Orgone energy is a discredited, fringe science theory^[1][2][3] originally proposed in the 1930s by Wilhelm Reich.^[4] Reich, originally part of Sigmund Freud's Vienna circle, extrapolated the Freudian concept of libido first as a biophysical and later as a universal life force.^[5] In its final conception, developed by Reich's student Charles Kelly after Reich's death, Orgone was conceived as the anti-entropic principle of the universe, a creative substratum in all of nature comparable to Mesmer's animal magnetism, the Odic force of Carl Reichenbach and Henri Bergson's élan vital.^[4] Orgone was seen as a massless, omnipresent substance, similar to luminiferous aether, but more closely associated with living energy than inert matter. It could coalesce to create organization on all scales, from the smallest microscopic units—called bions in orgone theory—to macroscopic structures like organisms, clouds, or even galaxies.^[6]

Reich's theories held that deficits or constrictions in bodily orgone were at the root of many diseases - and in particular cancer - similar to the way in which deficits or constrictions in the libido could produce neuroses in Freudian theory. He created the Orgone Institute to pursue research into orgone energy after he emigrated to the US, and used it to publish literature and distribute material relating to the topic for more than a decade. Reich designed special "orgone accumulators" - devices which ostensibly collected orgone energy from the atmosphere - for purposes as diverse as improvement of general health, increase sexual potency, and weather control.^[1] Ultimately, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) obtained a federal injunction barring the interstate distribution of orgone-related materials, on the grounds that Reich and his associates were making false and misleading claims, and later jailed Reich and destroyed all orgone-related materials at the institute after Reich violated the injunction.^[3]

Orgone is regarded by the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine as a type of "putative energy", a model which some therapists use for clinical procedures, but which is untestable or defies measurement.^[7] There is no empirical support for the concept of orgone in medicine or the physical sciences, and research into the concept ceased with the end of the Institute.^[2]

History[link]

The concept of orgone belongs to Reich's later work, after he immigrated to the US. 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. While Freud had focused on a solipsistic conception of mind in which unconscious and inherently selfish primal drives (primarily the sexual drive, or libido) were suppressed or sublimated by internal representations (cathexes) of parental figures (the superego), for Reich libido was a life-affirming force repressed by society directly. For example, in one of his better known analyses Reich observes a workers' political rally, noting that participants were careful not to violate signs that prohibited walking on the grass; Reich saw this as the state co-opting unconscious responses to parental authority as a means of controlling behavior.^[8] He was expelled from the Institute of Psycho-analysis because of these disagreements over the nature of the libido and his increasingly political stance. He was forced to leave Germany very soon after Hitler came to power.^[9]

Reich took an increasingly bioenergetic view of libido, perhaps influenced by his tutor Paul Kammerer and another biologist, Otto Warburg.^[10] In the early 20th century, when molecular biology was in its infancy, developmental biology in particular still presented mysteries that made the idea of a specific life energy respectable, as was articulated by theorists such as Hans Driesch. As a psycho-analyst Reich aligned such theories with the Freudian libido, while as a materialist he believed such a life-force must be susceptible to physical experiment. He wrote in The Function of the Orgasm; "Between 1919 and 1921, I became familiar with Driesch's 'Philosophie des Organischen' and his 'Ordnungslehre'... Driesch's contention seemed incontestable to me. He argued that, in the sphere of the life function, the whole could be developed from a part, whereas a machine could not be made from a screw..... However, I couldn't quite accept the transcendentalism of the life principle. Seventeen years later I was able to resolve the contradiction on the basis of a formula pertaining to the function of energy. Driesch's theory was always present in my mind when I thought about vitalism. The vague feeling I had about the irrational nature of his assumption turned out to be justified in the end. He landed among the spiritualists."^[11]

The concept of orgone was the result of this work in the psycho-physiology of libido. After his migration to the US, Reich began to speculate about biological development and evolution, and then branched out into much broader speculations about the nature of the universe.^[4] This led him to the conception of "bions": self-luminescent sub-cellular vesicles visible he believed were observable in decaying materials, and presumably present universally. Initially he thought of bions as electrodynamic or radioactive entities, as had the Ukrainian biologist Alexander Gurwitsch, but later came to the conclusion that he had discovered an entirely unknown but measurable force, which he then named "orgone",^[4] 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).^[12]

For Reich neurosis became a physical manifestation he called "body armor"—deeply seated tensions and inhibitions in the physical body that were not separated from any mental effects that might be observed.^[13] 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.

Evaluation[link]

Orgone was closely associated with sexuality: Reich, following Freud, saw nascent sexuality as the primary energetic force of life. The term itself was chosen to share a root with the word orgasm, which both Reich and Freud took to be a fundamental expression of psychological health. 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.

In at least some cases, Reich's experimental techniques do not appear to have been very careful, or to have taken precautions to remove experimental bias.^[14] Nevertheless, conclusions based on these unreplicated informal sensory observations by Reich and his associates are still regarded and relied upon as fact in current publications by orgonomists. Reich was concerned with experimental verification from other scientists. Albert Einstein famously agreed to participate, but thought Reich's research lacked scientific detachment and experimental rigor; he found Reich's demonstrations of "orgone heat" inconclusive.^[15]

Orgone and its related concepts were quickly denounced in the post-World War II American press.^[16] 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 best-known book The Function of the Orgasm, and this led to numerous investigations as a communist^[17] and denunciation under a wide variety of other pretexts.^[18] He was, as the New York Times later put it, "much maligned".^[19] The psychoanalytical community of the time saw his approach to healing diseases as quackery of the worst sort, and they took his comments about UFOs out of context to make him look like a charlatan.^[20] In 1954 the U.S. Food and Drug Administration successfully sought an injunction to prevent Reich from making medical claims relating to orgone, which (among other stipulations) prevented him from shipping "orgone devices" across state lines.^[21] Reich defied the order and was jailed, and the FDA took that opportunity to destroy any of Reich's books which mentioned orgone, along with research materials and devices.^{[5][21][22][23]}

Some of Reich's observations have been replicated by other researchers. Stefan Müschenich, in an unpublished Master's thesis, has demonstrated effects of orgone accumulators on test subjects in keeping with Reich's original descriptions, while a subjects exposed to a known "dummy box" showed no such effects.^[24] As of 2007, the National Institutes of Health database PubMed, and the Web of Science database, contained only 4 or 5 peer-reviewed scientific papers published (since 1968) dealing with orgone therapy.

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,^[24][25][26] but use of orgone equipment is rare, limited mainly to therapists who have been trained in "Reichian" institutions such as the American College of Orgonomy.

Orgone in popular culture[link]

This section needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (June 2010)

Orgone was used in the writings of several prominent beat generation authors, who were fascinated by both its purported curative and sexual aspects. To that extent, it is heavily associated with the 1950s counterculture movement, though it did not carry over into the more extensive movements of the 1960s.

William S. Burroughs[link]

William S. Burroughs was a major proponent of orgone research, who often included it as part of the surreal imagery in his novels. Orgone interested Burroughs particularly because he believed that it could be used to ease or alleviate "junk sickness"—a popular term for heroin withdrawal. This fitted well in the context of his novels, which were usually narrative recreations of his own experiences with narcotics and the Beat life.

Burroughs explicitly compares "kicking the habit" to cancer in the novel Junky, and ties it to the use of orgone accumulators. He writes:

Cancer is rot of tissue in a living organism. In junk sickness the junk dependent cells die and are replaced. Cancer is a premature death process. The cancer patient shrinks. A junkie shrinks—I have lost up to fifteen pounds in three days. So I figure if the accumulator is a therapy for cancer, it should be therapy for the after-effects of junk sickness.

At the time that Burroughs was writing, orgone accumulators were only available from Reich's Orgone Institute in New York, offered for a ten dollar per month donation. Burroughs built his own instead, substituting rock wool for the sheet iron, but still achieved the desired effect. Burroughs writes about what occurred once he started using the accumulator:

Constant use of junk of the years has given me the habit of directing attention inward. When I went into the accumulator and sat down I noticed a special silence that you sometimes feel in deep woods, sometimes on a city street, a hum that is more rhythmic vibration than a sound. My skin prickled and I experienced an aphrodisiac effect similar to good strong weed. No doubt about it, orgones are as definite a force as electricity. After using the accumulator for several days my energy came back to normal. I began to eat and could not sleep more than eight hours. I was out of the post cure drag.

