Orgone Energy Accumulator

December 22, 2004 10:00 AM

These People believe you can accumulate a life force known as Orgone Energy by sitting in a box.
posted by Devils Rancher (49 comments total)

If you think that's funny, these people think you go to a place in the sky to live forever when you die.

People are funny!
posted by xmutex at 10:07 AM on December 22, 2004

Funny, I thought they were dyslexics from Oregon.
posted by fenriq at 10:09 AM on December 22, 2004

Don't forget the Wilhelm Reich Museum, paying tribute to the discoverer of orgone energy.

/me heartily recommends Martin Gardner's essay "Wilhelm Reich and the Orgone" for all your debunking needs.
posted by ubernostrum at 10:10 AM on December 22, 2004

"Where psychiatry and psychoanalysis have failed to resolve the dilemma of destructive human aggression, Reich's sex-economy succeeded. Where mechanistic biochemistry failed to elucidate the riddle of the origins of life, or of the cancer cell, Reich's bion experiments, and discovery of a specific life energy, has brought forth their solutions. While neither mechanistic science nor mystical philosophies have shed any light on the longstanding problems of sadism and warfare, or on the world-wide human fear and hatred of nature, Reich's work pinpoints their origins in specific traumatic, sex-negative social institutions which damage the young, and from which sadistic urges develop."

apparently this is a very...er..flexible theory
posted by DV8 2XL at 10:11 AM on December 22, 2004

If you haven't tried it, then it is very easy to laugh at the idea...try it first and then report back!
posted by Postroad at 10:17 AM on December 22, 2004

William Burroughs was a proponent. His orgone box gets a namecheck in Kerouac's On The Road, from what I can recall. (sorry, can't link to a book on my shelf... yet.)
posted by Devils Rancher at 10:17 AM on December 22, 2004

There's a really great documentary/drama/? about all this from a few years back called "WR: Mysteries of the Organism." It has a lot of interesting interviews with people who knew Reich, and fairly riveting footage of his methods in practice. Also, communist agitprop and sex. And plaster-casting.
posted by koeselitz at 10:28 AM on December 22, 2004

"Wilhelm Reich and the Orgone(s)" would make a great band name.
posted by Foosnark at 10:36 AM on December 22, 2004

"I'm a-living in a box...I'm a-living in a cardboard box..."
posted by SisterHavana at 10:40 AM on December 22, 2004 [1 favorite]

These folks really should try a joint marketing program with Gene Ray. Perhaps new insights into the simultaneous four-day creation timecube could be gleaned while infusing yourself with orgonic energy as you squat in the box.

Of course, xmutex has a great point. We look at this sort of thing and laugh at how goofy people are. But people who get together to wave their hands, sprinkle water on their newborns, periodically smear ash on their foreheads (or whatever) and chant to their invisible friend ... well, that all just makes perfect sense and is acceptable. In fact, if you don't engage in some variation of that particular form of silliness, then something must be wrong with you.
posted by mstefan at 10:44 AM on December 22, 2004

Can two people in a box achieve simultaneous orgonasms?
posted by weapons-grade pandemonium at 10:44 AM on December 22, 2004

Postroad, you know the Jehovah Witness's that came to my door said the exact same thing. So did the Scientologists, for that matter. And the Mormons.

And I'm pretty sure your same argument is the one the Tobacco companies are using. "Don't hate cigarettes until you've tried a couple of packs of them."

Thanks, I'll pass.
posted by fenriq at 10:47 AM on December 22, 2004

Ignoring Cubium indicts you evil. Well, I , er... what?
posted by Devils Rancher at 10:48 AM on December 22, 2004

By the way, for those of you who doubt the wisdom of Gene Ray, I'll have you know that he won the Nobel prize for physics after publishing his "Nature's Harmonic Simultaneous 4-day Time Cube."
posted by mstefan at 10:52 AM on December 22, 2004

Apparently this thing was the inspiration for Woody Allen's Orgasmatron in SLEEPER.
posted by ranchocalamari at 10:53 AM on December 22, 2004

Validity of beliefs, it seems, is all in the number of followers.

Christianity, ok. Believing in some life force called orgone energy, wacky.
posted by xmutex at 10:55 AM on December 22, 2004

xmutex, my posting of this thread does not ipso facto correlate to Christianity being non-wacky.
posted by Devils Rancher at 10:57 AM on December 22, 2004

Also inspiration for Kate Bush's song Cloudbursting. And mentioned in the play Sideman.
posted by rainbaby at 10:58 AM on December 22, 2004

Devils Rancher: I wasn't trying to claim that it did. I was just making a separate follow-up point to my original snark. It's just odd that in our Western society we consider it a viable belief that wine becomes blood, and that bread becomes the body of someone long dead, and that good people live forever in a nice place and bad people live forever in an unpleasant place, but on the other hand consider some other beliefs that are held by significantly less numbers to be cultish and, well, insane.

Not that you were doing that; just that we do that in general as a culture.

