Suppressed Inventions and Other Discoveries (40 page)

WITHOUT A COUNTRY

Despite such experiences, Reich continued to be intellectually honest throughout his life, regardless of consequences. Through no fault of his own, much of his vision of a sexual revolution—toward a maturity in people—was lost in what actually happened in society. He would be opposed to pornography, with its emphasis on perverse, infantile and destructive elements. Biographer David Boadella said Reich wanted to take away barriers to "re-emergence of a truly personalized sexuality that could deepen and enrich people's lives so fully that 'trips' to a heightened consciousness on drugs would be . . . irrelevant. . ."

In studying the relation between sexuality and anxiety, Reich the psychoanalyst developed a theory which considered the orgasm in terms of increase of surface electrical tension followed by a decrease. This avenue of study led him to look at plasma movements in one-celled animals. They too followed rhythms of reaching out toward the world and then retreating.

In the last month of that year the Danish Minister of Justice refused to renew Reich's residence permit, because of accusations by psychiatrists who did not agree with Reich's unorthodox writings. He relocated across the three-mile strait to Malmo, Sweden, and many of his Danish students began to commute by boat. But two Copenhagen psychiatrists contacted their counterparts in Sweden, and Swedish and Danish police co-operated in keeping watch on Reich and his students. City police searched his home in Malmo without a warrant. No charges were laid against Reich or his students, but again his residence permit was not renewed. On advice from a friend, Reich re-entered Denmark as an illegal immigrant for a time.

During that time his unorthodox views were co-opted by some psychoanalysts but they did not have the courage to present them in the frank manner which he did. In 1934 the 13th International Congress of Psychoanalysis expelled Reich, the man whom Sigmund Freud had titled "the founder of the modern technique in psycho-analysis."

In the mid- and late 1930s Reich was a refugee in Norway, after accepting the invitation of a professor he knew in Oslo. As a psychoanalyst Reich continued to develop new techniques for releasing blocked emotions. The human potential movement and today's bodywork therapies can be traced back to Reich.

BIO-ELECTRIC ORGANISMS

While in Norway he first discovered what he called "bions," a microscopic form of particles which Reicheans say are a transitional form between non-living material and living organisms. The scientific community refused to accept his reports of spontaneous generation of life, nor his contention that as long as medical scientists study dead tissue, their understanding of living organisms will remain limited.

His previous work led up to the discovery. His professor friend had made facilities at the Psychological Institute of Oslo University available to Reich, and Reich had turned to an assistant there for help on measuring electrical charges of the skin. He wanted to confirm his bio-electric concepts. Again he was a pioneer.

Out of his earnings from lectures, Reich paid for the building of sensitive new apparatus with electrodes and vacuum tubes connected to an oscillograph.* Mainly, Reich confirmed his tensions-charge theory and the theory that the organism worked like an electrolytic system, and that it has a continuous bio-electric field of excitation between nerve centers in the middle of the body and the skin surface.

The holistic aspect of his work was important; for the first time in this way a scientist showed the organism to be a whole in which disturbance of one part affects it all. The bio-electric experiments showed the presence of one bio-psychological energy. His earlier work had indicated the energy being dammed up and then released in the body, and now his instruments showed pleasure causing an increase of measurable charge and displeasure causing decrease of bio-electric charge.

The prolific researcher was about to master yet another area of science. He wanted to study processes of expansion and contraction and corresponding bio-electric charges in protozoa—primitive forms of life. Did currents of a biological force work the same in all living creatures?

*Adeviceforproducingageographicalrecordofthevariationofanoscillatingquantity,such asanelectriccurrent.

LIFE UNDER THE MICROSCOPE

Loyal friends helped Reich buy equipment for microphotography, sterilization, and detecting electrical charges, as well as to hire assistants. In 1936 time-lapse photography of protozoa was a new idea, but Reich never let that stop him. His critics could not understand why he wanted highmagnification microscopes, since there was an upper limit above which the subject would become increasingly blurry. But he wanted to study movement within the protozoa, not the fine details of form.

