Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Collaborating with C O R E
C O R E has important research projects within psychology, medicine,
horticulture, and meteorology, which are waiting to be done and which need
motivated workers. We have repeated some of the experiments of H C Bastian,
(1837-1915), whose pioneering research on the origin of life foreshadows Reichs
work on the bions. His discoveries, ignored and rejected at the time, have, like
Reichs, never been disproved. Reichs discoveries answer some of the unsolved
questions raised by Bastian. Generally the problem with orgonomic research is
that even a few simple experiments lead on to new questions and new
investigations. There is simply far too much for one person or even a few people
to do. C O R E urgently needs new workers with scientific skills or students
willing to study the subject and learn new skills. We also need help with computer
graphics for our books that await publication. For details of C O R E's current
research projects see C O R Es Research Facilities and Projects on page 3. Our
activities are now severely restricted because we cannot find a friendly IT adviser
who can help us with a web-site and the use of data-acquisition software for
various experiments and investigations that we have planned. Please get in touch
if you have the necessary skills and would like to help us.
We also need help with word-processing, graphic design, photography,
microscopy and laboratory work, (skilled and simple), and writing and research
(following up references and looking out rare publications). Students of biology
will find orgonomic laboratory work extremely interesting and challenging.
C O R E can offer
instruments. These microscopes are not the last word in optical technology
but they will do the job for you. We do urge you to collect the money for
this project and to repeat the experiments yourself. There is no substitute
for actually doing it, as opposed to reading about it. If you do repeat these
experiments you will possess knowledge and experience that even most
biology graduates do not have. This puts you in a position to stand up and
speak for orgonomy in a way that the armchair 'Reichian' just cannot do.
See C O R E's booklet Three Experiments with the Microscope for the
Amateur Orgonomist for further guidance, if you have no access to The
Bion Experiments on the Origin of Life or The Cancer Biopathy, which
contain Reich's original research reports. C O R Es leaflet on The Bion
Experiments is reprinted at the end of this booklet (see page 22) to give
readers new to this area of scientific orgonomy an introduction to the field.
C O R E has just acquired a high-vacuum tube similar to the type used by
Reich in his visual demonstrations of the orgone. After a short charging
period in our smaller accumulator it flashes visibly in the dark when
stroked by hand.
Atmospheric Observatory
C O R E has excellent observing facilities accommodated on a fourth
floor balcony which overlooks a vast panorama of Lancashire countryside, areas
of Preston's suburbs and the horizon from east to west through an arc of about 160
degrees. We also have some excellent observing equipment. All this equipment
and our observing activities need a proper observatory in which equipment can be
left in position all the time. Equipment includes the following:A high-quality Newtonian reflector telescope;
A high-power refractor telescope, binoculars, a spotting scope, and a pair
of giant binoculars for observation of the atmospheric orgone energy and
night sky;
A To-T apparatus a small orgone accumulator and a control container,
similar in all respects, but with no iron layers within and thus no
accumulating capacity. Both contain an accurate thermometer. There is a
slight positive temperature differential between the T o and T-containers
which varies according to atmospheric conditions.
Forthcoming
Scanning volunteers' orgone energy fields using our prototype energy field
scanner supplied by Heliognosis. We hope eventually to adapt this instrument so
that it can be safely used to scans the energy fields of babies. In its present form it
can only be used to scan the energy field of a person in a standing position.
T-T. We hope to take long-term recordings of this temperature difference and
correlate it with the atmospheric twinkle at night, recording this through a
telescope and data-acquisition software. This demands a thermically neutral
environment for the T-T apparatus, which we do not at present have. This is
another good reason for acquiring our own premises that can be adapted or, if
new, constructed to suit this experiment. If this work showed a direct, positive
correlation between the atmospheric twinkle and the T-T difference, it would be
a result of enormous significance for both orgonomy and conventional physics.
