Information regarding sexualizing energies is hard to dig out of the histories of animal magnetism, odic force, and psychic force. An assessment of the large literature establishes the existence of powerful societal suppression regarding their phenomena and any research of them.
The sexualizing energy aspects are further concealed, this most probably in keeping with the taboo regarding sex prevalent during the nineteenth and early part of the twentieth centuries.
However, anyone patiently and knowledgeably sifting through the enormous literature can find the evidence regarding energetic sexualizing phenomena. The evidence found is cumulative, and taken altogether is highly supportive of the real existence of such energies.
As it is, though, the evidence is really not all that necessary, in that most people, probably from time immemorial, physically experience and mentally realize not only that sexual energies have some kind of real existence, but that they interact over distances if they are strong enough.
A far greater mystery, but equally based in copious evidence, has to do with WHY research along the lines of human energetics has been condemned and suppressed by powerful societal factors.
Mesmer, Reichenbach, the photographers of energies, and psychical research were all attacked (best word) by powerful societal forces.
This resulted not only in their historical condemnation, but established serious barriers against ANY examination of the topics they represented.
Further, the attacks frequently were vicious, so much so that even reputations of highest eminence could be destroyed. For example, the positive interest of Sir William Crookes in the physical phenomena of Spiritualism damaged his high scientific standing almost beyond repair.
A calm and lengthy survey of this negative situation reveals that it is not the people involved, but the topic of human energetics as a whole, under any label or format, that is being suppressed by powerful societal forces. And this by methods resembling overkill with the ultimate goal of complete erasure.
All possible explanations considered regarding the societal suppression, the actual source of its origin and reasons for it remain arcane—especially if compared to the concept that the more that is learned and known about human potentials, the better off everyone would be.
THE FIRST DELIBERATE RESEARCH INTO
SEXUALIZING ENERGIES
With many similarities to the saga of Anton Mesmer, and to the scientific deconstruction of Karl von Reichenbach and later psychical research, the story of Wilhelm Reich demonstrates yet another revolting example of societal overkill regarding any knowledge about the actual existence of human energetics.
Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957) was born the son of a farmer in Dobrzcynica, Galicia. He showed high promise in his early tutoring, so much so that his poor family worked to provide him with higher education.
After World War I, in which he served in the Austrian army on the Italian front, he studied law at the University of Vienna, and then went on to study medicine, obtaining his M.D. in 1922. After graduating he undertook further studies in neurology and psychiatry.
No less a personage than Sigmund Freud recognized Reich’s excellence. Reich was soon appointed as the first clinical assistant in Freud’s Psychoanalytic Polyclinic in 1922, and later became vice-director in 1928. These positions held by Reich were of no mean importance, and they contributed mightily to his growing reputation as an excellent thinker and scientist.
Reich joined the Austrian Socialist Party in 1924, and the Communist Party in 1928. These early affiliations with Socialism, Marxism and Communism were later to be held against him in the United States. But in Europe at the time, such affiliations were rather standard fare, and almost an unavoidable intellectual necessity.
The socio-political intensities in Europe had little in common with how Americans understood politics. It could be said, in general, that Europeans were preoccupied with socio-political theories in much the same way as Americans were fascinated with movies and movie-making.
In any event, it was de rigeur for intellectuals to consider at least the social (as differentiated from the political) promises of these growing theories.
Competent biographies of Reich make it quite clear that he was principally interested not in political issues but in social health and well-being, and in reforms that would cure mental and emotional factors upon which social ills were founded and perpetuated.
Reich had become convinced that much neurosis was caused by poverty, bad housing conditions, and various other social ills. Essential Freudianism, Marxism and European Socialism had been set up to improve the human lot in this regard, and so it was logical for Reich to involve himself in all three. In the sense of all this, Reich completely fitted into the times and developments of Europe.
However, much like Freud, Reich had early on become convinced that social ills principally arose from neuroses based in blocked and distorting sexual urges. He early advocated the establishment of “health centers” in which the blocked sexual urges could be unblocked and once more take on their natural expression.
Europeans were quite prepared to discuss and debate social ills, the traditional basis of which was perceived as resulting from the unfair distribution of economic wealth on behalf of the wealthy and the politically powerful.
