(from wikipedia online encyclopedia)
"Reich was a respected analyst for much of his life, focusing on character structure, rather than on individual neurotic symptoms.[1] He promoted adolescent sexuality, the availability of contraceptives and abortion, and the importance for women of economic independence. Synthesizing material from psychoanalysis, cultural anthropology, economics, sociology, and ethics, his work influenced writers such as Alexander Lowen, Fritz Perls, Paul Goodman, Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, A. S. Neill, and William Burroughs.[2]
He was also a controversial figure, who came to be viewed by the psychoanalytic establishment as having gone astray or as having succumbed to mental illness. His work on the link between human sexuality and neuroses emphasized "orgastic potency" as the foremost criterion for psycho-physical health. He said he had discovered a form of energy, which he called "orgone," that permeated the atmosphere and all living matter, and he built "orgone accumulators," which his patients sat inside to harness the energy for its reputed health benefits. It was this work, in particular, that cemented the rift between Reich and the psychoanalytic establishment.[3]
Reich, of Jewish descent and a communist, was living in Germany when Adolf Hitler came to power. He fled to Scandinavia in 1933 and subsequently to the United States in 1939. In 1947, following a series of critical articles about orgone and his political views in The New Republic and Harper's,[4] the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) began an investigation into his claims, winning an injunction against the interstate sale of orgone accumulators. Charged with contempt of court for violating the injunction, Reich conducted his own defense, which involved sending the judge all his books to read, and arguing that a court was no place to decide matters of science. He was sentenced to two years in prison, and in August 1956, several tons of his publications were burned by the FDA.[5] He died of heart failure in jail just over a year later, days before he was due to apply for parole.
From 1934-37, based for most of the period in Oslo, Reich conducted experiments seeking the origins of life.
He examined protozoa, single-celled creatures with nuclei. He grew cultured vesicles using grass, sand, iron, and animal tissue, boiling them, and adding potassium and gelatin. Having heated the materials to incandescence with a heat-torch, he noted bright, glowing, blue vesicles, which, he said, could be cultured, and which gave off an observable radiant energy. This he called “orgone”. He named the vesicles “bions” and believed they were a rudimentary form of life, or halfway between life and non-life.
When he poured the cooled mixture onto growth media, bacteria were born. Based on various control experiments, Reich dismissed the idea that the bacteria were already present in the air, or in the other materials used. Reich's The Bion Experiments on the Origin of Life was published in Oslo in 1938, leading to attacks in the press that he was a “Jew pornographer” who was daring to meddle with the origins of life."
basically for the unscientific, he induced the creation of single cell life. but it was his invention of the cloudbuster which got him in trouble in more ways than he could anticipate.
"On June 5, 1956, FDA officials traveled to Orgonon, Reich's 200-acre (80-hectare) estate near Rangeley, Maine, where they destroyed the accumulators, and on June 26, burned many of his books. On August 25, 1956 and again on March 17, 1960,[57] the remaining six tons of his books, journals and papers were burned in the 25th Street public incinerator in New York's lower east side (Gansevoort incinerator). In March 1957, he was sent to Danbury Federal Prison, where a psychiatrist examined him, recording: “Paranoia manifested by delusions of grandiosity and persecution and ideas of reference.”[21]
Reich died in his sleep of heart failure on November 3, 1957 in the federal penitentiary in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, shortly before he was due to apply for parole. Not one psychiatric or established scientific journal carried an obituary."
"ideas of reference" is an exaggerated form of self consciousness. People suffering from ideas of reference experience intrusive thoughts of this nature, but crucially, they realize that these ideas are not real. Intrusive thoughts are unwelcome, involuntary thoughts, images or unpleasant ideas that may become obsessions, are upsetting or distressing, and can be difficult to be free of and manage.
so, the man invents orgone accumulators, draws the attention of secret government services, is arrested and jailed, all his accululators are smashed and research and books burned like an episode out of the dark ages, gets diagnosed with psycholigical issues while in jail, and conveniently dies just before he is to be parolled.
what i think is that somehow these accululators interefered with warp state travel, and so the american government did what it does best. made people and things 'go away'. i also think is that the man was constantly attacked by people in d'att state because of his invention.
alice bailey (june 16, 1800 - dec 15, 1949)
benjamin creme (born 1922)