Jack Kerouac[link]

In Kerouac's popular novel On the Road, the orgone accumulator was treated more as another type of drug than as a medical device: primarily a stimulant, with strong sexual overtones. When Sal Paradise visits Old Bull Lee in the novel (characters representing Kerouac and Burroughs, respectively), Lee's orgone accumulator is described as follows:

'Say, why don’t you fellows try my orgone accumulator? Put some juice in your bones. I always rush up and take off ninety miles an hour for the nearest whorehouse, hor-hor-hor!' said Bull Lee… The orgone accumulator is an ordinary box big enough for a man to sit inside on a chair: a layer of wood, a layer of metal, and another layer of wood gather in orgones from the atmosphere and hold them captive long enough for a human to absorb more than a usual share. According to Reich, orgones are vibratory atmospheric atoms of the life-principle. People get cancer because they run out of orgones. Old Bull thought his orgone accumulator would be improved if the wood he used was as organic as possible, so he tied bushy bayou leaves and twigs to his mystical outhouse. It stood there in the hot, flat yard, an exfoliate machine clustered and bedecked with maniacal contrivances. Old Bull slipped off his clothes and went to sit and moon over his navel.

J.D. Salinger[link]

According to his daughter, J.D. Salinger would sometimes use an orgone accumulator, among an assortment of other alternative health regimens.^[27]

Orson Bean[link]

Noted American actor Orson Bean was once a proponent of orgone therapy and published a well-received book about it entitled Me and the Orgone.

Dušan Makavejev[link]

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.^[28] Scenes include one of only "ten or fifteen orgone boxes left in the country" at that time.^[29]

Hawkwind[link]

British space rockers Hawkwind released the track "Orgone Accumulator" as the first track on side three of the 1972 live album, Space Ritual.

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

...But an Orgone Accumulator
Is a superman creator

Kate Bush[link]

The song "Cloudbusting" by British singer Kate Bush describes Reich's arrest and incarceration through the eyes of his son, Peter.^[30]

Devo[link]

The new wave '80s band Devo claimed that their iconic energy dome design was used to recycle the wasted orgone energy that flows from a person's head. Devo co-founder Mark Mothersbaugh has said,

'We did the red energy dome, which was useful—besides being an icon -- it was a useful icon. You probably know this very well, but your orgone energy goes out the top of your head and it dissipates out the top, but if you wear an energy dome it recycles that energy. It comes back down and showers back down on you and, among other things, you remain manly, shall we say, for maybe another 150 years of your life, probably. I think that's a safe prediction to say that energy domes -- if you wore them constantly, night and day -- which I don't do, but there are people out there who do, not too many of them but there are some. We get e-mails from them, so we know they're out there, those people will probably live about an extra 150 years because of all that orgone energy that they're saving and not wasting away.'^[31]

Evelyn Waugh[link]

An orgone accumulator plays an important role in the semi-autobiographical Evelyn Waugh novel The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold. A neighbour to Mr Pinfold owns a box and with it he experiments on Mr Pinfold's wife. Later, in a hallucinatory state, Mr Pinfold imagines that his problems have originated from that box.

Warren Leight[link]

Warren Leight's play, Side Man, contains a scene where Gene and Terry receive an orgone box that Gene's friend's wife made him get rid of.

Hal Duncan[link]

In Hal Duncan's book Ink (The Book of All Hours 2), one of alternative realities is orgone-based, i.e. orgone ("sexual energy") is used as primary energy source.

See also[link]

• Alexander Gurwitsch
• Animal magnetism of Franz Anton Mesmer
• Energy (spiritual)
• Energy medicine
• Fringe science
• Morphogenetic field
• Odic force of Carl Reichenbach
• Rupert Sheldrake
• Vitalism

References[link]

Further reading[link]

• Boadella, David: Wilhelm Reich, The Evolution Of His Work, Henry Regnery, Chicago, 1973.
• DeMeo, James: The Orgone Accumulator Handbook: Construction Plans, Experimental Use and Protection Against Toxic Energy, Natural Energy Works, Ashland, Oregon 1989.
• DeMeo, James (Ed.): On Wilhelm Reich And Orgonomy (Pulse of the Planet#4), Natural Energy Works, Ashland, Oregon 1993.
• DeMeo, James & Senf, Bernd (Eds): "Nach Reich: Neue Forschungen Zur Orgonomie", Zweitausendeins, Frankfurt, 1997.
• DeMeo, James (Ed.): Heretic's Notebook: Emotions, Protocells, Ether-Drift and Cosmic Life Energy, With New Research Supporting Wilhelm Reich", Natural Energy Works, Ashland, Oregon 2002.
• Eden, Jerome: Orgone Energy, The Answer To Atomic Suicide, Exposition, NY, 1972.
• Eden, Jerome: Animal Magnetism And The Life Energy, Exposition, NY, 1974.
• Gardner, Martin: Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science, Dover, 1952.
• Mann, Edward: Orgone, Reich And Eros: Wilhelm Reich's Theory Of The Life Energy, Simon & Schuster, NY, 1973.
• Moise, William S.: A Taste Of Color, A Touch Of Love, Hancock, Maine, 1970.
• Overly, Richard: Gentle Bio-Energetics: Tools for Everyone, Gentle Bioenergetics Press, Asheville, NC, 1998.
• Raknes, Ola: Wilhelm Reich And Orgonomy, St. Martin's Press, NY, 1970; Penguin, Baltimore, 1970.
• Sharaf, Myron: "Fury on Earth: A Biography of Wilhelm Reich", St.Martin's/Marek, NY 1979.
• Wyckoff, James: Wilhelm Reich: Life Force Explorer, Fawcett, Greenwich, CT, 1973.

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Orgone

• Quackwatch article

Wilhelm Reich (March 24, 1897 – November 3, 1957) was an Austrian-American psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, known as one of the most radical figures in the history of psychiatry. He was the author of several notable books, including The Mass Psychology of Fascism and Character Analysis, both published in 1933.^[1]

Reich worked with Sigmund Freud in the 1920s and was a respected analyst for much of his life, focusing on character structure rather than on individual neurotic symptoms.^[2] He tried to reconcile Marxism and psychoanalysis, arguing that neurosis is rooted in the physical, sexual, economic, and social conditions of the patient, and promoted adolescent sexuality, the availability of contraceptives, abortion, and divorce, and the importance for women of economic independence. His work influenced a generation of intellectuals, including Saul Bellow, William S. Burroughs, Paul Edwards, Norman Mailer, and A. S. Neill, and shaped innovations such as Fritz Perls's Gestalt therapy, Alexander Lowen's bioenergetic analysis, and Arthur Janov's primal therapy.^[3]

Later in life he became a controversial figure who was both adored and condemned. He began to violate some of the key taboos of psychoanalysis, developing body psychotherapy, using touch during sessions, and treating patients in their underwear to improve their "orgastic potency." He said he had discovered a primordial cosmic energy, which he said others called "God" and that he called "orgone." He built orgone energy accumulators that his patients sat inside to harness the reputed health benefits, leading to newspaper stories about sex boxes that cured cancer.^[4]

Reich was living in Germany when Adolf Hitler came to power in January 1933. On March 2 that year the Nazi newspaper,Völkischer Beobachter, published an attack on one of Reich's pamphlets, The Sexual Struggle of Youth.^[5] He left immediately for Vienna, then Scandinavia, moving to the United States in 1939. In 1947, following a series of articles about orgone in The New Republic and Harper's, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) obtained an injunction against the interstate sale of orgone accumulators.^[6] Charged with contempt for violating it, Reich conducted his own defense, which involved asking the judge to read his books 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, one of the most notable examples of censorship in the history of the United States.^[2] He died in jail of heart failure just over a year later, days before he was due to apply for parole.^[7]

Early life[link]

Childhood[link]