Not that we've ever even had what could be considered a highly intelligent culture-- we're getting dumber by the year, too, just turn on your television-- but still.

Let's just say that the phrase we're all adults here with respect to validity of belief doesn't even apply.
posted by xmutex at 11:06 AM on December 22, 2004

xmutex: Totally agree. Validity of belief, to me, correlates to validity of empirical, observable evidence to back said belief. "Our Leader said so" has never cut it for me, either. I approach all wacky belief systems with skepticism, and I find myself having equal amounts of same, regardless of the sheer number of adherents. few wacky is actually not as scary as many wacky.
posted by Devils Rancher at 11:18 AM on December 22, 2004

As a matter of fact, a good working definition of a cult could be a small group of people who adhere (or claim to adhere) to a set of beliefs and a defintion of religion, a large group of people who adhere (or claim to adhere) to a set of beliefs.
posted by xmutex at 11:19 AM on December 22, 2004

a large group of people who adhere (or claim to adhere) to a set of beliefs

That's a poor definition. Atheists, Scientists, Democrats, Republicans, all fit into it.
posted by goethean at 11:23 AM on December 22, 2004

See also Hawkwind's classic tune, "Orgone Accumulator" -

I've got an Orgone Accumulator
It makes me feel greater
I'll see you sometime later
When I'm through with my Accumulator

It's no social integrator
It's a one man isolator
It's a back brain stimulator
It's a cerebral vibrator

Those energy stimulators
Turn your eyeballs into craters
But an Orgone Accumulator
Is a superman creator

It's no social integrator
It's a one man isolator
It's a back brain stimulator
It's a cerebral vibrator

I've got an Orgone Accumulator
And it makes me feel greater
I'll see you sometime later
When I'm through with my Accumulator
posted by stinkycheese at 11:24 AM on December 22, 2004

goethean: Ha, some might say case in points.
posted by xmutex at 11:26 AM on December 22, 2004

Build your own and see for yourself
posted by stinkycheese at 11:30 AM on December 22, 2004

polite reminder: a 'wacky' belief is not by default wrong, misguided, or worthy of derision.

carry on.
posted by moonbird at 12:03 PM on December 22, 2004

xmutex - bleagh. i don't know what to say. it's not worth a call out, i'm not offended (i'm atheist). it's just... boring? obvious? i dunno. sorry. try for something more original next time?
posted by andrew cooke at 12:05 PM on December 22, 2004

ReligionBashingFilter. I swear to Baal, people!
posted by Sidhedevil at 12:08 PM on December 22, 2004

Okay, down the drain it goes. I laughed, anyway.
posted by Devils Rancher at 12:08 PM on December 22, 2004

I love it when groups like this cite "research articles" written on their thingamajig or belief system (bottom of this page), and all the cited articles are in publications published or endorsed by the group itself. Try finding the International Journal of Sex-Economy and Orgone Research or Orgone Energy Bulletin in PubMed...

*actually checks, just in case*

...Wow, they're not in there, but I did find four articles on or mentioning Orgone:
1. The onset of labour: an alternative theory.
Complement Ther Nurs Midwifery. 1996 Feb;2(1):21-4.
2. Orgone (Reichian) therapy in tension headache.
Am J Psychother. 1976 Jan;30(1):103-11.
3. [Orgone accumulators and energy for prevention and therapy of cancer? Interview granted to "Minerva Medica" by Walter Hoppe M.D]
Minerva Med. 1972 Jun 6;63(43):2450-2. Italian. No abstract available.
4. [Orgone energy--vital force--(Galvani) and morbid states]
Minerva Med. 1968 Oct 3;59(79):4203-8. Italian. No abstract available.

Of course, two of them are from some obscure Italian journal, but still.
posted by me3dia at 12:09 PM on December 22, 2004

Do the little copper bracelets with the magnets in them cancel out the benefits of this type of therepy?
I'll have to consult my pewter "guardian Angel" my grandmother insisted I take and "use"...
posted by Balisong at 12:13 PM on December 22, 2004

Also inspiration for Kate Bush's song Cloudbursting.

I thought that most of The Hounds of Love was aboput Reich.

I've been in the vicinity of the museum countless times and always meant to stop by, but I've never checked it out.
posted by anathema at 12:54 PM on December 22, 2004

Wilhelm Reich was a pretty far-out guy. That's not to say that his ideas didn't have some grounding in reality, but it's not looking too good. The rest of the world had moved on to the electromagnetic spectrum and he was still focused on orgone. However, death in a jail cell and destruction of all his scientific works was perhaps a bit overboard?

