Content note: super weird sexual shit
The formal study of psychology is about a hundred and fifty years old, depending on who you ask. In that time, the field has seen a metric fucktonne of ideas come and go, a few bookshelves worth of stuff that we probably know for sure, and a handful of fucking whackadoodle visionaries.
So let’s talk about the sex box guy.
Today’s Moment of Science… Orgone energy, or as it would be branded if it worked, Cumming for Climate Change.
After Sigmund Freud decided we were all sexual deviants fraught with Oedipus complexes and daddy issues, a generation of psychologists started trying to sort out our sexual bullshit. Amongst the more free-spirited of them was Wilhelm Reich.
Which is, uh, putting it nicely. Guy was a bit of a horse fucker in his teens, banged a bunch of his patients, and he cheated on pretty much all of his wives (with his patients). Oh, and he made up a form of therapy in which people stripped down to their skivvies and he massaged them. Because that was gonna help heal some trauma, obviously.
That’s not even the weird stuff.
An Austrian doctor born in 1897, he was possibly the world’s most promising psychoanalyst, famous in the field by his mid-thirties. He worked at the Vienna Ambulatorium under Freud’s direction in 1922, treating patients at low or no cost. He hypothesized that the neurosis he saw in many of his patients were reactions to their environment, and in large part coping mechanisms for living with abuse and poverty. He also ran a mobile clinic, promoting abortion and birth control, and even doing a little soap box sex education.
People were not thrilled with the douchebag answering their kids’ questions about butt stuff.
While his contemporaries sought to perhaps manage the libido, Reich thought it was a vital life force to be entirely unleashed.
Moving to Berlin in 1930, Reich joined the communist party and published The Mass Psychology of Fascism three years later. Unsurprisingly, it was banned under Nazi rule. The core tenet of the book was that sexual repression led to people becoming fascists. Reich was all for sexual revolution and liberation which, he theorized, would make for more good communists like him.
Notably, it was also banned in the United States. Stick a pin in that.
His stance of ‘Germans need to loosen up and bang’ was pretty extreme for the day, getting him kicked out of the German communist party. When he moved to Denmark, their communist party was like ‘thanks but no thanks.’ Moving to Sweden, he was monitored by the police under suspicion that his practice was actually a brothel. He secured a visa for the US in 1939, where surely the Americans would be more sympathetic to weird sex stuff.
Bless.
Now we get to Reich’s whole phase when he thought the world ran on the free floating energy of orgasms and this was when shit went fucking bananas.
You know how people use the term ‘energy’ around things like crystals and Gwyneth Paltrow’s vagina? That’s what we’re working with here. That’s Orgone. It’s mystic energy bullshit that some horny doctor thought controlled everything. The proof? He thought he’d managed to spontaneously generate life by throwing together protozoa soup with grass, sand, potassium, and some animal tissue. The only explanation was orgone, obviously. Not that he threw a bunch of shit into a test tube and there was bacteria in there, oh no. It was the orgasms buzzing around us in the air, duh.
He made the Orgone Energy Accumulator. It was about the size of a stout telephone booth, lined with sheet iron, allegedly making the orgone concentration five times higher than in the atmosphere. He started work treating- and subsequently killing- cancer patients with it.
He also made a cloudbuster. It was supposed to draw the orgone energy out of the atmosphere, causing rainfall. It didn’t change the climate or deliver any orgasms that we know of.
It’s all fun and games until you transport your orgasm box across state lines. Reich had been busted by the FDA for- big shock here- the contraption being a worthless piece of garbage. They were like “you’ve gotta stop killing cancer patients, you rascal.” They banned promotional materials that mentioned orgone, and in 1956 six tons of his books were burned.
Just saying, maybe someone at the FDA needed to get laid because as much as the box was stupid, book burning sounds pretty fucking fascist to me.
By this point, Reich was losing his grasp on reality. He thought Eisenhower was a good buddy of his. The communists and fascists were surely plotting together against him. He was shooting down UFOs with his cloudbuster.
He was caught shipping accumulator parts across state lines in a sting, and was sentenced to two years in prison. In 1957 at sixty years old, visionary whackadoodle Wilhelm Reich died of heart failure in a federal penitentiary.
This has been your daily Moment of Science, pretty sure I need therapy from researching this piece.
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Good piece. You should do a John Harvey Kellogg piece.