Reich was born the first of two sons to Leon Reich, a prosperous farmer, and Cecilia Roniger, in Dobrzanica, a village in Galicia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His father was by all accounts strict, cold, and jealous. He was Jewish, but Reich was later at pains to point out that his father had moved away from Judaism and had not raised his children as Jews; Reich wasn't even allowed to play with Yiddish-speaking children.^[8] As an adult, Reich corrected anyone who referred to him as a Jew. His biographer, Myron Sharaf, writes that this was in part because of his rejection of what he called "Jewish chauvinism," in part because he disliked being forced into any position he had not chosen for himself, and in part because he never wanted to be an outsider.^[9]

Shortly after his birth, the family moved south to a farm in Jujinetz, near Chernivtsi, Bukovina, where Reich's father took control of a cattle farm owned by his mother's uncle, Josef Blum. Reich attributed his later interest in the study of sex and the biological basis of the emotions to his upbringing on the farm where, as he later put it, the natural life functions were never hidden from him.^[10] He also spoke of having witnessed the family maid having intercourse with her boyfriend, and asking her later if he could "play" the part of the lover. He said that, by the time he was four years old, there were no secrets about sex for him;^[8] in his early memoirs, Passion of Youth, he writes that he had intercourse for the first time at the age of 11½, though elsewhere said that he was 13.^[11]

He was taught at home until he was 12, when his mother committed suicide after she was discovered having an affair with Reich's tutor, who lived with the family. Her death was particularly brutal: she drank a common household cleaner, which left her in great pain for days before she died.^[13][14]

Reich wrote in 1920 about how deeply his mother's affair had affected him. Night after night he followed her as she crept to the tutor's bedroom. He stood outside listening, feeling ashamed, angry, and jealous. He wondered if they would kill him if they found out, and briefly thought of forcing her to have sex with him too. Torn between wanting to protect her, but also to tell his father, he later blamed himself for her death, waking in the night overwhelmed by the thought that he had killed her. The tutor was sent away, leaving Reich without a mother or a teacher, and with a powerful sense of guilt.^[13]

Education[link]

He was sent to the all-male Czernowitz gymnasium, excelling at Latin, Greek, and the natural sciences. It appears to have been during this period that a skin condition developed that plagued him for the rest of his life. When it began is unclear, but it was diagnosed as psoriasis; Sharaf speculates that it may have been triggered by his mother's suicide. He was given medication that contained arsenic, now known to make psoriasis worse.

His father was devastated by his wife's suicide.^[15] In or around 1914, he took out a life insurance policy, then stood for hours in a cold pond, apparently fishing, but in fact intending to commit slow suicide, according to Reich and his brother, Robert.^[16] He contracted pneumonia and tuberculosis, and died in 1914. Despite the insurance policy, no money was forthcoming.^[16]

Sigmund Freud and Reich met in 1919.

Reich managed the farm and continued with his studies, graduating in 1915 mit Stimmeneinhelligkeit (unanimous approval). In the summer of that year, the Russians invaded Bukovina and the Reich brothers fled to Vienna, losing everything. In his Passion of Youth, Reich wrote: "I never saw either my homeland or my possessions again. Of a well-to-do past, nothing was left."

Reich joined the Austro-Hungarian Army after school, serving from 1915–18, for the last two years as a lieutenant. When the war ended in 1918, he entered the medical school at the University of Vienna. As an undergraduate, he was drawn to the work of Sigmund Freud. The men first met in 1919 when Reich visited Freud to obtain literature for a seminar on sexology, Freud making a strong impression on him. He became one of Freud's favorite students.^[17] Freud allowed him to start seeing analytic patients in 1920, when Reich was accepted as a guest member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Association, becoming a regular member in October that year at the age of 23.^[18] He was allowed to complete his six-year medical degree in four years because he was a war veteran, and received his M.D. in July 1922.^[19]

Early career and first marriage[link]

Reich worked in internal medicine at University Hospital, Vienna, and studied neuropsychiatry from 1922-24 at the Neurological and Psychiatric Clinic under Professor Julius Wagner-Jauregg. In 1922, he set up private practice as a psychoanalyst, and became a clinical assistant, and later deputy director of Freud's Psychoanalytic Polyclinic. He joined the faculty of the Psychoanalytic Institute in Vienna in 1924, conducted research into the social causes of neurosis, and became Deputy Director of Training.^[17]

A plaque on the house Reich lived in with his wife and children at Schlangenbader Straße 87, Berlin-Wilmersdorf, from 1931 until February 1933.

It was in Vienna that he met Annie Pink, a medical student who came to him for analysis, and who later became an analyst herself. They married on March 17, 1922, when she was 20 and Reich one week short of 25, with Otto Fenichel as a witness.^[20] The marriage produced two daughters, Eva in 1924 and Lore in 1928.^[21] They moved to Berlin in 1930, where he set up clinics in working-class areas, taught sex education, and published pamphlets. He joined the Communist Party of Germany, and his book, The Sexual Revolution, was published in Vienna, but he became too outspoken for the communists, and was expelled from the German party in 1933 and a year later from its Danish counterpart. He was also expelled from the International Psychoanalytical Association in 1934 for political militancy.^[22]

Reich had several affairs during his marriage, including one with his wife's friend, Lia Lasky, in 1927. He and his wife finally separated in 1933 after he began a serious relationship in May 1932 with Elsa Lindenburg, a choreographer and dance therapist, trained in Laban movement analysis, and a pupil of Elsa Gindler. He and Lindenburg were living in Germany when Hitler became Chancellor in January 1933. On March 2, the Nazi newspaper Völkischer Beobachter published an attack on Reich's Der Sexuale Kampf der Jugend (The Sexual Struggle of Youth).^[5] He was derided as a womanizer, a communist, and a Jew who advocated free love. He and Lindenburg left for Vienna the next day. They moved to Scandinavia, first to Denmark where Reich was accused of corrupting Danish youth with German sexology, then to Sweden, and in the Fall of 1934 to Norway.^[23]

1934–1939: Oslo[link]

Vegetotherapy and the orgasm[link]

Reich's home in Drammensveien near Olaf Kyrres plass at Frogner, Oslo. A blue plaque reads: "The physician and psychoanalyst WILHELM REICH (1897-1957) lived and worked here 1935–39. Developed character analysis and the body-oriented therapy."

Reich stayed in Norway for five years, working under the auspices of Professor Schjelderup of the Psychological Institute at the University of Oslo. He first presented the principles of his vegetotherapy in a paper called "Psychic contact and vegetative current" in August 1934 at the 13th International Congress of Psychoanalysis at Lucerne, Switzerland, and went on to develop the technique between 1935 and 1940. Vegetotherapy involves the patient physically simulating the effects of certain emotions in the hope of triggering them. Reich argued that the ability to feel sexual love depended on a physical ability to have sexual intercourse with what he called "orgastic potency." He tried to measure the male orgasm, noting that four distinct phases occurred physiologically: first, the psycho-sexual buildup or tension; second, the tumescence of the penis, with an accompanying electrical charge that Reich measured; third, an electrical discharge at the moment of orgasm; and fourth, the relaxation of the penis. He believed the force that he measured was a distinct type of energy present in all life forms.^[24]

He was a prolific writer for psychoanalytic journals in Europe. Originally, psychoanalysis was focused on the treatment of neurotic symptoms. Reich's Character Analysis was a major step in the development of what today is called ego psychology. In Reich's view, a person's entire character, not only individual symptoms, could be looked at and treated as a neurotic phenomenon. The book also introduced his theory of body armoring. Reich argued that unreleased psycho-sexual energy could produce actual physical blocks within muscles and organs, and that these blocks act as a body armor preventing the release of the energy. An orgasm was one way to break through the armor. These ideas developed into a general theory of the importance of a healthy sex life to overall well-being, a theory compatible with Freud's views. His idea was that the orgasm was not simply a device to aid procreation, but was the body's emotional energy regulator. The better the orgasm, the more energy was released, meaning that less was available to create neurotic states. Reich called the ability to release sufficient energy during orgasm "orgastic potency," something that very few individuals could achieve, he argued, because of society's sexual oppression. A man or woman without orgastic potency was in a constant state of tension, developing a body armor to keep it in. The outer rigidity and inner anxiety is the state of neurosis, leading to hate, sadism, greed, fascism and antisemitism.^[23]

He agreed with Freud that sexual development was the origin of mental illness. They both believed that most psychological states were dictated by unconscious processes, that infant sexuality develops early but is repressed, and that this repression has important consequences for mental health. At that time a Marxist (see Freudo-Marxism), Reich argued that the source of sexual repression was bourgeois morality and the socio-economic structures that produced it. As sexual repression was the cause of the neuroses, the best cure was an active, guilt-free sex life. He argued that such a liberation could come about only through a morality not imposed by a repressive economic structure.^[25] In 1928, he joined the Austrian Communist Party and founded the Socialist Association for Sexual Counseling and Research, which organized counseling centers for workers.

