doubt came from an orgonomy therapist that I saw voluntarily – and he came highly recommended by Dr. Carol Selma Stoll, who herself was also a therapist trained by the American College of Orgonomy and who believed not only in orgonomy but in a few other pseudoscientific notions as well!
We were discussing modern practitioners of Reich’s “cloudbusting” technique, whereby a few metal pipes attached by hoses to a source of running water were all it took to create clouds, disperse clouds, and move clouds around. The modern practitioners call themselves Cosmic Orgone Engineers, or CORE. I’d read some of the CORE reports, with their glowing descriptions of saving crops from killer frost or bringing rain to deserts. The therapist commented to me, “I do wish they’d include details of their failures in the CORE reports.”
Boom, first seed of doubt right there. The cloudbusting folks were reporting only their successes, not their failures. Could this be a case of “counting the hits and ignoring the misses”, as many self-proclaimed psychics like to do? Weather is not a wholly predictable phenomenon; was their cloudbusting success rate any better than what you’d expect by random chance? Did they, perhaps, not want to look at the possibility that the alleged effectiveness of their Reich cloudbusters was only an illusion?
And if cloudbusting rests upon such shaky ground, despite Reich’s insistence that it really worked, what about Reich’s other claims?
No, my dad didn’t use any electrically-powered sex gadgets. So far as I know.
However, now that you mention it, he is rather obsessed with sex. He’s only had one sex partner throughout his entire life (my mom) – maybe he feels like he’s missing out on something.
Incidentally, my dad was introduced to orgonomy and Reich’s therapy while we were living in Berkeley. At the time, my dad was, I kid you not, a wannabe hippie. (In the 1960s, Reich’s theories enjoyed a bit of a revival, since Reich was the man who’d coined the term “Sexual Revolution.” Since Berkeley has a reputation for being the hippie capital of the world, it’s not surprising that that’s where my dad found out about Reich.)
When I first saw this thread, I checked the date. It wasn’t April 1st.
Ok.
tracer — many fringe believers think their views can be used in day-to-day terms. Example–astrology buffs think they can forcast the future. Another example is “crystal healers”.
Does this belief system of your parents teach that you can “do things” with it? Did you ever attempt to use it?
Orgonomists are of the opinion that, by undergoing The Therapy and perhaps also supplementing Therapy with sitting in an orgone accumulator box or having a “medical” DOR buster waved back-and-forth over your body, you will become emotionally healthier, which will make all sorts of good things come your way, and better still, can even cure what Reich called biopathic illnesses (physical illnesses which Reich felt were due to blocked orgone energy within the body). Reich believed that cancer was biopathic, and therefore believed that if he cured a cancer patient’s emotional sicknesses he would also cure that patient’s cancer.
Reich also claimed that you can create life from lifelessness by soaking autoclaved, sterilized dirt in water for a few months (the microorganisms that appeared in those experiments he called bions), that you can control weather by controlling the atmospheric orgone energy flow with a simple device called a cloudbuster, and that the cloudbuster could even be used as a space gun against invading flying saucers (which he called Energy alphas.)
Admittedly, curing cancer, changing global weather patterns, creating life ex nihilo, and shooting down alien space ships are not the kinds of activities most people would want to engage in on a day-to-day basis. But there was one thing I picked up from reading about The Therapy that I did use, and that was using the Character Analysis classifications as a kind of psychological “judgement tool” against people. I’d see someone with a stuttering problem, and then recall Reich’s claim that stuttering was caused by emotional armoring in the jaw muscles, and draw all sorts of unjustified conclusions about that person from it.
This is facinating. I actually know a bit (very little bit) about orgone and Reich. I did a paper on him in high school. Not because I belived it even then, more that my bored, lonely, horny, spends-way-to-much time-alone-in-the-library self thought he was a good way to work sex into science class.
I guess the obvious question is, given Reich’s theories about the importance of sex and orgasms (certainly for anyong past puberty) , did you parents take an interest in your own “oragasitic potency”? And if so, how did THAT go?!
And…it’s total bunk as science, but do you think you got anything out of it…anything you’d want to keep…on a …ya know, mytho-poetic level? I mean, I kind of liked the orgasm powered universe.
Or, to put it broader, did you get anything out of it? That you want to keep?
And speaking of mytho-poetic, how do you feel about Kate Bush’s “Cloudbuster” song/video?
Heh. No, they didn’t watch me have sex to see if I’d have an orgastically-potent orgasm, or anything. Although my second therapist did let me masturbate in front of her once. :o
My parents did, however, make sure that I took some contraceptive foam with me when I was away from home as a teen-ager. I was never in danger of needing it, though – I didn’t even get to kiss a girl 'til I was 15, and I didn’t get laid 'til I was 21. (I wasn’t the most socially savvy person on the face of the planet, and my love life suffered for it. And is still suffering for it, I fear.)