The development of a test for soil vitality based on orgonomic criteria rather than
the usual ones of chemical content.
scientific experiments, birth-preparation groups, baby-therapy groups, orgoneenergy field scanning, atmospheric observations, and our long-planned course, to
name only a few. Another project we have planned is a standing exhibition of
orgonomic devices and experiments that the public can come in to, look at, and
work with, as they can with many other exhibitions of scientific material. It is
vital, if orgonomy is to take root in this country, that we draw in new students
willing to commit themselves to serious orgonomic study and research.
If you can help C O R E with a donation of either time, money, a
building, or building space we would be very pleased to hear from you. All
donations will be publicly acknowledged unless you wish to remain anonymous, a
wish which C O R E would, of course, respect unreservedly. You do not need to
be an expert to be able to help us in our work. Much orgonomic scientific research
is simple observation and there is also much to be done that is simple office work,
in particular helping with printing and publishing work. If you are interested you
will anyway learn a lot as you work. Assisting C O R E would be an excellent
orgonomic apprenticeship for any student of orgonomy.
(PS 2007: C O R Es situation concerning our application for charitable
status has improved greatly. We now have several high-status academic
contacts who would support our application. It appears that a collection
of signatures of university professors will satisfy the charity
commissioners. There are several university professors active in
orgonomy, all known to C O R E. After our summer conference we shall
re-submit our application for charitable status.)
Our need for our own premises becomes more urgent by the day and we
are seriously looking for ways of raising funds to pay for a building.
The difficulty with this is simple - the almost complete lack of interest
in orgonomy in this country. This is a vicious circle. If we were visible
on the ground and were conducting activities relevant to the community,
people would eventually get drawn in to orgonomic work. If 2000 active
supporters donated 50 each we would have the funds to purchase a
small building for our activities. Such a target would be easy for any
organisation with wider support, even a local cricket club or scout
group. If you would like to help get this project started, please send us
your 50 and persuade anyone else you know interested in orgonomy to
contribute. All contributions will be acknowledged and paid into a
special bank account until we have enough to actually buy premises. If
you wish to see orgonomy thrive in this country, now is the time to do
something to help C O R E.
Many of these books and articles are rare, if not irreplaceable, and are not
available for loan. Interested students are welcome to visit C O R E by
arrangement to use this collection. (When C O R E has its own premises the
collection will be made available in a reading room.) There are no loan copies of
most of these rare works, essential to the study of orgonomic biology, in any of
the great UK libraries. Apart from C O R Es copies, you will have to study
reference copies in the major reference libraries such as the British Library in
London or Manchester Central Reference Library.
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the time. C O R E prints those that appeal to more specialist interests on request.
These booklets are by no means best-sellers and trickle out into the world in very
small numbers. They do, however, travel great distances. So far copies that we
know about have reached the western United States, Australia, South Africa, and
Poland. For all that they receive appreciative comments, often from wellinformed students of orgonomy, and some students of orgonomy in countries
where access to orgonomic literature is very limited have found them helpful in
their early study of orgonomy. C O R E will continue to print them as long as
there is any demand at all for them. If you have read any of the booklets and have
anything to say about them we would be pleased to hear from you.
I have written the booklets with the intention of producing
straightforward introductions to the various areas of orgonomy in question and an
extensive list of sources that serious students can follow up if they wish to learn
more about the subject. Needless to say, many of these references are to Reichs
own works and there is no substitute for a careful reading of these. I have tried to
summarise Reichs own findings as simply and clearly as I can. I make it clear
when I am speculating or adding my own interpretations to Reichs observations.
The short texts contain an enormous number of references, 70 or 80 for 24 pages,
for example. This is not academic pedantry but deliberate, so that students have a
generous number of leads to follow if they wish to inform themselves further
about the subject. The serious student of orgonomy, will, anyway, need to develop
the habits of an intellectual ferret as he or she pursues the study of orgonomy.
Orgonomic explanations and tables are not sitting there waiting for you in welledited textbooks, as they are for the student of mainstream academic disciplines.
Unless you are to become an orgonomic parrot, mimicking what you have read,
you must get into the habit of following up leads, reading original texts by the
early researchers in the field, and generally seeing for yourself.