Reich, however, advised that the more actual basis of social ills arose from blocked sexual urges brought about by confusions inherent in social conditioning that resulted in faulty functions of energies involved with sexual orgasm. Not only was society as a whole guilty of maintaining the conditioning, but the basic family unit also.
Reich made his views known by publishing papers, and then in his first book entitled THE FUNCTION OF THE ORGASM (1927). This book addressed three issues:
1the biological function of orgasm
2the release of pent-up emotions and energies, and
3the sexual frustrations of the working classes
In 1927, socialists of all waters were quite prepared to undertake the curing of social ills by the most radical political and economic means possible. However, they were not at all prepared to deal with faulty sexual orgasm.
Indeed, the nature of sexuality was still taboo within science and the new psychoanalysis, and within Socialism, Marxism, and Communism as well. The working classes, firmly rooted in the meaning and identity of the family unit, did not consider themselves as being sexually frustrated.
In this way, Reich managed to step on just about everyone’s toes, and he was ushered out of the developing “orthodox” mainstreams of psychoanalysis, doctrinaire Marxism, and all versions of European Socialism.
Reich, however, was made of rather stern stuff. Undaunted, he moved to Berlin in 1930. To begin the process of “the sexual education of young people,” he helped establish an organization on behalf of sexual politics—the VERLAG FUR SEXUALPOLITIC (SEXPOL-VERLAG). (In English, PUBLISHING HOUSE FOR SEXUAL POLITICS (SEXPOL PUBLICATIONS).
In this undertaking, he followed the logic inherent in the original Freudian concepts regarding the overriding importance of the sexual urge in human affairs—but with a slight difference.
Freudianism held that sexual problems were mental in nature. But Reich was convinced that actual “bio-physical” energy was involved, energy which could be physically blocked, and thus lead to the mental distortions.
As it turned out, however, Berliners were not amenable to Reich’s orgasmic ideas that had to do with sexual education of young people, and soon increasingly vicious smear campaigns began appearing.
The smear campaigns ultimately resulted in Reich’s being expelled from the Communist Party in 1933 because of his advocacy of sexual politics. He was unbothered by this, since he had visited Russia in 1929 and confessed himself disappointed with Russian bureaucracy and bourgeois moralistic attitudes toward sexuality.
A short while later, the International Psychoanalytic Association expelled him, ironically because of his Communist membership. That Association apparently being unaware that the Communist Party had already expelled him.
Undaunted by these various, and conflicting expulsions, Reich published his first monumental book in 1933, entitled CHARACTER ANALYSIS, a profound and basic tome still utilized by analysts.
In it, Reich held that “bioenergy” which “normally travels through the body in a specific circuit gets trapped wherever muscles are tight.”
He went on to explain that this kind of situation, if chronic, inhibits and reduces the body’s bioenergy flows, affects the immune system and leads to sickness and other dysfunctional discomforts often ending up as debilitating neuroses.
Also in 1933, Reich had taken critical interest in the emergence and dangers of German fascism which he correctly foresaw as a rising tide of political influence.
He blamed the rise of Hitler on “the sex-repressed German family” and explained the intricate details of this in his book MASS PSYCHOLOGY OF FASCISM (1933). First published in Scandinavia, it took a few years for it to be translated into German, and to be comprehended by the Hitler Movement.
None the less, smear campaigns against him began emerging in the Scandinavian countries, Austria and Germany—not so much as regards the rise of fascism, but because of moralistic outrage about the function of the orgasm, and because of Reich’s blasts about sex-repressive family units.
Again undaunted by smear campaigns and media abuse, Reich did not defend himself but rather escalated HIS attacks on the “perverse character of the Hitler regime.” Since Communism paraded itself in Western Europe as a form of Socialism, the propaganda sections of the Communist Internationale were affronted by Reich castigation’s of “sham Socialism.”
Since the whole of this developing situation had to come to a head, it did so in 1939. Reich was by that year a targeted enemy of Communism, the Nazi’s, and of moralistic outrages regarding orgasm energy blockages in the family unit.
