Wilhelm Reich (long)

[ed@das.llnl.gov (Edward Suranyi)]

     With all the talk lately about "Cloudbusting" and Wilhelm and Peter
Reich, I thought it would be instructive to see how someone with 
a completely different perspective looks at his work.  The following
piece is by Martin Gardner,  a well known mathematician and critic
of the paranormal.

		From "Hermit Scientists" by Martin Gardner (1951)
	    Reprinted in Gardner's _Science: Good, Bad and Bogus_ (1981)
                	Reprinted here without permission

       Let us turn to a more colorful scientist whose work has recently
become a lively cult among the more Bohemian intellectuals of New York
and elsewhere -- the psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich.  Like Hubbard's
dianetics, Reich's "orgone therapy" has no connection with religious dogma
but is presented simply as a revolutionary discovery in biology and 
psychology.
       Reich began his curious career in Austria as an orthodox Freudian
but later broke with the psychoanalysts, founding his own publishing 
house in Germany in 1931.  He also severed his ties with the Austrian
Communist Party, having served in the same cell with the writer Arthur
Koestler.  Five years later, Reich opened an institute at Oslo, where he
met with furious attack by Scandinavian biologists who insisted his
knowledge was less than that of an undergraduate.  Expelled from Norway,
he came to New York in 1939 at the invitation of Dr. Theodore P. Wolfe,
an associate professor of psychiatry at Columbia University, and lectured
for a brief term at New York's New School for Social Research. [Later, he
maintained] a press in Greenwich Village, and research laboratories in
Forest Hills, New York, and Organon, Maine.
      In Reich's best-known work, _The Function of the Orgasm_, he
compares himself to Peer Gynt, i.e., the unconventional genius, out of
step with society, misunderstood, ridiculed.  Society has the last laugh,
he writes, until the Peer Gynts are proved right. In [another]
publication, _Listen, Little Man_, 1949, Reich likens himself to such
persecuted figures as Jesus and Karl Marx.  "Whatever you have done to me
or will do to me in the future," he declares, "whether you glorify me as
a genius or put me in a mental institution, whether you adore me as your
savior or hang me as a spy, sooner or later necessity will force you to
comprehend that *I have discovered the laws of the living*. . ."
      A pamphlet by Dr. Wolfe, published by Reich's Orgone Institute in
1948, is called _Emotional Plague Versus Orgone Biophysics_.  The purpose
of the booklet is stated on the cover:

	       A vicious campaign of slander and distortion against 
	       Wilhelm Reich and his work was begun early in 1947.  
	       There is no telling where it will lead.  This campaign
	       has not been confined to magazine and newspaper articles,
	       but an agency of the United States Government has been
	       dragged into it.

      Chief signs of this "emotional plague" (Reich's term for the slander
campaign) are two articles by Mildred Brady, one in _Harper's_ (April, 
1947), the other in _The New Republic_ (May 26, 1947).  The government
agency is the Food and Drug Administration, at that time investigating
Reich's "orgone accumulators."  These are large boxes of wood on the
outside and metal inside.  Patients rent them from the Institute, then
sit inside them to build up their orgone potential by absorbing the 
box's abnormally high concentration of orgone energy (a nonelectromagnetic
radiant energy coming from outer space which Reich discovered in Norway
in 1939).  "The Orgone Accumulator is the most important single 
discovery in the history of medicine, bar none," Wolfe writes.
      The following paragraph from a letter of Reich's published in the
pamphlet, is revealing:

	        It is an old story.  It is older than the ancient Greeks
              whom we consider the bearers of a flourishing culture. . . . 
              It was no different two thousand years later.  Giordano
	      Bruno, who fought for scientific knowledge and against
	      astrological superstition, was condemned to death by the
	      Inquisition.  It is the same psychic pestilence which 
	      delivered Galileo to the Inquisition, let Copernicus die
	      in misery, made Leeuwenhoek a recluse, drove Nietzsche 
	      into insanity, Pasteur and Freud into exile.  It is the
	      indecent, vile attitude of contemporaries of all times.
	      This has to be said clearly once and for all.  One cannot
	      give in to such manifestations of the pestilence.