Bion experiments[link]

From 1934-39, Reich conducted experiments looking at vegetative energy in the body, especially the Galvanic skin response, which became research into the origins of life. These he called the "Bion Experiments." 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. He named the vesicles "bions" and believed they were a rudimentary form of life, halfway between life and non-life. When he poured the cooled mixture onto growth media, bacteria were born, he said, dismissing the idea that the bacteria were already present in the air or on other materials.^[26]

T-bacilli[link]

In 1936, Reich wrote that "[s]ince everything is antithetically arranged, there must be two different types of single-celled organisms: (a) life-destroying organisms or organisms that form through organic decay, (b) life-promoting organisms that form from inorganic material that comes to life."^[27] This idea of spontaneous generation led him to believe he had found the cause of cancer. He called the life-destroying organisms "T-bacilli," with the T standing for Tod, German for death. He described in The Cancer Biopathy how he had found them in a culture of rotting cancerous tissue obtained from a local hospital. He wrote that T-bacilli were formed from the disintegration of protein; they were 0.2 to 0.5 micrometer in length, shaped like lancets, and when injected into mice, they caused inflammation and cancer. He concluded that, when orgone energy diminishes in cells through aging or injury, the cells undergo "bionous degeneration," or death. At some point, the deadly T-bacilli start to form in the cells. Death from cancer, he believed, was caused by an overwhelming growth of the T-bacilli.

Nudity and touch during sessions[link]

Part of a series of articles on
Psychoanalysis
Most of psychoanalysis forms around the use of a sofa for the patient where the psychologist is behind the patient.
Concepts Psychosexual development Psychosocial development Unconscious · Preconscious Consciousness Psychic apparatus Id, ego and super-ego Libido · Drive Transference Countertransference Ego defenses · Resistance Projection · Denial
Important figures Alfred Adler · Michael Balint Wilfred Bion · Josef Breuer Nancy Chodorow · Erik Erikson Ronald Fairbairn · Sándor Ferenczi Anna Freud · Sigmund Freud Erich Fromm · Harry Guntrip Karen Horney · Ernest Jones Carl Jung · Melanie Klein Heinz Kohut · Jacques Lacan Ronald Laing · Margaret Mahler Otto Rank · Wilhelm Reich Harry Stack Sullivan Susan Sutherland Isaacs Donald Winnicott
Important works The Interpretation of Dreams The Psychopathology of Everyday Life Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality Beyond the Pleasure Principle
Schools of thought Self psychology · Lacanian Jungian · Object relations Interpersonal · Relational Ego psychology
Psychology portal
v t e

From 1930 onwards, Reich became more interested in his patients' physical responses during therapy sessions, and toward the late 1930s, he began to treat patients outside the limits of psychoanalysis's restrictions, though well within the scope of general medicine. He began to sit next to his patients, rather than behind them, in order to make stronger 'contact.' He started touching them, to both increase awareness of tension and contraction and to relieve it directly. He would ask his male patients to undress down to their shorts, and sometimes to undress entirely, and his female patients down to their underclothes. He began talking to them, answering their questions, rather than the stock, "Why do you ask?" analyst's response.^[28]

From a psychoanalytic point of view, this undermined the position of neutrality. The analyst is meant to be a blank screen onto which the patient projects his old desires, loves, hates, and neurosis—a process known as transference. Reich wrote that the psychoanalytic taboos reinforced the neurotic taboos of the patient. He slowly broke away from them, writing that he wanted his patients to see him as human.^[29] He would press hard on their "body armor," his thumb or the palm of his hand pressing on their jaws, necks, chests, backs, or thighs, aiming to dissolve their muscular, and thereby characterological, rigidity.^[30] He wanted to see their movements soften, their breathing ease. This dissolution of the "body armor" also brought back the repressed memory of the childhood situation that had caused the repression, he wrote. If the session worked as intended, he wrote that he could see waves of pleasure move through their bodies, a series of spontaneous, involuntary movements. Reich called these the "orgasm reflex." The two goals of Reichian therapy became the attainment of this orgasm reflex during therapy, and orgastic potency during intercourse. Reich called the flow of energy that he said he observed in his patients' bodies, "bio-electricity," and considered calling his therapy "orgasmotherapy," but thought better of it for political reasons.^[31]

Opposition to his ideas[link]

Scientists in Oslo reacted strongly to his work on bions, deriding it as nonsense. Tidens Tegn, a leading liberal newspaper, launched a campaign against him in 1937, supported by scientists and other newspapers.^[23] Between September 1937 and the fall of 1938, over 100 articles denouncing him appeared in the main Oslo newspapers.^[32]

In 1937, Leiv Kreyberg, the country's top cancer specialist, was allowed to examine one of Reich's bion preparations under the microscope. Kreyberg wrote that the broth Reich had used as his culture medium was indeed sterile, but that the bacteria were ordinary staphylococci. He concluded that Reich's control measures to prevent infection from airborne bacteria were not as foolproof as Reich believed. Kreyberg accused Reich of being ignorant of basic bacteriological and anatomical facts, while Reich accused Kreyberg of having failed to recognize living cancer cells under magnification. Thus, Sharaf writes, an opportunity for scientific exchange degenerated into name-calling.^[26]

Reich sent a sample of the bacteria to another Norwegian biologist, Professor Thjötta of the Oslo Bacteriological Institute, who also said they resulted from air infection. Kreyberg and Thjötta had their views published in Aftenposten on April 19 and 21, 1938, Kreyberg referring to him as "Mr. Reich," alleging that Reich knew less about bacteria and anatomy than a first-year medical student. When Reich requested a detailed control study, Kreyberg responded that his work did not merit it.^[26]

Reich's The Bion Experiments on the Origin of Life was published in 1938, leading to attacks by the scientific and lay press that he was a "Jew pornographer," who was daring to meddle with the origins of life. Alan Cantwell writes that Reich's detractors focused on one paragraph in which Reich wrote that his research had "proved particularly fruitful for an understanding of cancer," which led to the claim that he was promoting a quack cancer cure.^[24]

By February 1938, his visa had expired. Several Norwegian scientists argued against an extension, Kreyberg saying, "If it is a question of handing Dr. Reich over to the Gestapo, then I will fight that, but if one could get rid of him in a decent manner, that would be the best." The writer Sigurd Hoel wondered when it had become a crime to perform amateurish biological experiments. "When did it become a reason for deportation that one looked in a microscope when one was not a trained biologist?" Reich received influential support from overseas, first from Bronisław Malinowski, who wrote to the Norwegian press in March 1938 that Reich's sociological work was a "distinct and valuable contribution to science," and from A.S. Neill, founder of Summerhill in England, a progressive school known throughout the world. Neill also wrote to the Norwegian press, arguing that "the campaign against Reich seems largely ignorant and uncivilized, more like fascism than democracy ..." Norway was proud of its intellectual tolerance, so the "Reich affair" put the government on the spot. A compromise was therefore found. Reich was given his visa, but a royal decree was issued stipulating that anyone wanting to practice psychoanalysis needed a licence, and it was widely understood that Reich would not be given one. Throughout the affair, Reich issued just one public statement, when he asked for a commission to replicate his bion experiments. Sharaf writes that the scientific opposition to his work affected his personality and relationships. He was angered and humiliated by the notoriety he had inadvertently achieved. His self-confidence undermined, he felt like a marked man, hunted and tormented, no longer comfortable in public, and seething with bitterness against the researchers who had denounced him.^[32]

Personal life[link]

Sharaf writes that, at a personal level, 1934–1937 was the happiest period of Reich's life. His relationship with Elsa Lindenberg was good and he considered marrying her. When she became pregnant in 1935, they were initially overjoyed, buying clothes and furniture for the child, but doubts developed for Reich, who felt the future was too unsettled. Sharaf writes that, to Elsa's great distress, Reich insisted on an abortion, at that time illegal. They went to Berlin, where Edith Jacobson, a psychoanalyst, helped to arrange it.^[33]