A series of accidental or experimental changes in procedures led to his amazing discovery of moving lifelike forms which could be grown in cultures and developed from a variety of apparently non-living materials put in solutions which caused microscopic particles to swell. Artificially-created tiny blue-green vesicles (sacks) which he named "bions" grew in sterilized preparations of materials such as coal or sand. Under high magnification the vesicles could be seen in rolling, pulsating, rotating and merging movements. In controlled experiments he proved that the bions could not have appeared as a result of infection from the air.

While looking at bion cultures under the microscope, his eyes were burned by a non-nuclear radiation from them that he later found in the atmosphere. It was not the type of radiation known to physics. Instead, it corresponded more to the Hindu concept of prana or to the Chinese concept of chi. This is when he named it orgone—energy of the organism. It is a biological radiation, not electromagnetic, and an Oslo radiologist confirmed that no standard nuclear radiation was present in the bion culture. In the dark, the cultures glowed with a vague greyish-blue light.

Reich also studied cancer tissue at high magnification and showed a leading cancer researcher some moving cancer cells from living tissue. The researcher took the tissue back to his own laboratory, performed the usual procedures which killed cells by drying and staining them, then in a smug tone reported that he had "controlled" Reich's experiment and found Reich's bions to be "only staphylococci." He apparently did not follow Reich's procedures, however.

Reich continued to follow the path which now leads into research on cancer pathology. Eminent Norwegians started a newspaper campaign against his work in all his fields of interest, and once again influential psychiatrists pressed a government to kick Reich out of their country—this time by changing licensing regulations. By now the furore had nothing to do with his former interest in Communism; he had seen it for what it is and became vehemently anti-communist. In the middle of Reich's intense study of bions, he had to quickly pack up his laboratory equipment. On the last boat out of Norway before World War II, Reich again emigrated to another country.
SIXTH NEW START

After he arrived in the United States, Reich settled with his third wife in a rented house on Long Island, New York. The basement was used for experiments, the dining room transformed into a laboratory and the maid's room into an office/preparation room for laboratory cultures. Psychotherapy took place in what had been an extra bedroom. Reich further made a living by lecturing at the New School for Social Research as associate professor of medical psychology until 1941.

During those years Reich's research focus was on cancer and on radiation properties of his bions. To make certain that it was not only his own perceptions, he had his assistants stand in the dark and pick out test tubes which had a bluish glimmer of radiating bion cultures. Accidentally from a rubber glove incident he had found that organic materials absorbed the radiation.

His next experiment was to design an enclosure of metal to prevent leakage of the radiation from cultures. He lined the experimental boxes on the outside with organic materials—cotton or wood. The experiment was controlled by an identical metal box which was empty of bion cultures. To his surprise, the [empty] control box luminated as if it held radiating cultures itself. It appeared to pull the same type of radiation from the very air.

From the experiments with experiencing a lumination visually, he went on to discover that heat concentrated in the box. It felt like the warmth and prickling which bion cultures produced on skin ... He then learned that metal attracted the unusual radiation and then reflected it away, to be absorbed by the organic materials.

He then designed an accumulator with a glass window behind which a thermometer could be inserted. An identical thermometer at the same height outside the box measured room temperature. Reich found the accumulator was always about a half a degree Celsius warmer than surrounding air.

What it meant was that the life force he had previously found in bion cultures could be collected from the atmosphere by an orgone accumulator. In its one-layer form, it is a wooden box lined with sheet metal. It works like a one-way grid for the orgone, as in the greenhouse effect where a radiation is allowed to enter but is reflected back inside faster than it exits, and the concentration builds up. He and his associates learned they could sit inside the box, soak up a greater charge of life force than they could by sitting outside, and improve their health.

Among the experiments done with the accumulator, one type showed that an electroscope* discharges more slowly inside it. This could not be explained by the current theory on atmospheric electricity. Other experiments showed body temperature of people sitting inside the accumulator

*Anapparatusfordetectinganelectriccharge.
rose anomalously. Control experiments eliminated all standard explanations for the temperature rise.