After I had written several of the booklets it dawned on me that each one
was in effect the chapter of a book and that put together they would make the
substantial introduction to orgonomy that I had been wanting to write for years. I
therefore put them together as a book, adding various chapters and editing the
original texts to fit them better into a larger publication. C O R E has not been
able to publish this larger work yet as we need help with the illustrations for it and
have as yet been able to find a volunteer with the necessary skills in computer
graphics. In the meantime I have written several more books on various aspects of
orgonomy. Publication is delayed for the same reasons. The booklets, many of
which have been incorporated into the books, will remain available for those who
want a smaller bite of orgonomic information than that afforded by a book.
Orgone Therapy with Babies - An Introduction to Orgonomy - Orgonomic
Midwifery - An Introduction to Self-Regulation and the Continuum Concept
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large
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therapeutics planned for several years and a tiny number of potential students
have expressed interest. Unfortunately, this number has always been just below
the level of viability for a course and so it has never been able to get started. In
the meantime, applicants have drifted away because of the lack of progress and
the course goes on, waiting and waiting.
C O R E offers shorter training opportunities, for example, day workshops in the
basic principles of orgone therapy and weekend workshops on the bion
experiments and the Reich blood tests. We have run these events from time to
time and they have met with a positive response from participants. We can run
these short events locally in the Preston area or anywhere else in the country, if
you can get enough students together and find suitable premises. Many aspects of
orgonomy can be presented effectively to a small group over a day or a weekend.
Our 2007 conference generated limitd publicity and interest and we hoped that as
a result of this we would be able to run a week-long summer school in orgonomy
in the 2008. If enough younger people were interested we also hoped to run a
similar event for younger students in the Easter holidays. If you want to benefit
from any of these events, please tell people about our plans and do something to
attract students. At the moment serious interest in orgonomy in this country is
almost non-existent. (C O R Es serious supporters can be counted on one hand!)
So do not expect C O R E to be able to set up lavish events with generous
facilities. If we are to be able to turn any of these opportunities into reality for
possible learners, we need many more seriously interested participants, not people
who look down a microscope and say, how absolutely fascinating!, but people
who are willing to actually do something for the sake of orgonomy.
This is a quite different level of interest and commitment to that
demanded by participants in run-of-the-mill events, where you pay your money
and turn up and consume passively what is provided. If you are still seriously
interested in orgonomic study and wish to get started on your own, C O R E will
be happy to advise you and can offer access to our laboratory equipment by
arrangement and help with literature. The serious student of orgonomy must
expect to use their own initiative and enterprise in the present state of affairs
where there is so little supporting interest.
What is Orgonomy?
Orgonomy is the science of the orgone energy, the cosmic life energy,
discovered and studied in great detail by the late Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957),
Austrian doctor, psycho-analyst, psycho-therapist, and natural scientist. Many
people believe intuitively that there is a life-force behind the processes of nature
and the cosmos. This belief is part of many cultures. Although such a belief puts
one beyond the pale of rational, civilised society nowadays, our modern
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scientific culture is probably the first and only one to explicitly deny the existence
of such a force. This force has been called many different things and is often
referred to in primitive cultures in purely metaphorical or symbolic terms. The
names chi and prana will be familiar to students of oriental medicine or yoga.
Those in our modern western culture who believe that such a force exists in
nature have no support for their intuitive awareness of this energy. Reich was the
first western scientist to conduct detailed scientific research into the nature of and
laws governing the functions of this energy. His findings provide evidence for this
intuitively held conviction. As he discovered it in the course of many years
investigation of sexuality and health he named it orgone from the classical Greek
root orgein to swell, from which originate the many familiar words in English
such as orgasm, organ, organic.
Reich started his journey towards this discovery of the orgone as a
psycho-analyst and a loyal follower of Freud in Vienna in the nineteen twenties.
