Orgone
[6] Orgone was seen as a massless, omnipresent substance, similar to luminiferous aether, but more closely associated with living energy than with inert matter.
[3] Ultimately, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) obtained a federal injunction barring the interstate distribution of orgone-related materials because Reich and his associates were making false and misleading claims.
Reich's early work was based on the Freudian concept of the libido, though influenced by sociological understandings with which Freud disagreed but which were to some degree followed by other prominent theorists such as Herbert Marcuse and Carl Jung.
Initially, he thought of bions as electrodynamic or radioactive entities, as had the Russian biologist Alexander Gurwitsch, but later concluded that he had discovered an entirely unknown but measurable force, which he then named "orgone",[6] a pseudo-Greek formation probably from org- "impulse, excitement" as in org-asm, plus -one as in ozone (the Greek neutral participle, virtually *ὄργον, gen.: *ὄργοντος).
[19] He developed a therapeutic approach he called vegetotherapy that was aimed at opening and releasing this body armor so that free instinctive reflexes—which he considered a token of psychic well-being—could take over.
This focus on sexuality, while acceptable in the clinical perspective of Viennese psychoanalytic circles, scandalized the conservative American public even as it appealed to countercultural figures like William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac.
Albert Einstein agreed to participate, but thought Reich's research lacked scientific detachment and experimental rigor; and concluded that the effect was simply due to the temperature gradient inside the room.
[21] Reich and his students were seen as a "cult of sex and anarchy," at least in part because orgone was linked with the title of his book The Function of the Orgasm, and this led to numerous investigations as a communist and denunciation under a wide variety of other pretexts.
[5][24][25][26] Some psychotherapists and psychologists practicing various kinds of body psychotherapy and somatic psychology have continued to use Reich's proposed emotional-release methods and character-analysis ideas.
[27][28][29] Dušan Makavejev opened his 1971 satirical film W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism with documentary coverage of Reich and his development of orgone accumulators, combining this with other imagery and a fictional sub-plot in a collage mocking sexual and political authorities.