To follow what Reich was doing, he said, a scientist would have to drop all the intellectual baggage that's connected to the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Otherwise, "he will not understand the temperature difference; he will feel inclined to do away with it as only heat convection or ... this or that. He will fail to see its orgonomic, atmospheric significance." Believers in the hypothesis of empty space likewise would not understand that a vacuum could light up and that the effect can vary with weather changes, Reich said.

In the orgone accumulator, heat is not produced out of nothing, Reich said, but rather the moving orgone within it is stopped by the accumulator's inner wall or the palm of a hand, and is then expressed as heat.

Reich's bion experiments continued, including one type which showed fogging on X-ray plates from the bions' radiation.

ACCUMULATOR TO ORANUR

Over the following years Reich's patients reported that the orgone accumulator was helpful in treating many types of disorders such as arthritis, and especially cancer. He never claimed it was a cure for cancer, but somehow he gained the reputation of having claimed this.

He moved from New York to a small rural community, Rangeley, Maine, and set up an institute he called Orgonon. Throughout the 1940s he researched the orgone as well as kept up a practice and publishing his own journal The International Journal Research.

Reich also reported discovering the enough energy was collected in an orgone accumulator to run an electric motor about the size of an orange. Plans for the motor were never published because he said humanity was not ready. As with all orgone phenomena, such as the accumulator, the orgone motor varied with the weather. Today, the Wilhelm Reich museum has a film of the motor.

The saga at Orgonon took a frightening turn when in 1951 Reich tried putting a small amount of radioactive material—radium—in an orgone accumulator. His hypothesis was that powerful orgone would wipe out the bad effects of nuclear radiation. He was wrong. Some unknown force, different and more powerful than the radioactive material itself, went crazy.

The reaction of an area highly charged with orgone and then exposed to radioactivity caused a local disaster; Reich's "oranur" experiment contaminated his laboratory, killed mice which he had in the laboratory for experiments and made everyone at the institute quite sick, including Reich, who fainted several times in the sickening atmosphere caused by the experiment. of Sex Economy and Orgone

motor force—he claimed that One worker nearly passed out when he stuck his head in the accumulator. Rocks on the fireplace crumbled mysteriously. Granite sticking out of the ground several hundred yards away in the infected area blackened.

Dark, dull clouds hung overhead for days. The clouds seemed to be connected with an anti-life effect, and people's health worsened in their personal weak areas. For several weeks, radiation counts measured on Geigercounters in a radius of 300 miles from Orgonon were unusually high. Reich did his best to wash and decontaminate the building and surrounding area, but it took a long time and caused much stress to the people at Orgonon.

CLOUDBUSTER

The disaster had a side effect. In an effort to clear the depressing clouds from the area, Reich invented the device he later called the cloudbuster. It is made simply—from hollow metal tubes pointed at an angle at the sky and grounded at the other end in flowing water, because water attracts the life force. The bundle of pipes is said to draw orgone out of the sky wherever it is pointed.

Why would Reich want to do that? He and his associates would reply that radioactive fallout and other pollutants turn the lively natural-state orgone into a stale, stagnant, dead form of orgone which he called DOR, which stands for Deadly Orgone Radiation. He said DOR is a factor in causing droughts by inhibiting rain and cloud formation. One theory of cloudbusting is that by drawing the DOR out of the sky with a cloudbuster and then getting the healthy orgone moving again, the atmosphere returns to its natural cycles which include rain.

For several years he researched what could be done with a cloudbuster to change weather, and said he learned how to raise the energetic level of the surrounding atmosphere instead of just decrease it. When he took his cloudbusting equipment to Arizona, events became really strange, including alleged experiences with UFOs. Reich's journal of his 1954 journey reveals an unusual ability to sense the natural landscape and its moods, similar to the awareness and sensitivities of aboriginal peoples.