WILHELM REICH

Opening

Wilhelm Reich was a psychoanalyst, once one of Sigmund Freud's most promising pupils, who by the 1940s believed he had found a new form of energy in living things and in the sky. He called it orgone, from "orgasm" and "organism". He built boxes to collect it, an apparatus to move it, and a research station in Maine, Orgonon, to study it.

In 1954 a US federal court enjoined him from distributing his devices, after the Food and Drug Administration took action. In 1956 he was convicted of contempt for ignoring the order, and six tons of his books and journals were burned by order of the court. He died in federal prison in November 1957. The orgone claims have never been replicated. The burning of the books, in the United States, is on the record and is the part that does not go away.

Timeline

1930sReich leaves Germany for Scandinavia. In Oslo he coins the word orgone and publishes his work on microscopic "bions" in 1938. A Norwegian pathologist, Leiv Kreyberg, examines a preparation and finds ordinary staphylococci, suggesting airborne contamination.

1940He builds the first orgone accumulator, a box lined with layers of metal and insulating material. The first human-sized box is built in December in his New York basement.

January 1941Reich meets Albert Einstein in Princeton for nearly five hours and later sends him a small accumulator. On 7 February Einstein writes that the matter is, in his view, completely solved by an ordinary temperature gradient in his room.

1950 and 1951At Orgonon, Reich reports an episode he calls the Oranur experiment, in which radioactive material placed near orgone equipment made him and his staff ill.

1953He builds and uses a cloudbuster, a bank of pipes aimed at the sky, and claims to produce rain in Maine.

19 March 1954A federal court issues a decree of injunction banning the distribution of orgone devices and ordering them destroyed.

7 May 1956Reich is found guilty of criminal contempt and sentenced to two years.

23 August 1956About six tons of his books and journals are burned in New York.

3 November 1957Reich dies of heart failure in the federal penitentiary at Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, aged 60.

Key figures

Wilhelm Reich, born in 1897, was a physician and psychoanalyst. He believed in his discoveries and acted on them to the end.

Albert Einstein tested an accumulator and gave a mundane explanation for what Reich claimed to measure.

The Food and Drug Administration began the legal action that led to the injunction. It followed critical articles about Reich in 1947 in The New Republic and Harper's.

Peter Reich, his son, later wrote a memoir of life at Orgonon.

Physical and documentary trail

The record: the 1954 decree, the contempt conviction and sentence, the burning of the literature, Reich's own books, his published exchange with Einstein, and Orgonon, which is now the Wilhelm Reich Museum, where a cloudbuster and an accumulator are displayed. His tomb is there too, above ground, as he wished.

What is missing is any replication of the orgone claims by independent researchers. Einstein's test and the Norwegian contamination finding both gave ordinary explanations for the effects Reich reported.

Things you might not know

• He published the Einstein letters. Reich released their correspondence in 1953 as The Einstein Affair.
• He was arrested after Pearl Harbor. In 1941 he was held on Ellis Island, and the FBI later admitted it had confused him with a New Jersey bookseller named William Reich.
• Willy Brandt volunteered. The future German chancellor was a volunteer in Reich's oscillograph experiments in 1935.
• A pop song came out of it. Kate Bush's 1985 song "Cloudbusting" was inspired by Peter Reich's memoir of his father.
• The burning did not end with the first fire. One account has more of his literature burned in New York in 1960, after his death.
• Accumulators were popular. Writers including William Burroughs used them.

Competing explanations

A sincere pioneer. Reich believed he had found a real energy and that the establishment was suppressing it. His early psychoanalytic work was influential, and the persecution was real. The weakness is that the orgone experiments have not held up.

A mistaken experimenter. The strongest scientific reading is that Reich's instruments and boxes showed ordinary effects, such as temperature gradients and contamination, which he interpreted as a new energy.

Official overreach. The FDA acted against his medical claims, and the court ordered his publications destroyed. Many people, including those who reject orgone, find the book-burning excessive.

Later life of the case

Reich's books were gradually republished, and his museum opened. Orgonomy has a small following today, but mainstream science treats it as discredited. The burning of the books is still cited in debates about censorship.

Finding

Two things are true. Reich's claims about a new life energy have never been confirmed, and the tests that were done found ordinary causes. And the United States government took a man's published work and destroyed it, and he died in prison. That the first is true does not excuse the second.

What still will not resolve: whether orgone has ever been tested with proper controls by anyone outside Reich's circle. No independent replication has been published, and the exact details of what was burned, and where, differ between the accounts I found.