In 1937, Reich began an affair with a female patient, an actress who was the ex-wife of a colleague. She had entered therapy with the explicit intention of seducing him, which he told her was impossible, but she succeeded. The analysis stopped because of the relationship, then the relationship ended and the analysis began again. She eventually threatened to go to the press, but was persuaded that it would harm her at least as much as him. When a colleague asked him why he had behaved this way, he replied, "A man must do foolish things sometimes."^[34] He also had an affair with Gerd Bergersen, a 25-year-old Norwegian textile designer.^[35]

During the same period, as the newspaper campaign against him gained pace, he suddenly developed intense jealousy toward Elsa, demanding that she share his work with him, and not have a separate life of any kind. He even physically assaulted a composer she was working with on some choreography. Elsa briefly considered calling the police but decided Reich couldn't afford another scandal. His behavior took its toll on their relationship, and when Reich asked her to accompany him to the U.S., she said no, writing later that it was the hardest "no" she had ever had to say.^[36]

1939: Move to the U.S.[link]

Teaching; meeting his second wife[link]

In March 1938, Hitler annexed Austria. Reich's ex-wife and daughters had already left Austria for the U.S. Later that year, an American psychiatrist at Columbia Medical School, Theodore P. Wolfe, traveled to Norway to study under Reich. Wolfe offered to help Reich settle in the U.S., and managed to arrange an official invitation from The New School in New York. Wolfe and Walter Briehl, an old student of Reich's, put up several thousand dollars to guarantee Reich's salary. Wolfe also pulled strings with Adolph Berle, an official in the U.S. State Department. He finally received his visa in August 1939, and sailed out of Norway on August 19 on the Stavenger Fjord, the last boat to leave for the States before the war began on September 3.^[37]

He began teaching at The New School, where he remained for two years, living first at 75-02 Kessel Street, Forest Hills, Queens, then settling into a two-story brick house at 9906 69th Avenue in the same area. It had a basement that he used for animal experiments, a large room on the first floor that served as an office, dining room, living room, and a place for his seminar students every other week. The dining room became his laboratory. Two bedrooms on the top floor were shared by his maid and his secretary, Gertrud Gaasland, and three rooms on the second floor became Reich's bedroom and therapy rooms.^[38]

It was Gertrud Gaasland who introduced him to Ilse Ollendorf, 29 years old at the time. Reich was still in love with Elsa, but Ilse threw herself into organizing Reich's life for him, taking over the secretarial and bookkeeping tasks, learning laboratory techniques, and showing herself willing to mold herself completely to his lifestyle, something Elsa had been unwilling to do. They began living together on Christmas Day 1939, and she began to work for him on January 2, 1940. They had a son, Peter, in 1944, and were married in 1946.^[39][40]

Reich's personality changed after the onslaught of the press in Oslo. He became socially isolated, and decided to keep his distance even from old friends and his ex-wife. He told a friend he was going to follow the "remarkable law": be distant, even a little haughty, withhold love, and then people will respect you. His students in the U.S. came to know him as a man that no colleague, no matter how close, called by his first name. He wrote to Elsa in January 1940 breaking off their relationship once and for all, telling her that he was in despair, and that he believed he would end up dying like a dog.^[41]

Allegations of mental illness[link]

Rumors had been rife since the late 1920s that he was mentally ill in some way, and had even been hospitalized, though Sharaf writes that he had not. He was seen as paranoid, remote, belligerent, and fanatical. Sharaf writes that psychoanalysts have had a tendency to dismiss as ill anyone from within the fold who has digressed, and that never was this done so relentlessly or destructively as with Reich. His work was split into the pre-psychotic "good" Reich, and the post-psychotic "bad," the date of the illness's onset depending on which parts of his work a speaker disliked. Psychoanalysts wanted to see him as sane in the 1920s because of his solid work on character; political radicals regarded him as sane during the 1930s because of his Marxist-oriented psychology research.^[42]

Orgonomy[link]

Freud had argued that there was a sexual energy called libido, which he initially described as "something which is capable of increase, decrease, displacement and discharge, and which extends itself over the memory traces of an idea like an electric charge over the surface of the body," but by 1925 he had rejected the idea that it was a physical energy.^[19] Reich took the idea further, arguing that he had discovered a primordial cosmic energy. He called it "orgone," and the study of it "orgonomy."

Orgone is blue in color, he wrote, omnipresent, can be seen with the naked eye, and is responsible for such things as weather, the color of the sky, gravity, the formation of galaxies, and the biological expressions of emotion and sexuality. He argued that St. Elmo's Fire is a manifestation of it, as is the blue color of sexually excited frogs. Red corpuscles, plant chlorophyll, gonadal cells, protozoa, and cancer cells are all charged with orgone, he said.^[23]

He argued that humankind had previously split its knowledge of orgone in two: "ether" for its mechanistic, physical aspects, and "God" for the spiritual, the subjective.^[43] He wrote that, "God-Father is the basic cosmic energy from which all being stems, and which streams through (the) body as through anything else in existence."^[44]

Orgone accumulators[link]

In 1940, he built boxes called "orgone accumulators" to concentrate atmospheric orgone. Some of the boxes were for lab animals, and some were large enough for a human being to sit inside. Composed of alternating layers of ferrous metals and organic insulators with a high dielectric constant, the accumulators had the appearance of a large, hollow capacitor. Based on experiments with them, he argued that orgone energy was a negatively-entropic force in nature responsible for concentrating and organizing matter. The construction of the boxes caught the attention of the press, leading to wild rumors that they were "sex boxes" that caused uncontrollable erections.^[24]

According to Reich's theory, illness was primarily caused by depletion or blockages of the orgone energy within the body. He conducted clinical tests of the orgone accumulator on people suffering from a variety of illnesses. The patient would sit within the accumulator and absorb the "concentrated orgone energy." He built smaller, more portable accumulator-blankets of the same layered construction for application to parts of the body. The effects observed were said to boost the immune system, even to the point of destroying certain types of tumors, though Reich was hesitant to claim this constituted a cure. The orgone accumulator was also tested on mice with cancer, and on plant-growth, the results convincing Reich that the benefits of orgone therapy could not be attributed to a placebo effect.^{[citation needed]} He had, he believed, developed a grand unified theory of physical and mental health, a claim regarded by the psychoanalytic community as quackery.^[45]

Experiment XX[link]

In December 1944, Reich began the 20th (Roman numeral XX) in his series of bion experiments.^[46] He filtered all the earth out of an earth bion preparation so that all that remained was clear yellow water, then buried the test tube outdoors in the frozen ground. When he retrieved it three weeks later and examined it under a microscope, he saw pulsating plasmatic flakes. Since the yellow water had not contained visible particulates before it had been frozen, Reich concluded that free orgone energy had condensed out to form the lifelike flakes. This experiment formed the basis for Reich's later theory that all matter in the universe had derived from orgone energy via cosmic superimposition.^[47]

Cloudbusters[link]

Reich posited a conjugate, life-annulling energy in opposition to orgone, which he dubbed Deadly Orgone Radiation or DOR. He wrote that accumulations of DOR played a role in desertification, and he designed a "cloudbuster" with which he said he could manipulate streams of orgone energy in the atmosphere to induce rain by forcing clouds to form and disperse. It was a set of hollow metal pipes and cables inserted into water, which Reich argued created a stronger orgone energy field than was in the atmosphere, the water drawing the atmospheric orgone through the pipes.^[19]

Reich conducted dozens of experiments with the cloudbuster^{[citation needed]}, calling the research "Cosmic Orgone Engineering." In 1953, a drought threatened Maine's blueberry crop, and several farmers offered to pay Reich if he could make it rain. The weather bureau had reportedly forecast no rain for several days when Reich began the experiment at 10 a.m. on July 6, 1953. The Bangor Daily News reported on July 24:

Dr. Reich and three assistants set up their "rain-making" device off the shore of Grand Lake, near the Bangor hydro-electric dam ... The device, a set of hollow tubes, suspended over a small cylinder, connected by a cable, conducted a "drawing" operation for about an hour and ten minutes ...