      A word about orgone energy.  Reich regards his discovery of it as 
comparable to the Copernican Revolution.  A failure to accept it on the
part of other psychiatrists is, of course, "resistance to a new concept."
In _Character Analysis_ he interprets Freud's "Id" as the action of 
orgone energy in the body.  The energy provides a biological and physical
base for psychiatry, and to operate with the old Freudian drives is, 
Reich asserts, like trying to drink from a mirror image of a glass of
water.  In _The Function of the Orgasm_ he describes orgone energy as
blue in color (it has been photographed on Kodachrome film, Wolfe tells
us), and adds that it is responsible for the Northern Lights, St. Elmo's
Fire, lightning, the blue of the sky, electric disturbances during
sunspot activity, and the blue coloration of sexually excited frogs.
"Cloud formations and thunder storms," he writes -- "phenemena which
to date have remained unexplained -- depend on changes in the 
concentration of atmospheric orgone."  In 1947 Reich measured the energy
with a Geiger counter.
      It is interesting to note in passing that Reich also attributes
the flickering of stars to orgone energy.
      Reich's most astounding discovery is reported in the article "The
Natural Organization of Protozoa from Orgone Energy Vesicles," in the
November, 1942, issue of his _International Journal of Sex Economy and
Orgone Research_.  In this paper, accompanied by microphotographs,
Reich describes his observations of protozoa being formed spontaneously
from aggregates of bions.  The bion is another Reich discovery.  It is 
the unit of living matter, consisting of a membrane surrounding a
liquid and pulsating with orgone energy.  Bions are constantly being
formed in nature by the disintegration of both organic and inorganic
matter.  Under his microscope Reich observed bions grouping together
to form various types of protozoa, and he has the photographs to prove
it.  Cancer cells, incidentally, are protozoa which develop from tissue
bions.  To charges of critics that protozoa get into his cultures from
the air, or were already on the disintegrating material in the form of
dormant cysts, Reich simply answers that it isn't so, though he gives
no evidence of taking adequate precautions against either possibility.
     Disciples of Reich frequently defend him by saying, "Granted that
his biological work is highly suspect, you'll have to admit he's made
great contributions to the field of mental therapy."  This may be 
true.  But it has somewhat the same plausibility as a statement like
the following:  "Granted that Professor Ludwig von Hoofenmeister errs
in his theory that stars are holes in an opaque sphere surrounding
the earth, you'll have to admit has has made magnificent discoveries
in his study of cosmic rays."
     The reader may wonder why a competent scientist does not publish
a detailed refutation of Reich's absurd biological speculations.  The
answer is that the informed scientist doesn't care, and would, in fact,
damage his reputation by taking the time to undertake such a thankless
task.  For the same reasons, scarcely a single classic in the field of
modern scientific curiosa has prompted an adequate reply.

[In the book Gardner adds a postscript, written in 1981:]

    Reich's orgonomy cult *seems* to be waning (I could be wrong!),
though most of his books are back in print, and his followers are
still to be found among writers, artists, and show people like Orson
Bean.  Numerous books about him, favorable and otherwise, have been
written in recent years.  His daughter Eva Reich, a pediatrician in
Hancock, Maine, is active as a lecturer in orgonomy.  Her father's
rain-making device -- huge tubes that squirt orgone energy into the
clouds -- is in her front yard. [Any Love-Hounds want to make a 
pilgrimmage?]  For a while she was using orgone energy accumulators
to treat infants at a hospital for premature babies in Harlem; but,
after the director asked her to cease or resign, she chose the latter.
    Eva is firmly persuaded that human auras are orgone energy.  See
Lynn Franklin's long, sad interview, "Like Father, Like Daughter,"
in the _Maine Sunday Telegram_, June 22, 1980.  According to 
_Newsweek_ (December 13, 1976):  "For twenty years, Eva Reich has 
been hiding microfilms of portions of Reich's papers in a mushroom
cave in the Catskill Mountains.  Unless the courts intervene, she says,
she may make these secrets available to the world."
     A silly book has just crossed my desk: _The Quest for Wilhelm
Reich_, by Colin Wilson (Doubleday, 1981).  Poor Colin.  He had 
great promise as a young writer in Britain before he went crackers
over the paranormal.  Wilson sees Reich as crazy, but nevertheless
a genius whose discovery of orgone energy puts him in the company
of Semmelweis, Mendel, and all those other great scientists who were
unappreciated in their day.  No book on Reich is less worth reading.

Note from Ed:
     This in *no way* takes anything away from the greatness of
"Cloudbusting"  which is one of my favorites even among Kate's
songs.  It's just that I always have to laugh whenever Kate mentions
in an interview that Reich was "very respected."  Sometimes her
philosophical ideas have to be taken with a grain of salt, I think.

Ed
ed@das.llnl.gov