Although the idea of a life-force at work in nature had been generally dead for
many years, there were still a few scientists who thought that such a force or
energy existed, in particular the biologist Paul Kammerer, who Reich cites in the
introduction to The Function of the Orgasm. In this passage Kammerer says that
a probable discovery in biology in the future will be the discovery of a specific
life-energy. Reich took Freuds concept of libido seriously. What laws, if any,
governed its behaviour and functions? What was libido? Its most common
meaning was the energy behind drives, especially the sexual drive, or the
excitation behind feelings. Reich was particularly interested in what he called the
quantitative aspects of libido. Why did the charge behind peoples emotions and
sexuality vary so greatly? When a patient in psycho-analysis suddenly went from
a very excited emotional state to a calm, apparently controlled state, where had all
this excitation gone? What had they done with it? What was going on within a
patient who appeared to have very little libido at all and who seemed to be unable
to experience any strong sexual sensations or emotions?
He sensed that the excitation that less defended patients were able to feel
could be bound somehow. Initially he said it was bound in character defences,
defences against emotional pain or unacceptable feelings. They were seen as
entirely psychological. These defences produced on Reich an impression of
armouring. He felt that all his therapeutic efforts were bouncing off something
hard and impenetrable. He started to focus more on these impressions and the way
patients in analysis behaved as much as on what they said. He pointed out to them
physical rigidities and ways in which they held themselves and in particular how
they breathed. The next step in the evolution of his therapeutic technique was to
start actually touching the patient and working with their physical rigidities,
massaging and kneading tight muscles and helping them to breathe more fully.
Reich found that this induced quite startling and profound changes in emotional
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15
on the skin and even a reddening, if held against the skin for long enough. This
culture seemed to be producing a form of radiation.
Reich and his assistants tried unsuccessfully to isolate this radiation. It
seemed to be present everywhere. He named it orgone. One of the accidental
results of these attempts to build a cage which excluded this energy so that he
could conduct objective experiments and measure its effects was the invention of
the orgone accumulator. This concentrated the energy and allowed the use of the
orgone for medical and experimental purposes. Soon Reich realised that the
orgone was also present in free form in the atmosphere as well as in organised
systems within biological organisms. He had indeed come upon the all-pervading
biological and cosmic energy that so many people in history have assumed exists.
His research went on into orgonomic biology, physics, meteorology, and
cosmology. He devised many experiments to measure the effects of the orgone
and some of these can be replicated without too much equipment or difficulty by
the serious amateur student of orgonomy without access to a laboratory. 4
The simplest, perhaps the most spectacular experiment for the amateur is
to build a small experimental orgone accumulator and germinate seeds in it,
measuring these against a control group germinated under identical conditions
except for the irradiation in the accumulator.5 The results are readily visible to the
naked eye and can be easily photographed. This experiment has been repeated
many times by different orgonomists in different countries. 6 (The construction of
a small accumulator is fairly simple and demands only ordinary do-it-yourself
skills.) Orgonomy is almost completely unknown in the UK. It has enormous
potential in many areas, in particular birth, infant-care, psychology, medicine, and
drought alleviation and is not just a form of psycho-therapy. One cannot do justice
to its enormous scope in a short leaflet. The references below and C O R Es
booklets give interested readers more detailed information. A useful guide is our
booklet A Students Guide to Orgonomic Resources and Literature.
References
1
Reich W (1942, 1983); The Discovery of the Orgone: Part I, The Function
of the Orgasm, Souvenir Press, London.
Reich W (1938, 1979); The Bion Experiments on the Origin of Life, FS&G.
Reich W (1948, 1973); The Discovery of the Orgone: Part II, The Cancer
Biopathy, Vision Press, London.
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Orgone Therapy
This article is a simple introduction to the principles of orgone therapy for
the intelligent enquirer. Much of C O R Es literature is about the use of orgone
therapy in childbirth or with infants. This leaflet aims to give readers a picture of
what ordinary one-orgone therapy involves.
Orgone therapy was first developed by Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957) as a
one-to-one psycho-therapy. It grew out of his work as a Freudian psycho-analyst.