Did anyone else note that the person that runs the Orgone Lab has a PhD in geography from U of Kansas and is on the Doctoral Research Committee of the Santa Barbara Graduate Research Institute?
posted by nTeleKy at 1:04 PM on December 22, 2004

anathema - I didn't know that. It seems like his whole deal inspired/inspires a lot of artists, so it has a value in that sense.
posted by rainbaby at 1:22 PM on December 22, 2004

See also Hawkwind's classic tune, "Orgone Accumulator" -

I've got an Orgone Accumulator
It makes me feel greater
I'll see you sometime later
When I'm through with my Accumulator
...

posted by stinkycheese at 11:24 AM PST on December 22

Pop Will Eat Itself did a cover of this back in the late 80s as well.
posted by dontrockwobble at 1:50 PM on December 22, 2004

nTeleKy, thanks for a post substantially more informative and interesting than my FPP. The mouse-overs are a nice touch.
posted by Devils Rancher at 3:00 PM on December 22, 2004

Yeah, Reich did seem like a nut, but the only curious thing to me was the US govt.'s all-out assault on him and his works. If you didn't read his bio, basically the FDA (!) got the authority to destroy all his orgone machines and his books. It was illegal to publish his books for some years after.

Why the fuss? Imagine the feds going after Timecube boy, Gene Ray. I don't think they'll go through the trouble. Of course, this was the height of McCarthyist America, so maybe it was just par for the course

The prosecution was a quite extreme. Reich refused to appear in court--stupidly--so they threw him in jail where he died of heart failure. It makes me wonder, though, if Reich really was actually onto something?

Someone make one of those orgone thingees and report back, mmkay?
posted by zardoz at 3:42 PM on December 22, 2004

I've known several people who used accumulators and reported good effects. It's one of those things where the power of belief may have helped. Who knows? But I really don't like the way this is being called out as dumb and the believers of this modality as foolish. We've all been duped into believing much less innocuous ideas. Faith is an amazing thing, far from rational at times, but have many of our life-binding mythologies been rational? No, but we can at least try respect them a tad bit, in our often less-than rational universe.

Ok, I'm done now.
posted by moonbird at 4:21 PM on December 22, 2004

Do the little copper bracelets with the magnets in them cancel out the benefits of this type of therepy?
I just read that those magnet bracelets actually work. Maybe this does too?
posted by amberglow at 4:44 PM on December 22, 2004

Well, if orgone accumulation "actually works", what does it "actually do"? Do you become stronger, faster, smarter? Taller? More attractive? Luckier in games of chance? What's the deal?
posted by aeschenkarnos at 4:54 PM on December 22, 2004

I've been in the vicinity of the museum countless times and always meant to stop by, but I've never checked it out.

anathema, you have to go! Young women walk you around Reich's lab, talking about orgasms and psuedoscience. Totally strange. I went when I was about 12 and it had a big effect on me.
posted by Mayor Curley at 5:20 PM on December 22, 2004

I just read that those magnet bracelets actually work.
amberglow,
I think it would be very hard to maintain a double blind test using the protocols in the linked article. I bet a lot of subjects found out whether or not they had the magnetic bracelets when the bracelet stuck (or not) to the refrigerator door (during the 12 week study).
posted by 445supermag at 7:09 PM on December 22, 2004

Actor/comedian Orson Bean wrote a book called Me and the Orgone, about his experiences with Reichian orgone therapy.
posted by jonp72 at 8:19 PM on December 22, 2004

the core of Reichian philosophy, as I got from WR: The Mysteries of the Organism (see above) comes down to this: (a direct quote)
"We don't have a body, we are a body."
To me, that was pretty profound.
posted by Al_Truist at 8:27 PM on December 22, 2004

Orgone energy is just another way of talking about yin and yang with a bonus of great sex tossed in for good luck. I'd buy in to that concept a lot quicker than most of the alternatives that are floating around out in the land of W. Plus, they offer stuff for free.
posted by DeepFriedTwinkies at 8:41 PM on December 22, 2004

See, it's not just me who drew a connection between Reich and Gene Ray.
posted by mstefan at 8:43 PM on December 22, 2004

Devil's Rancher - No problem, we don't all get paid to sit in front of computers all day. Thanks for your post, I hadn't come across any orgone-related fun in a while. I wasn't aware that there were still adherents.

BTW, you can add mouseovers like this:
<a href="URL" title="mouseover">Link Name</a>

If you're ever wondering how someone did something, just right-click and select View Page Source; that's how I figured out the mouseover thing.
posted by nTeleKy at 9:08 PM on December 22, 2004

i don't know, 445--there have been other studies too--i'll try to dig em up. (i don't discount the placebo effect tho)
posted by amberglow at 9:29 PM on December 22, 2004

I find Reich to be deeply fascinating. His relationship with reality was obviously fractured and troubled, and I'm not at all interested in the scientific merit of his thought, which is admittedly probably none. Nevertheless, unlike the time cube man whose theory consists of witless repetition of the same hallucinated platitude, Reich was a very bright person and often an acute observer, and in the midst of his paranoid (well, they were out to get him) stupor he managed to compose several books that are of some insight -- 'Listen, little man!' comes to mind as betraying a thorough understanding of fascism and of the banal and rotten complacency of its unwitting adherents. Many atheists enjoy "the Bible as literature" -- why not Reich as literature?
posted by ori at 12:39 AM on December 23, 2004