According to a reliable source in Ellsworth the following climactic changes took place in that city on the night of July 6 and the early morning of July 7: "Rain began to fall shortly after ten o'clock Monday evening, first as a drizzle and then by midnight as a gentle, steady rain. Rain continued throughout the night, and a rainfall of 0.24 inches was recorded in Ellsworth the following morning."

A puzzled witness to the "rain-making" process said: "The queerest looking clouds you ever saw began to form soon after they got the thing rolling." And later the same witness said the scientists were able to change the course of the wind by manipulation of the device.^[48]

The blueberry crop survived, the farmers declared themselves satisfied, and Reich received his fee.^[19]

Orgone experiment with Einstein[link]

Reich discussed orgone accumulators with Albert Einstein in 1941.

On December 30, 1940, Reich wrote to Albert Einstein saying he had a scientific discovery he wanted to discuss, and on January 13, 1941 went to visit Einstein in Princeton. They talked for five hours, and Einstein agreed to test an orgone accumulator, which Reich had constructed out of a Faraday cage made of galvanized steel and insulated by wood and paper on the outside.^[49] Einstein agreed that if, as Reich suggested, an object's temperature could be raised without an apparent heating source, it would be a "bombshell" in physics.^[50]

Reich supplied Einstein with a small accumulator during their second meeting, and Einstein performed the experiment in his basement, which involved taking the temperature atop, inside, and near the device. He also stripped the device down to its Faraday cage to compare temperatures. In his attempt to replicate Reich's findings, Einstein observed a rise in temperature,^[51] which Reich argued was caused by the orgone energy that had accumulated inside the Faraday cage.^[52] However, one of Einstein's assistants pointed out that the temperature was lower on the floor than on the ceiling.^[53] Following that remark, Einstein modified the experiment and, as a result, concluded that the effect was simply due to the temperature gradient inside the room.^[54] He wrote back to Reich, describing his experiments and expressing the hope that Reich would develop a more skeptical approach.^[55]

Reich responded with a 25-page letter to Einstein, expressing concern that "convection from the ceiling" would join "air germs" and "Brownian movement" to explain away new findings.^[52] The correspondence between Reich and Einstein was published by Reich's press as The Einstein Affair in 1953, possibly without Einstein's permission.^[56]

Arrested by the FBI[link]

On December 12, 1941, five days after Pearl Harbor, Reich was arrested at his home at 2 a.m. by the FBI, and taken to Ellis Island, where he was held for over three weeks, because he was an immigrant with a communist background. He was furious, and blamed his first wife, with whom he had a very poor relationship, for having reported him in some way, though there is no evidence that she was involved. His psoriasis erupted, and his doctor persuaded the authorities to transfer him to the hospital ward, where Ilse was allowed to visit him twice a week. Wolfe and a lawyer did their best to find out what the charge was, Wolfe traveling several times to Washington to protest, but it was not until December 26 that a hearing was held, and still it remained unclear why he had been picked up. He was questioned about several books the FBI had found in his home, including Hitler's Mein Kampf, Trotsky's My Life, and a Russian alphabet book for children. Eventually Reich threatened to go on hunger strike, and he was released on January 5, 1942. The FBI released 789 pages of its files on Reich in 2000, which said:

This German immigrant described himself as the Associate Professor of Medical Psychology, Director of the Orgone Institute, President and research physician of the Wilhelm Reich Foundation and discoverer of biological or life energy. A 1940 security investigation was begun to determine the extent of Reich's communist commitments. A board of Alien Enemy Hearing judged that Dr. Reich was not a threat to the security of the U.S.^[57]

Purchase of Orgonon[link]

Using money from his income as a therapist, and contributions from students, Reich purchased an old farm near Dodge Pond, Maine in November 1942. He called the 160 acres (0.65 km²) of fields, forests, and hills "Orgonon". He built a laboratory there in 1945, and in 1948 began construction of the Orgone Energy Observatory, which included another laboratory, a library, and observation decks to study atmospheric orgone.^[19]

Controversy[link]

1947: The Brady article and the FDA[link]

Until 1947, Reich enjoyed a largely uncritical press in the U.S. His psychotherapy practice was flourishing, his psychoanalytic theories were taught in universities and discussed in the Journal of the American Medical Association and the American Journal of Psychiatry. He was listed in American Men of Science, and The Nation gave his writing positive reviews. Only one science journal, Psychosomatic Medicine, had criticized him, calling his ideas about orgone a "surrealist creation."^[23]

His reputation took a sudden downturn in May 1947. On May 26, an article by freelance writer Mildred Edie Brady appeared in The New Republic, entitled "The Strange Case of Wilhelm Reich", with the subhead, "The man who blames both neuroses and cancer on unsatisfactory sexual activities has been repudiated by only one scientific journal."^[23] Brady wrote: "Orgone, named after the sexual orgasm, is, according to Reich, a cosmic energy. It is, in fact, the cosmic energy. Reich has not only discovered it; he has seen it, demonstrated it and named a town—Orgonon, Maine—after it. Here he builds accumulators of it, which are rented out to patients, who presumably derive 'orgastic potency' from it."^[23] Sharaf writes that the implication was clear: the accumulators gave orgastic potency, the lack of which causes cancer. Therefore, the claim for the accumulators was that they cured cancer. Brady argued that the "growing Reich cult" had to be dealt with.^[58]

The regulation and advertising of medical devices is shared and coordinated by the Federal Trade Commission and the Food and Drug Administration. On July 23, Dr. J.J. Durrett, director of the Medical Advisory Division of the Federal Trade Commission, wrote to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) asking them to look into Reich's claims about the health benefits of orgone.^[59] The FDA assigned an investigator to the case, who learned that Reich had built 250 accumulators; the FDA concluded that they were dealing with a "fraud of the first magnitude."^[60] Sharaf writes that the FDA suspected a sexual racket of some kind; questions were asked about the women associated with orgonomy and "what was done with them."^[61]

In November, Reich wrote in Conspiracy. An Emotional Chain Reaction: "I would like to plead for my right to investigate natural phenomena without having guns pointed at me. I also ask for the right to be wrong without being hanged for it ... I am angry because smearing can do anything and truth can do so little to prevail, as it seems at the moment."^[63] Sharaf writes that Reich came to believe that Brady was a Stalinist acting under orders from the Communist Party, a "communist sniper," as Reich called her.^[64]

1954 injunction[link]

Over the years, the FDA interviewed physicians, Reich's students, and his patients, asking about Reich's use of orgone accumulators. On July 29, 1952, an unannounced inspection was conducted at Orgonon. One inspector was a regular FDA inspector, another an FDA medical expert, and a third an FDA device expert. Reich was known to abhor unannounced visitors; he had once chased some people away with a gun just for looking at an adjacent property. He shouted at the FDA men, told them they had to read his writings before he would interact with them, and ordered them to leave.^[65]

The visit began a period of investigation by the FDA, triggering belligerent responses from Reich, who called them "HIGS," hoodlums in government, and the tools of red fascists. He developed a delusion that he had powerful friends in government, including President Eisenhower, who he believed would protect him, and that the U.S. Air Force was flying over Orgonon to make sure that he was all right.^[65]

On February 10, 1954, the U.S. Attorney for District of Maine filed a complaint seeking a permanent injunction under Sections 301 and 302 of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, to prevent interstate shipment of orgone accumulators and to ban some of Reich's writing promoting and advertising the devices.^[66] Reich refused to appear in court, arguing that no court was in a position to evaluate his work. In a long letter to Judge Clifford, he wrote:

My factual position in the case as well as in the world of science of today does not permit me to enter the case against the Food and Drug Administration, since such action would, in my mind, imply admission of the authority of this special branch of the government to pass judgment on primordial, pre-atomic cosmic orgone energy. I, therefore, rest the case in full confidence in your hands.^[67]

The United States was granted the injunction by default on March 19, 1954.^[68] The judge's ruling was more extensive than the original complaint. He ordered that all accumulators and their parts were to be destroyed. All written material of promotional information and instructions for use (labeling) on the accumulators was also to be destroyed. This included ten of Reich's books that mentioned orgone energy, until such time as references to orgone were deleted; the list included Character Analysis and The Mass Psychology of Fascism.^[69]