He became frustrated with the limitations of verbal therapy and following his
intuitions and clinical observations, gradually focused more and more on how
clients behaved, and how they breathed, stood, spoke, and moved. He observed
that many peoples ways of behaving were defensive and apparently served the
purpose of binding large amounts of energy or excitation. As a psycho-analyst he
used the word libido for this energy. He was of a persevering cast of mind and
wondered what actually was the nature of this energy or excitation that he was
able to observe appearing and disappearing and what happened to it when it
apparently disappeared. He sensed some physical process at work and eventually
discovered that the energy in question was bound or immobilised by chronic
muscular tensions, armouring, that people were not usually aware of.
He started to work much more actively with clients, helping them to
breathe more fully and touching and massaging tense muscles. When working
verbally he paid much more attention to describing clients demeanour to bring
their behaviour to their awareness, rather than analysing what they said. This
awareness was an important step in the clients abandoning the defence. A fixed
attitude whose purpose was the avoidance of certain feelings or movements Reich
called a character defence. The aim of therapy now was the dissolving of these
character defences, so that the client no longer had any permanent armouring.
During this new therapy his clients reported sensations of movement within their
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bodies as they breathed more fully and their tense muscles loosened. This
something moving was usually experienced as pleasurable, though intense
sensations sometimes made the client feel anxious. Reich found that when an
organism has spent years trying to prevent the movement of this something, its
renewed movement provokes anxiety. Some people, however, feel a great sense of
relief and release as they experience anew this movement. It is quite easy to help
fairly healthy young adults to feel the movement of their own orgone energy.
(Lively young children without too much armouring often do and say things that
show that they feel this movement, too.) However armoured one is, the body
remembers the sweetness of these sensations and both longs to experience them
again and fears them as well. This longing and fear Reich thought were the
driving forces behind the incomprehensible and violent social forces that were
creating such social havoc at this time. He wrote a classic book, The Mass
Psychology of Fascism, first published in 1933, when all this was happening
around him, and his analysis still rings true today, 70 years later.
Reich took Freuds concept of libido seriously and wanted to find out
exactly what these sensations of movement were. At first he thought that it might
be some form of electricity and he experimented with measuring the skin
potential of volunteer subjects in states of pleasure, anxiety, or depression. These
investigations did show changes in the skin potential, but only tiny ones of
millivolts. This did not seem to correspond to the powerful sensations that the
subjects were reporting. He thought that it might be possible to see the currents or
streamings, the processes of expansion or contraction, in simple organisms,
protozoa. He found that he could indeed observe the currents and concluded that
expansion and contraction (in the emotional realm, pleasure and anxiety), were
two basic functions observable in all living nature. He saw these two directions of
functioning in the workings of the autonomic nervous system in humans, the
parasympathetic and the sympathetic. What he had observed in protozoa was the
same energy movement that his clients had felt within themselves. While
investigating the force behind these processes he came across a radiation that was
everywhere. He named it orgone from the Greek orgein to swell, from which
come the familiar words organ, orgasm, and organism. He made the reestablishment of the capacity for free movement and discharge of ones orgone
energy the aim of his new orgone therapy. Even before discovering the orgone he
had concluded that the orgasm was natures mechanism for discharging surplus
bio-energy, which he now named orgone. He observed that the orgasm followed
the four-beat cycle of mechanical tension energy charge energy discharge
mechanical relaxation. The functioning of the bodys organs followed the
same cycle and Reich called it orgonotic pulsation. (Orgonotic = charged with,
excited by orgone energy.) The muscular armouring was in fact part of a much
deeper process of contraction and interfered with the physiology as well. He saw
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the capacity for orgonotic pulsation as the criterion for health. The aim of orgone
therapy is to restore this capacity. In one sense therapy is the same, whatever the
problems that lead someone to seek it the removal of all obstacles to pulsation,
the armouring. A new medicine is slowly being built up as workers since Reichs
death piece together the effects of different armouring patterns and of different
energy levels. Very few people are doing this work and it is very little known. It is
considered so beyond the pale that it is impossible to report on it in mainstream
scientific or medical journals.