Well … some of it, for better or for worse, has stayed with me. I still believe in being loud when I sneeze. I still gag on occasion to “free up my diaphragm.” I can definitely say that orgonomy’s obsession with total let-go orgasms and soft and tender feeling during sex has made me a better lover.
One thing about orgonomy that still influences me and that I want to get rid of is its Utopianism. Reich was a communist in his early years (he became an ardent anti-communist later in life), and communism’s ideal of a perfect paradise being “right around the corner if only we’d do thus-and-so” pervaded Reich’s psychological and sociological belief system. I picked up on Reich’s utopia of an emotional-plague-free world because I wanted it to be true, I wanted all the misery in the world to have a single root cause that could (A) take all the blame, and (B) theoretically be eradicated to make way for Paradise On Earth. I now consider such pipe dreams to be a waste of time, and potentially even a bit dangerous. The real world is very complicated and hardly anything is the stark black-and-white good-or-evil-with-nothing-in-between that Reich perceived.
That song was based on A Book of Dreams, which was written by Wilhelm Reich’s son, Peter Reich. I’ve read A Book of Dreams, and now that I see Wilhelm Reich as a crackpot rather than as the Way and the Truth and the Light, I can only recall the words of that book and think, “That poor kid!”
The line in the song about the glow-in-the-dark Yo-Yo was about the time Wilhelm Reich took Peter’s glow-in-the-dark toy away from him, because it used radium-based luminescence and Wilhelm Reich believed that even a tiny amount of radioactivity would aggravate natural orgone energy into its evil counterpart (!). Wilhelm Reich called this the ORANUR effect.
Tracer,
Thanks for satisfying a lingering curiosity that I have nourished for the past 25 years. I studied Reich a lot during the mid-70s. I still have plans for an accumulator and used to spin stoned fantasies with a friend about opening a psychic gym populated with those devices and others like it. Those stories about cloud busting and the descriptions of the pipe guns are kinda fun.
I also used to study another Freud heretic, Jung. Now as a more skeptical middle aged adult, my respect for those men and their cults has greatly diminished.
So, was Reich insane like everyone pegged him to be? Or was he totally self-obsessed? It seems like both he and Jung really thought they were being scientific, even though in retrospect their methods etc. hold little credibility.
The two aren’t necessarily mutually-exclusive, you know.
Reich did grow increasingly paranoid near the end of his life. His delusions of grandeur and persecution were largely fuelled by the psychiatrically-trained toadies he surrounded himself with, who were convinced that Reich’s work was The Answer and that Reich was one of the greatest men who ever lived. These followers of Reich may have been more accidental than anything else; Reich was extremely charismatic, and may have unwittingly created loyal followers just by his mere presence. At which point Reich would start to expect that kind of blind loyalty from any assistants, thus discouraging him from listening to criticism, thus strengthening his bond to his toadies in a vicious circle.
Reich tended not to associate with anyone who had a solid background in the natural sciences (physics, chemistry, microbiology, etc.). These people were just too critical of his work, and therefore, in Reich’s mind, were suffering from the Emotional Plague. They weren’t criticizing Reich’s work because Reich was wrong, no no no no, they were criticizing Reich’s work because Reich’s work was so emotionally disturbing to those trained in the “mechanistic” sciences that they were incapable of accepting the “obvious truth” of Reich’s discoveries. Yeah, that’s it, that’s the ticket.
You can toss Velikovsky into the same basket as Reich and Jung, too.
When I was in college in the mid-1970s, a group of Reichians gave a presentation on campus. I forget the name of their group, but they were German and lived in a commune where everyone went around nude all the time, and the men and women all had shaved heads and the children were raised in common. Do you know anything about them and what happened to them?
I’ve never heard of such a group, but I have heard tales of such communal-living groups that claim to have embraced Reich’s “teachings”. I heard most of these tales second-hand, from my dad.
My dad was always quick to condemn these groups as “misinterpreting” Reich’s work. Dad reflected the same stance that the American College of Orgonomy took on such matters: Reich was ardently against anything that resembled a cult. Reich was terribly afraid that orgonomy would turn into a “religion.” (This despite the fact that Reich never lifted a finger to object to the cult-like messianic status that his followers raised him to.)
<<you can create life from lifelessness by soaking autoclaved, sterilized dirt in water for a few months>>
As and aside - it’s very hard to autoclave dirt and actually sterilize it. Dirt has too many intricate, deep hidey-holes. Not the most scientific way to describe it, but it’s true. That’s why removing dirt is so important when you’re creating sterile conditions.
I once took a shot at trying to compare a patented “contamination eating” bacteria to normal soil bacteria and I couldn’t get the soil to sterilize, even in a walk-in autoclave. I ended up just testing it in consortium with the soil bacteria - which is what would be happening in the field anyway.
I’m surprized it took as much as a month for evidence of life to reassert itself. In my tests it took less than a week. Although I was adding nutrients to the soil, as well as water, which might have sped growth.
.
Although my second therapist did let me masturbate in front of her once. :o