May 1956: Trial[link]

In May 1956, Reich traveled to Arizona to experiment with the cloudbuster. In his absence, and without his knowledge, one of his students, Dr. Michael Silvert,^[70] moved some accumulators and books from Rangeley, Maine to New York, in violation of the injunction.^[19] Reich and Silvert were both charged with contempt of court. Once again, he refused to arrange a legal defense. Representing himself, he admitted to the violation and, in his defense, arranged for the judge to be sent copies of his books. He was found guilty of contempt of court on May 7, 1956, and sentenced to two years' imprisonment. Silvert was sentenced to a year and a day. The Wilhelm Reich Foundation, which Reich's students and friends had set up in 1949, was fined $10,000.^[19]

Dr. Morton Herskowitz, a fellow psychiatrist and friend of Reich's, wrote of the trial: "Because he viewed himself as a historical figure, he was making a historical point, and to make that point he had conducted the trial that way. If I had been in his shoes, I would have wanted to escape jail, I would have wanted to be free, etc. I would have conducted the trial on a strictly legal basis because the lawyers had said, 'We can win this case for you. Their case is so weak, so when you let us do our thing we can get you off.' But he wouldn't do it."^[71] Reich appealed in October 1956, but the Court of Appeals upheld the lower court's decision on December 11. He appealed to the Supreme Court, which decided on February 25, 1957 not to review the lower courts' decisions. Reich and Silvert then asked for a suspension or reduction of their sentences; a hearing was set for March 11, to be followed by jail if the request did not succeed. The judge later wrote to the U.S. Board of Parole that he had been inclined to suspend or reduce the sentence, but the government established that Reich would not discontinue promoting the orgone accumulator. Reich then appealed to the President, to no avail.^[72]

1956: Book burning[link]

On June 5, 1956, as Reich was arranging his first appeal, two FDA officials traveled to Orgonon to supervise the destruction of Reich's accumulators. Most of them had been sold at that point, and another 50 were with Silvert in New York. Only three were at Orgonon. The FDA agents were not allowed to destroy them, only to supervise the destruction, so Reich's friends, and his son Peter, chopped them up with axes as the agents watched. On June 26, the agents returned to supervise the destruction of the promotional material, including some of his books. On July 9, the American Civil Liberties Union issued a press release criticizing the book burning, although coverage of the release was poor, and Reich ended up asking them not to help him because he was annoyed that they failed to criticize the destruction of the accumulators. In England, a letter of protest signed by A.S. Neill and Herbert Read also failed to find a publisher. On July 23, the remaining accumulators in New York were destroyed by S.A. Collins and Sons, who had built them.^[73]

On August 23, six tons of his books, journals, and papers were burned in the 25th Street public incinerator in New York's lower east side, the Gansevoort incinerator.^[74] Among the material destroyed were titles that were supposed only to be banned, including 12,189 copies of the Orgone Energy Bulletin, 6,261 copies of the International Journal of Sex Economy and Orgone Research, 2,900 copies of Emotional Plague Versus Orgone Biophysics, 2,976 copies of Annals of the Orgone Institute, and hardcover copies of several of his books, including The Sexual Revolution, Character Analysis, and The Mass Psychology of Fascism.^[19] This action has been cited as one of the worst examples of censorship in U.S. history.^[2]

As with the accumulators, the FDA was supposed only to observe the destruction, while his colleagues carried it out. One of them, Victor Sobey, wrote: "All the expenses and labor had to be provided by the [Orgone Institute] Press. A huge truck with three to help was hired. I felt like people who, when they are to be executed, are made to dig their own graves first and are then shot and thrown in. We carried box after box of the literature."^[75]

1957: Imprisonment and death[link]

On February 10, 1957, Reich signed his last will, naming his daughter, Eva, as his executrix.^[76] On March 12, he was sent to Danbury Federal Prison, where Richard C. Hubbard, a psychiatrist who admired Reich, examined him, recording paranoia manifested by delusions of grandiosity, persecution, and ideas of reference:

The patient feels that he has made outstanding discoveries. Gradually over a period of many years he has explained the failure of his ideas in becoming universally accepted by the elaboration of psychotic thinking. "The Rockerfellows (sic) are against me." (Delusion of grandiosity.) "The airplanes flying over prison are sent by the Air Force to encourage me." (Ideas of reference and grandiosity.)^[77]

On March 22, he was transferred to the federal penitentiary in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, where there were better psychiatric facilities, and was examined again. This time, it was decided that he was mentally competent, and that his personality appeared intact, though he might become psychotic under stress.^[77] Two days later, on his 60th birthday, he wrote to his son, Peter, then 13:

I am in Lewisburg. I am calm, certain in my thoughts, and doing mathematics most of the time. I am kind of "above things," fully aware of what is up. Do not worry too much about me, though anything might happen. I know, Pete, that you are strong and decent. At first I thought that you should not visit me here. I do not know. With the world in turmoil I now feel that a boy your age should experience what is coming his way—fully digest it without getting a "belly ache," so to speak, nor getting off the right track of truth, fact, honesty, fair play, and being above board—never a sneak. ...^[78]

Peter did visit him at Lewisburg several times. Reich told him that he cried a lot, and wanted Peter to let himself cry too, believing that tears are the "great softener." His last letter to his son was on October 22, when he said he was in good spirits, and looking forward to being released on November 10, when he would have served one third of his sentence; a parole hearing had been scheduled for just a few days before. He wrote that he and Peter had a date for a meal at the Howard Johnson restaurant near Peter's school.^[7]

Reich failed to appear for morning roll call on November 3, and was found dead in his bed at 7 a.m., fully clothed but for his shoes. The prison physician said he had died during the night of "myocardial insufficiency with sudden heart failure."^[7] He was buried in a plot of land he had chosen in the woods at Orgonon, in a coffin he had bought a year earlier from a Maine craftsman. He had left instructions that there was to be no religious ceremony, but that a record should be played of Schubert's "Ave Maria" sung by Marian Anderson, and that his granite headstone should read simply: "Wilhelm Reich, Born March 24, 1897, Died ..." Dr. Elsworth F. Baker, a physician friend, said at his funeral, "Once in a thousand years, nay once in two thousand years, such a man comes upon this earth to change the destiny of the human race. As with all great men, distortion, falsehood, and persecution followed him. He met them all, until organized conspiracy sent him to prison and then killed him."^[79] A replica of a cloudbuster stands next to his grave, and the building that housed his laboratory is now the Wilhelm Reich Museum.

None of the psychiatric and established scientific journals carried an obituary. Time magazine wrote on November 18, 1957:

Died. Wilhelm Reich, 60, once-famed psychoanalyst, associate and follower of Sigmund Freud, founder of the Wilhelm Reich Foundation, lately better known for unorthodox sex and energy theories; of a heart attack; in Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary, Pa; where he was serving a two-year term for distributing his invention, the "orgone energy accumulator" (in violation of the Food and Drug Act), a telephone-booth-size device that supposedly gathered energy from the atmosphere, and could cure, while the patient sat inside, common colds, cancer, and impotence.^[80]

Legacy[link]

Status of his work[link]

The study of Reich's work has been hampered by the instruction he left that his unpublished papers were to be stored for 50 years after his death, "to secure their safety from destruction and falsification," which meant researchers were not able to access them until 2007.^[81]

Nearly all his publications have been reprinted, apart from his research journals, which are available as photocopies from the Wilhelm Reich Museum. The first editions are not available: Reich continuously amended his books throughout his life, and the owners of Reich's copyright only allow the latest revised versions to be reprinted. In the late 1960s, Farrar, Straus & Giroux republished all his major works.^[82]

New research journals devoted to his work began to appear in the 1960s. Physicians and natural scientists with an interest in Reich organized small study groups and institutes, and new research efforts were undertaken, though the mainstream scientific community has shown minimal interest in his ideas. The Orgone Biophysical Research Lab, founded in 1978 by Dr. James DeMeo, continues to investigate Reich's orgone research, and hosts international conferences and an occasional research journal.^[83] DeMeo undertook studies on Reich's cloudbuster device at the University of Kansas in 1979, and wrote that he had confirmed many of the effects claimed by Reich.^[84] A double-blind, controlled study of the effects of the orgone accumulator was carried out by Stefan Müschenich and Rainer Gebauer at the University of Marburg in 1987, and appeared to validate some of Reich's claims.^[85] The study was later reproduced by Günter Hebenstreit at the University of Vienna.^[86]