People asking about orgone therapy always want to know what happens
in a therapy session. This varies greatly from person to person and at different
stages of therapy. If the client feels comfortable with it therapy is conducted with
the person undressed down to their underwear, so that tiny muscular movements
and slight variations in the breathing can be seen. These slight movements are
very important as the therapist must notice the clients often very subtle reactions
to an increase in their energy level and try to help him or her to become aware of
what they are doing to control the movement of their orgone energy and the
emotional expression of this movement. The client lies down on a firm couch
during therapy. If the client feels uncomfortable with a considerable degree of
nakedness early sessions can be done wearing, say, a T-shirt and shorts.
According to the clients initial energy state the first few sessions, (in
some cases it may be many), will be taken up with mobilising the clients
breathing and raising his/her energy level. This means helping the client to
breathe more fully with simple and usually gentle physical techniques, which can
also be described as supporting the breathing. As the energy level rises it threatens
the long-standing armouring and this will probably exaggerate itself to preserve
the status quo. This may make the client aware of the armouring, often for the
first time. The therapist will encourage this process by pointing out defensive
behaviour that is fairly close to the clients awareness. (What to point out next and
what to work on in order to be effective is the whole crux of orgone therapy.)
Some lighter armouring may give of its own accord at this stage. This depends
on how heavily armoured any individual is. A lightly armoured person may feel
their orgone energy moving quite soon and welcome the greater sense of aliveness
that this brings. A heavily armoured client may work for a long time before they
feel any energy movement and when they do they may feel quite threatened by it.
The armouring may struggle hard to assert itself again, though one cannot predict
accurately what may happen in any one persons therapy. There are simple
techniques that are used to bring armouring to the surface. A very important one is
a way of opening up the eyes, so that impulses or feelings suppressed by
armouring in that area are released, such as crying, anger, intelligence,
vulnerability, or emotional contact. This work on the eyes can have very positive
effects on a persons vision. The therapist may ask the client to make movements
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or faces with the aim of bringing out feelings or helping them become aware of
how they are doing something without expressing any feelings about it. The
feelings that emerge with the movements may be quite inappropriate. For example
while expressing longing by reaching out towards an imaginary person, a client
might express fear, if the response to the expression of this feeling as a child had
always been anger or rejection. If a client seemed angry but had difficulty in
being angry, the therapist might help him/her to express and feel anger by offering
something to hit a cushion with. For a feeling to be fully and freely experienced it
is important that the client can surrender to the spontaneous movements that go
with it. Later in the therapy the therapist may ask the client to make jelly-fish
movements, which are gentle echoes of the orgasm reflex, another of Reichs
basic psycho-physiological discoveries. These movements bring out an awareness
of any armouring that is interfering with the reflex and also help a client to let
go. The client always has the freedom to reject any of these suggestions, if he/she
does not feel happy with them, though in practice this rarely happens. Once the
client is familiar with the techniques of the therapy and what helps them most,
they can actually ask the therapist to do things that they feel will help them make
progress.
As hitherto bound energy begins to move and presses through the
defences, feelings emerge that may have been suppressed for decades. These may
be outbursts of, say, anger. The feelings that come to the surface are not always
negative or painful. Many people see such feelings as anger, rage despair,
jealously fear, loss, or betrayal as negative. In therapy any feeling is part of a
persons history and a manifestation of life. Orgone therapeutically someone
having a lot of negative feelings is more alive than someone who feels nothing,
although the latter may be apparently more at ease and easier to live with. As the
painful feelings get expressed, others will emerge. The negative ones will be
justified responses to rejection, hurt, or abuse in childhood. Below these will be
the emotional capabilities and sensitivities that existed before. These may emerge
tentatively and fearfully at first; after a major experience of hurt a person may
find it difficult to open up and risk the vulnerability of an earlier unarmoured
state before the hurt occurred. The therapists job is to provide an emotionally safe
environment in which the client can have and test out such new feelings. Some
feelings that emerge as armouring is released can be extremely pleasant. Not
everything that has been suppressed is painful. Many happy childhood feelings
that meet no response or are forbidden because of parents or teachers inability
to respond to a lively childs delight in life are buried as well as the obviously
unacceptable ones such as anger and a childs sexuality. Other positive and often
quite unfamiliar feelings emerge, too, such as an awareness of ones right to be
alive, to feel, to have wishes, to love, and to be loved. Many people are brought
up to feel that they have no right to any of these. These are examples of the sort of
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problems that may emerge once therapy gets established. Everyones experience
and history is different and so is the content and the course of their therapy. The
long-term aim of therapy is the removal of all armouring, the obstacles to
orgonotic pulsation. If this is rarely achieved, most people do benefit greatly from
orgone therapy and go on growing independently once they leave therapy.