He first strategically evacuated to Norway where he planned to continue his work. Uneasily established there, however, the Germans began their invasion of Norway in April, 1940, and Reich barely made it out with his life. He then headed to the United States of America.
Once there, he set up shop in Forest Hills, Long Island, but shortly moved to “Orgonon,” Maine, “Orgonon” being the name of his “estate” and orgone research laboratory, and which included an observatory.
As a result of this judicious move to the U.S.A., Americans were now somewhat surprised by having to learn about such electrifying matters as:
Armor in the genital character
Basic life processes
Biological energy
Biopathic contractions
Control over irrationality
Emotional expression of the body
Emotional plagues
Energy blocks and energy fields
Eye contact
Field excitation of orgone energy
Genital disturbances, excitation and gratification
Orgastic convulsions, impotency and potency
Orgonotic energy charge, pulsations and streamings
Radical approaches to liberating creative energies
The Americans soon became alarmed and distressed by Wilhelm Reich as the European communists and fascists had been.
ORGONE—A SEXUALIZING ENERGY
The vast bulk of Reich’s work is quite difficult to summarize. The best, and so far the only competent source for Reich’s saga can be found in Myron Sharaf’s monumental biography entitled FURY ON EARTH (1983), which should be required reading for anyone interested in human energetics.
Beyond that, and with apologies to the followers of Reich’s work, we can get at the central gist of it for the purposes of this book.
As pointed up in FURY ON EARTH (p. 276), it is difficult to pinpoint the exact date for Reich’s formulation of orgone energy. The general chronology of his work places it at about 1940.
But this most certainly refers to the term ORGONE, not to Reich’s awareness that such an energy existed, and which awareness obviously would have taken place even quite early in his life.
His earliest usage of ORGONE seems to have evolved in 1939 in relationship to “orgone radiation,” but this radiation was established by Reich in a context having to do with “bions.”
It is difficult to grasp what was meant by bions, but visual evidence of them could be observed “in the dark basement room” as radiations from heated ocean sand.
The bionic radiations, or the bionic light, visible to the naked eye, was described as bluish light emanating from the walls and from various objects in the darkened basement room.
Reich explained that he could not exclude “subjective impressions” with regard to the light phenomena. There is no record that Reich’s bionic light was ever compared to Karl von Reichenbach’s luminous phenomena, although it too was perceived in dark rooms by sensitives in touch with their own subjective (or clairvoyant) impressions.
Very roughly put, orgone energy was considered a non-electromagnetic force, a life force, which permeates all nature, and in some way is closely associated with “orgastic potency.”
If heightened by physical or therapeutic means, orgastic potency results in phenomena not unlike the cathartic phenomena associated with Anton Mesmer’s vats that accumulated some kind of energy and then transferred it to those holding the wands.
If one can directly perceive the energy of orgastic potency (presumably by some direct and/or clairvoyance means), it is of the color blue.
The orgastic potency is composed of radiating bions which, Reich stated (and later demonstrated), can be transferred to objects and other human bodies for therapeutic (cathartic) purposes.
Reich derived the term ORGONE from ORGANISM and/or ORGASM or both, and stipulated that it was an energy that normally traveled through the body in a specific current, but could get blocked up and result in any number of undesirable phenomena.
As Reich’s research with orgone energy continued, he was ultimately to divide it into three chief characteristics: visual observation, thermal measurements, and the electroscopic effect.
The sexual aspects of orgone energy were often played down later, but in the end they are unavoidable, since the sexual apparatus of the human body cannot be detached, rationally anyway, from the energies of the human body.
The evidence is quite compelling that Reich quite early envisioned possibilities of interacting with orgone energy. This energy is foreshadowed in Reich’s 1922 paper entitled THE SPECIFICITY OF FORMS OF MASTURBATION, and in his first 1923 version of what was later to become his major thesis entitled ON GENITALITY. Sexual energy, later renamed orgone energy, is considered in depth in his book THE FUNCTION OF THE ORGASM.
ORGONE ENERGY ACCUMULATORS
The existence of orgone energy was to Reich a good thing, capable of many different kinds of applications—if it could be “collected” and intensified.
Therefore, the next step in the study of this energy radiation (whether orgonic or bionic in nature) was to build an apparatus that would collect and contain it.
