Really? Huh… Thanks for the clarification. I’d always heard it the other way before. Guess I’ve always been hearing people give the interpretation as the actual quote…
Erk… I see someone’s been doing his homework Okay, I should have phrased that better. Replace my original sentance with “I have no mystic insight into how things are happening in relation to Ed Dames and any crimes he may attempt to solve in Japan.” Or maybe just “I have no mystic insight into how these things are happening.”
I imagine it might seem a little odd for me to be taking the side I am in this debate…
I read Reich For Beginners back when I was a True Believer in orgone energy.
I believe the author of the book was, to put it bluntly, a Communist. He portrayed Wilhelm Reich’s early life as that of a Champion for the Glorious Revolution of the Proletariat, but portrayed everything that Reich did after he skipped out of the Communist Party in the mid-1930s as the ravings of a psychopathic crackpot. (Then again, Reich’s work really did get more and more pseudoscientific as he got older.)
Incidentally, I have a whole boatload of skeptical articles about the works and theories of Wilhelm Reich here: http://www.netcom.com/~rogermw/Reich. He had two things in common with Velikovsky: He was a psychiatrist who applied psychiatry’s less-than-carefully-controlled approach to “research” into areas that he had no working knowledge of, and he felt persecuted because the rest of the “evil scientific establishment” didn’t immediately accept his wacko alternative theories as Gospel Truth.
Dang, I haven’t heard Wilhelm Reich’s name in a long time. IIRC he actually did come up with something of scientific merit, but this was way before his crazy ‘orgone’ (or whatever) claims.
Ah, but would you be willing to try sitting in a placebo orgone box*? Not that a double-blind placebo trial is anything Reich ever thought of doing himself, of course.
[sub]*) Nitpick: Reich called the box an “orgone accumulator”.[/sub]
The one “legitimate” contribution Reich made was Character Analysis. This was an extension of Freud’s technique of psychoanalysis. In traditional Freudian psychoanalysis, the patient sits on a couch with the therapist facing away from him; the therapist can only use the patient’s spoken words to analyze him. In character analysis, the therapist not only looks at the patient, the therapist takes careful note of muscular expressions in the patient’s body. It’s not what the patient says, but how the patient says it, that is important. In character analysis, a big, rigid, ironic smile, for example, says more about a person’s neuroses and defenses than his stories about his mother.
This idea of “character” was something already in the air within the psychiatric community at the time Reich formalized it, in much the same way that special relativity was already in the air at the time Einstein published his theory of special relativity.
However, saying that character analysis is “something of scientific merit” is stretching things a bit. Psychoanalysis itself, on which Character Analysis was based, wasn’t scientific. Freud read a line in Oedipus Rex, had a flash of insight, and boom, the “Oedipus Complex” was born, with no verification other than therapists’ convictions that it must be true. Psychoanalysis has been subjected to very few objective trials as to its real efficacy, and the results are mixed. Yes, some neurotic patients do have their neuroses disappear over a long course of therapy; but then, neuroses can also disappear over time with no therapy, and many of the tests of psychoanalysis show no significant difference between the cure rate in the therapy group and the cure rate in the no-therapy group.
So far as I know, Character Analysis has never been subjected to an objective trial for its effectiveness at all.
My interest in Wilhelm Reich is a tad more … personal. Some people are raised in a Catholic family, some people are raised in a Jewish family; I was raised in an Orgonomy family. And, trust me, there are religious aspects to the pseudoscience of Orgonomy.
I actually couldn’t remember what he had done at all, so I was working off of a slight memory of a book that mentioned something to the effect of he once followed the scientific method, then he changed to psuedo-science. It was an assumption on my part that he was actually involved with ‘something of scientific merit’.
I’ll admit it, I used to believe in UFO’s, Bigfoot, The Loch Ness Monster, etc.
I was even a card carrying member of MUFON.
I saw the alien autopsy footage and was convinced that it was genuine.
I was still in highschool at the time and I hadn’t developed the critical thinking skills I have now. I think my first experience with the deceit of what some people want you to believe was when I bumped into a ‘LaRouche’ who exclaimed all the virtues of Lyndon Larouche.
It was my semester in college and I ran up to my father and told him about all the wonderful things that the Larouches promised. My dad, a WWII history buff, was shocked and introduced me to some of the delusional thinking that the Nazi’s had. He then introduced me to the concept of ‘arguments from authority’ (he didn’t use that logical fallacy term though).
After that I picked up some books that helped me develop critical thinking (Shermer, Sagan, etc.), also my college classes and their demand for ‘scientific journals’ helped me out.
Okay, actually, Character Analysis wasn’t the only thing Reich came up with that wasn’t completely cuckoo.
In the mid-1930s, Reich conducted bioelectrical experiments wherein he measured tiny tiny amounts of naturally-produced voltage on the skin’s surface from subjects in various states of anxiety or sexual arousal. Unfortunately, his methods were rather sloppy, and at least one attempt to duplicate his results failed when the controls were tightened. Reich was interested in vindicating his theory that Freud’s “Libido” was something real and not merely a metaphor or an illusory sensation – the experiment shows his clear bias, both in its setup and in the conclusions he drew from the results. The fact that Europe at the time was full of prudes and Reich was doing an experiment related to sex didn’t exactly help his public image, either, and because of that, Reich assumed that criticism of his experimental method was merely an expression of his critics’ prudishness.
Still, those haphazard bioelectrical experiments were, to a small extent, an inspiration for Masters and Johnson’s later and much-more-well-controlled measurements of people’s bodies in various states of sexual arousal.
I too used to believe in Bigfoot, Nessie, the Bermuda Triangle and all the other crap that seemed really popular when I was a kid in the '70s (and even cold-fusion for a few days). I remember the Chariots of the Gods movie and I was convinced at the time that the pyramids and the Nazca lines were the products of more than one world.
I don’t remember exactly when I started to realize all the arguments for those myths were based on hearsay and very loose conjecture, but I do know that at some point I started realizing that all I ever heard on shows like In Search Of was along the lines of “could it be that aliens visited the Earth thousands of years ago?” or** “is it possible that Stonehenge is merely an alien’s Lego set that was left behind by accident?”** I came to understand that these were just bizarre ideas that had no basis in reality; only that the words “could” and “is it possible” meant that, well, yeah, it’s possible, but it’s also possible that Eric van Daaniken was just so full of shit that he saw everything in shades of brown, and that’s a much stronger possibility. I then started to apply the same sort of logic to things like psychics and ghosts and religion. Ultimately I became a skeptic.
It’s one thing to be a child and believe in impossible things, because when you’re a child so much of the world is new and the impossible just seems exciting. As an adult the world is amazing as it is; there’s no need (for me) for the impossible to make it more so.
Okay, I should have phrased that better. Replace my original sentance with “I have no mystic insight into how things are happening in relation to Ed Dames and any crimes he may attempt to solve in Japan.” Or maybe just “I have no mystic insight into how these things are happening.”