Occasionally someone will make major positive changes in their life after quite a
short time in therapy, though one cannot, of course, make promises about any
individuals prospects. Anyone entering therapy, once informed of the possibilities
and difficulties has to commit themselves and accept the course of their own
therapy. I have written here of orgone therapy as if it were only a psycho-therapy,
though in fact it works with the whole organism in all aspects, especially
physiology, and can often bring about improvements in general health or specific
problems. Major changes in physiology can be experienced by people in orgone
therapy and observed by therapists. Much positive research could be done in this
area with access to appropriate monitoring equipment. People rarely come to
therapy for medical reasons, though in theory there is no reason why they should
not. The use of orgone therapy in pregnancy and childbirth and with babies and
young children is described in other C O R E publications. There are many
spheres of work in which orgone-therapeutic knowledge and skills can be useful,
such as child-care, physio-therapy, or speech therapy. You do not need to want to
work as an orgone therapist to be able to use such knowledge and skills. For some
suggestions, please see the various brochures and booklets published by C OR E.
You can experience some of the things mentioned in this leaflet, the movement of
your own orgone energy, possibly some of the effects of youre your own
armouring, see these in other people, and learn more about this therapy by taking
part in a day or weekend workshop in orgone therapy. C O R E runs these from
time to time and can run a local one at your request. Please contact us for further
information.
Further Reading
If you have found this essay interesting, you may want to read something
further about Reichs work in the books mentioned below. A very readable and
well-informed biography of Reich which also explains the development of his
work step by step is Fury on Earth by Myron Sharaf, published in 1983 by
Hutchinson.
An interesting and very personal story of the actual experience of having
orgone therapy is Me and the Orgone by Orson Bean, published in 1971 by St
Martins Press, New York, and recently republished.
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The story of how Reich came to develop orgone therapy and discover the
orgone is contained in The Function of the Orgasm by Wilhelm Reich,
published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York. This is in fact the subtitle of the
book, whose full name is The Discovery of the Orgone: Volume I, The
Function of the Orgasm, though the book is usually known simply by its
subtitle. Volume II is The Cancer Biopathy from the same publishers (1973) and
this will be interesting if you want to follow up in detail how Reich came to
discover the orgone and the experimental laboratory work involved, or if you
have a medical interest and wish to read about Reichs work on cancer.
If you want to follow up some of the technical points touched on in this
essay you will find Reichs Character Analysis interesting, published by Vision
Press, London, in 1960, and also in print now as a paperback.
Reichs understanding of authoritarianism and the appeal of Nazism is
detailed in The Mass Psychology of Fascism, last republished in Britain by
Penguin in 1975. This may interest those with a social or political interest.
Please contact C O R E, of you would like further details of orgonomic
journals and research. Reichs discovery of the orgone led to many different areas
of science, far too many to detail in this short essay. Many of them are discussed
in our series of booklets. All the above-mentioned texts are now available again
from the USA. C O R E hopes to import them soon. Please enquire for details, if
you wish to obtain any of these titles.