As described in FURY ON EARTH (p. 277), metal reflected the energy whereas organic material absorbed it. Since metal did reflect it, Reich designed a box-like “collector” that had metal walls on the inside backed with organic materials on the outside.
One panel of the collector had a porthole through which the presumed energy could be seen from the outside by researchers and witnesses. As originally intended, the collector was designed not to treat illness, but to visually study the bionic radiation.
With this collector which intensified the energy, it was possible to observe two kinds of “light” or luminescent phenomena—the bluish, moving vapors, and sharper, yellowish “points” and “lines” that flickered.
Thereafter, Reich began experimenting with different kinds of accumulators, and found that the energy seemed to accumulate in just about any old container.
If Reich had not had the idea before (which he certainly had), he now concluded that the energy he was studying was “everywhere.” He also concluded that the energy “came from the atmosphere.”
After research on the visual, thermal and electrostatic effects had sorted out at least some basic questions, between 1940 and 1948 Reich turned his attention to the “medical effects” of the orgone accumulators.
His reports on these effects were stunning, and began attracting profound interest of many important researchers in a number of fields.
Although the following brief statement may be over-simplistic, he had begun to demonstrate: that organisms suffused with bionic-orgone energy were highly disease resistant, and that organisms weakly suffused could be brought back into a more healthy state by being subject to accumulated infusions of the orgone energy.
SEXUALIZING EFFECTS OF ORGONE ENERGY
However, trouble had begun pushing into view when individuals discovered that sitting in the accumulators often enhanced sexual potency, even to the degree of occasionally effecting spontaneous thrills.
While the general public would have no precise idea of what bionic energy meant at the cellular and molecular levels, almost anyone could clearly understand the wonderful enhancements of sexual potency.
With this news, excitedly promulgated by wide press coverage, Reich’s reputation (and following) increased immensely—and copies of his JOURNAL OF ORGONOMY and ORGONE ENERGY BULLETIN were much in demand.
Additionally, it is clear that Reich hoped to achieve “cures” of awful diseases via orgone energy, especially, but not only including a cancer cure.
Here was a “hope” that finally galvanized certain societal forces in reaction to Reich. Reich also ran into problems regarding his announced attempts to collect bionic energy into types of “guns” or “cannons” in order to transmit it, among other possible practical uses, for weather control.
However, these events only increased the “furors” that had accumulated not in the bionic accumulators but around the person and name of Reich himself.
THE SOCIETAL TERMINATION OF WILHELM REICH
Because of a wide, invisible web of vested interests, the FDA proceeded against Reich as if he were a common charlatan peddling a worthless cancer cure.
During 1952, the FDA and the Justice Department issued a court injunction banning not only the construction of orgone accumulators, but demanding the sanitizing of the word ORGONE from all his paper, books and other materials. Reich’s “inalienable rights” guaranteed by the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were simply cast aside—while this kind of activity at such high levels implied that he was something more than a harmless kook.
During 1953, and before an official hearing could take place, the FDA, assisted by the FBI, confiscated all of Reich’s documents, books, research papers. These were finally fed into the Gansevort Incinerator, New York, on August 23,1956. With his First Amendment rights shredded into the wind, Reich somewhat noisily refused to comply with the court order, and when the proceedings against him were finally heard in 1954, he again refused.
He was thereupon found in contempt of court, and was sentenced to imprisonment. He was first sent to Danbury Federal Prison for ten days where he was subjected to “psychiatric examination.”
He was then moved to incarceration in the federal penitentiary in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, where he died on November 3, 1957, with the actual circumstances of his death remaining unclear. Why Reich should have been imprisoned for nearly three years on the mere charge of contempt of court is, by any rationale, not readily comprehensible.
At this point, we might assume that various phenomena human energetics are real, and that they have been touched upon by numerous researchers. The sexualizing element within these phenomena is consistently encountered.
While many of the phenomena encountered might be readily experienced upon average, the essence of the sexualizing energies is entirely real and tangible within the scope of usual human experiencing.
We can now turn our attention, in Part II, to the ways and means such energies, usually invisible, can be seen by clairvoyance. Here we encounter a truly rich and wonderful panorama and history.