Orgone therapy

From SkepticWiki

1 Definition
2 Discussion
- 2.1 Origins
- 2.2 Quotations
3 Related Topics
4 References

[edit] Definition

Orgone therapy is the term Wilhelm Reich coined late in his life for all of the different therapies he used on his patients. There were two main broad subdivisions: physical orgone therapy and psychiatric orgone therapy. It was not uncommon for Reich to use both types of therapy on the same individual.

Physical orgone therapy involved the use of devices that Reich believed manipulated orgone energy directly. These included orgone accumulator boxes large enough for the patient to sit in, orgone blankets and "shooters" which were built out of the same layers as a single wall in an orgone accumulator, and Reich's medical DOR buster which was a scaled-down version of his cloudbuster.

Psychiatric orgone therapy was Reich's late-in-life name for character-analytic vegetotherapy. It was developed by Reich in the early-to-mid-1930s, and consisted of Character Analysis techniques used in combination with more direct physical techniques that Reich called vegetotherapy (after the vegetative nervous system). Vegetotherapy included physical movement exercises and lots of deep breathing, but were often centered around a rather painful process called "attacking the muscular armor", which resembles a later technique called Rolfing.

[edit] Discussion

[edit] Origins

Psychiatric orgone therapy has its origins in Reich's Character Analysis. Reich believed that a chronic tension in part of the musculature indicated that emotions were being "held" in those muscles. He referred to this alleged emotional holding as "muscular armor." He sought to remove the muscular armor by pressing on them directly with his fingers, in a way most likely to elicit a strong emotional response from his patient. Since these attacks were often quite painful, emotional responses in the form of anger or even crying were very common -- Reich interpreted these reactions as proof that his attacks on the muscles were releasing pent-up emotions and, thus, that his therapy worked.

Physical orgone therapy has its origins in Reich's belief in orgone energy. He believed that one effect of muscular armor was that the chronically-contracted muscles blocked the natural flow of orgone energy in the body, and that thus supplying the body with extra orgone energy might be able to overcome those blocks. He also believed that organic substances attracted orgone energy, and metallic substances attracted but then immediately re-radiated orgone energy -- so, he reasoned, by building boxes with organic substances lining the outside and metallic substances lining the inside, he ought to be able to "accumulate" orgone energy inside the box. Reich and his followers built many of these orgone accumulator boxes and had patients sit naked inside them for 10-20 minutes at a time. They eventually came to believe that physical orgone therapy could cure everything from impotence to cancer.

[edit] Quotations

My objection to vegetotherapy is not that it deviates from the cautious, interpretative techniques of classical analysis but that its underlying theory seems to me to be bad biology. For instance, Reich's description of the segmental arrangement of character armor and his assertion that it 'represents the worm in man' (See Selected Writings p. 158 et seq.) seems to me to run counter to evolutionary theory and to comparative morphology.

—Charles Rycroft, psychoanalyst, in The New York Review of Books, 12-Feb-1970