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inorganic and completely dead, swells in contact with water or a nutrient fluid and
produces small vesicles with some properties of the living. He named these
vesicles bions. They are about 0.5-1.0 m in diameter or length. Their predominant
form is either spherical or bean-like. He came across this process first while
studying the breakdown of dead grass in water. This investigation was a logical
step from his psycho-therapeutic work. Many of his patients reported strong
sensations of something moving within themselves. The stronger their feelings
(emotions) were the, the stronger these sensations of movement were. Though
usually pleasurable and accompanied by involuntary movements expressing
pleasure and surrender, when the sensations were very strong, they sometimes
provoked anxiety and a contraction in the patient. They were also accompanied by
relaxing, expansive physiological effects. Patients described them as streamings,
currents, or waves. He wondered whether these sensations and physiological
processes were basic natural functions. Could the streamings and the expansion
and contraction be observed in nature at large? He began to observe amoebae to
see if these currents and movements occurred in protozoa. He obtained cultures of
amoebae from Oslo University and innocently asked the man delivering them
where the amoebae in the culture came from. The answer was that given in
biology text-books the world over from the spores attached to the hay in the
water. Reich was sceptical of this and devised an ingenious way of observing the
breakdown of dead grass under water. He also did everything he could to find
these spores on the grass before he immersed it in water and repeatedly washed
grass and carefully examined the water afterwards. He was unable to find any
spores at all. However, he observed grass in water under the microscope and saw
that after a while, depending on the freshness of the grass, its surface began to
look grainy in places. It began to bulge and swell and small, highly motile
vesicles broke free. Some of them while moving very actively, remained attached
to the grass. Clumps of these vesicles bulged out of the grass surface and
eventually broke away as independent organisms. There are photomicrographs of
these processes and forms in both books.
Once he had observed these processes in grass, an organic material, once
alive, he experimented with non-living materials such as sand and iron-filings to
see if he could observe the same process in them. He found that the process of
bionous disintegration could be seen in these, too. In fact it occurs more quickly
in inorganic materials and can be observed in some cases after a few minutes or
even immediately after the addition of fluid. He was able to get these same
apparently living forms from coal-dust, sand or iron-filings, even when the solid
material had been heated to red-heat, ie, to several hundred degrees Celsius before
the addition of water or potassium chloride, KCl. Critics accused him of using
contaminated cultures, but the heating of materials to such a heat must without
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doubt destroy all living forms and any cysts or spores. He claimed to have
cultured the living forms so obtained, that is, he got them to breed..
Although these experiments demand some care and dexterity, they are not
impossible for a serious amateur student; the main difficulty is access to a suitable
biological microscope. The microscope sundries needed are not expensive and are
normally available anywhere where there is a microscope in use. (A microscope is
useless without them.) The texts mentioned above are available but difficult to
come by in the UK. C O R E publishes a booklet on the experiments, Three
Experiments with the Microscope for the Amateur Orgonomist. This gives a
more complete list of the items needed, a specification for a suitable microscope,
and more information on how to carry out the experiments. The three in question
are the grass-infusion experiment, obtaining bions from solid materials such as
sand, soil, and iron filings, and a simple control experiment for the grass-infusion
experiment. You also need some way of auto-claving for these experiments. You
can use a pressure-cooker, if you have no access to a true autoclave.
These experiments have been repeated and developed by US and German
orgonomists. At C O R E we have repeated the basic bion experiments and also
confirmed Reichs findings. Some earlier biologists in the nineteenth century, now
written out of mainstream history books and long forgotten, also did experiments
similar to Reichs. Before the dispute over spontaneous generation was apparently
settled by Pasteurs work, the possibility of the origin of life from dead matter
was taken seriously by many scientists. The arguments about the process centred
on the temperature at which sterilisation kills micro-organisms. Only Reich
thought of experimenting with solid materials heated to red-heat, way beyond the
temperature at which micro-organisms or spores and cysts could survive. Such
heating accelerated the process of bionous disintegration.
If you are seriously interested in these experiments and are having
difficulty in finding access to a suitable microscope, you should find one of C O
R Es bion workshops interesting and helpful. We can arrange a demonstration for
you and/or show you how to carry them out, also giving you an opportunity to do
some of the work yourself. Please contact us at the address on the cover.
For further information on these experiments, see;
Reich W; (1948*, 1973); The Cancer Biopathy, Vision Press London,
and
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