DeMeo conducted a number of other studies into Reich's work at the University of Kansas, including a global cross-cultural study, "Saharasia," to test the validity of Reich's sex-economic theory in the origins of human violence.^[87] He undertook controlled studies on Reich's controversial thermal anomaly experiment,^[88] and in 2011 wrote that orgone-charged water has a higher UV absorption in the 240-280 nm range, as compared to control samples.^[89] He has also published studies showing statistically significant increases in plant growth when charged inside orgone accumulators, as compared to controls.^[90] He argues that Reich's orgone energy is functionally similar to the older concept of the cosmological ether of space, and bears a similarity to the modern concepts of dark matter and the interstellar medium.^[91]

Reich's influence is felt in modern psychotherapy. In 1978, the French philosopher, Michel Foucault, wrote that the impact of Reich's critique of sexual repression was substantial.^[92] William Steig, Robert Anton Wilson, Norman Mailer, Jerome D. Salinger and Orson Bean have all undergone Reich's orgone therapy, and there is some use of orgone accumulators by psychotherapists in Europe, particularly in Germany.^[93] Reich was a pioneer of body psychotherapy and several emotions-based psychotherapies, influencing Fritz Perls's Gestalt therapy and Arthur Janov's primal therapy. His pupil Alexander Lowen, the founder of bioenergetic analysis, and Charles Kelley, the founder of Radix therapy, ensure that his research receives widespread attention. Many practising psychoanalysts give credence to his theory of character, as outlined in Character Analysis (1933, enlarged 1949). The American College of Orgonomy, founded by Dr. Elsworth Baker, and the Institute for Orgonomic Science, led by Dr. Morton Herskowitz, still use Reich's original therapeutic methods.

In popular culture[link]

Reich continues to influence popular culture, with references to orgone and cloudbusting found in songs by Clutch, Hawkwind, Pop Will Eat Itself, Turbonegro, Bob Dylan, and Patti Smith ("Birdland" on Horses).

• He is a character in the opera Marilyn (1979) by Italian composer Lorenzo Ferrero.
• Kate Bush's song "Cloudbusting" describes Reich's arrest and incarceration through the eyes of Reich's son, Peter, who wrote his father's story in A Book of Dreams, published in 1973. The video for the song was directed by Julian Doyle, conceived by Terry Gilliam and Bush, and has Donald Sutherland as Reich, and Bush as Peter.^[94]
• An article about the female orgasm by Reich provided the inspiration for "Little Man Within" by Welsh singer/songwriter Karl Wallinger of World Party.
• Author Robert Anton Wilson wrote a play, Wilhelm Reich in Hell, partly based on Reich's life; it was also published as a book in 1987. Wilson frequently referred to Reich and Reich's works in both his fiction and non-fiction. Notably, one character in Wilson's Schrödinger's Cat Trilogy is a witness to the 1957 book-burning.

Reich's work is described in Italian writer Valerio Evangelisti's novel Il mistero dell'inquisitore Eymerich ("The mystery of Inquisitor Eymerich"), in which Reich is described as a visionary whose ideas were ahead of his time.

• A film about his teachings called W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism was made in 1971 by Yugoslavian director Dušan Makavejev, and was listed by film critic Roger Ebert in his "Great Movie" series in 2007.
• A short drama film about Reich by Jon East, called "It can be done," was nominated for a Silver Lion at the 1999 Venice Film Festival.
• The superhero "Orgone Lad", a member of the League of Infinity is Wilhelm Reich, Supreme by Alan Moore(2000).
• "He did ten years in Attica, reading Nietzsche and Wilhelm Reich"—from the song "Joey" on the album Desire by Bob Dylan.
• In Jack Kerouac's autobiographical novel On the Road, written in 1951, Old Bull Lee (modelled on William Burroughs) extols the benefits of the orgone accumulator he owns and considers how it may be improved by building it from "more organic" wood. Burroughs makes several references to Orgone energy in his own novels and essays.
• The final episode of series 5 of British TV series Peep Show featured two main characters becoming enamoured of a religious cult that expounded Reich's orgone theory.
• Reich is the subject, along with real estate developer Del Webb, of the 2008 documentary Wasteland Utopias by filmmaker David Sherman.
• The Australian product designer Marc Newson has produced several 'Orgone' items of furniture, most famously his 'Orgone Chair.'
• The post punk band Devo credited Mayan technology and Reich as the sources of inspiration for their 'energy dome' hats in an interview with Stephen Colbert on June 16, 2010.

Works[link]

See also[link]

• Ernst Simmel
• Phallic narcissism

Notes[link]

Further reading[link]

• Wilhelm Reich Infant Trust, accessed March 28, 2012.
• Reich's FBI file (also see here).
• Los Orgones, Argentinian site of Orgonomy
• Bibliography on Orgonomy, a full listing of scholarly works on Wilhelm Reich
• Orgone Biophysical Research Laboratory
• PORE, Public Orgonomic Research Exchange (includes biography and timeline)
• The American College of Orgonomy
• Wilhelm Reich Gesellschaft
• Wilhelm Reich Orgon Institut Deutschland
• Wilhelm Reich Akademie
• Reichian therapy.
• Wilhelm Reich at Find a Grave

Books

• Baker, Elsworth F., Man In The Trap. Macmillan, 1967.
• Bean, Orson, Me And The Orgone/ St. Martin's Press, 1971.
• Boadella, David. Wilhelm Reich, The Evolution Of His Work, Henry Regnery, 1973.
• Boadella, David (ed.). In The Wake Of Reich, Coventure, 1976.
• Corrington, Robert S. Wilhelm Reich: Psychoanalyst and Radical Naturalist. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003/
• Greenfield, Jerome (1974). Wilhelm Reich Vs. The USA, W.W. Norton, NY, 1974.
• Guillon, Claude (1978). Pour en finir avec Reich, Alternative diffusion, 1978.
• Herskowitz, Morton (1998). Emotional Armoring: An Introduction to Psychiatric Orgone Therapy, Transactions Press.
• Mann, Edward (1973). Orgone. Reich And Eros: Wilhelm Reich's Theory Of The Life Energy, Simon & Schuster.
• Mann, Edward & Hoffman (ed.) (1980). The Man Who Dreamed Of Tomorrow: A Conceptual Biography Of Wilhelm Reich, J.P. Tarcher, 1980.
• Martin, Jim (2000). Wilhelm Reich and the Cold War, Flatland Books.
• Meyerowitz, Jacob (1994). Before the Beginning of Time, rRp Publishers.
• Ollendorff, Ilse. (1969). Wilhelm Reich: A Personal Biography, St. Martin's Press.
• Raknes, Ola (1970). Wilhelm Reich And Orgonomy, St. Martin's Press.
• Reich, Peter (1973). A Book Of Dreams, Harper & Row.
• Ritter, Paul (ed.) (1958). Wilhelm Reich Memorial Volume, Ritter Press.
• Senf, Bernd (1996). Die Wiederentdeckung des Lebendigen (The Rediscovery of the Living), Zweitausendeins Verlag.
• Wilson, Robert Anton (1998). Wilhelm Reich in Hell, Aires Press.
• Wyckoff, James (1973). Wilhelm Reich: Life Force Explorer, Fawcett.

Articles

• D'Aloia, Alessandro. Marxism and Psychoanalysis: Notes on Wilhelm Reich's life and work, first published in FalceMartello, International Marxist Tendency, October 15, 2004.
• DeMeo, James. The Orgone Accumulator Handbook: Construction Plans, Experimental Use and Protection Against Toxic Energy, Natural Energy Works, 1989.
• DeMeo, James. Response to Martin Gardner's Attack on Reich and Orgone Research in the Skeptical Inquirer, 1989.
• DeMeo, James (ed). "On Wilhelm Reich And Orgonomy", Pulse of the Planet, No. 4, Natural Energy Works, 1993.
• DeMeo, James & Senf, Bernd (eds). Nach Reich: Neue Forschungen zur Orgonomie: Sexualokonomie, Die Entdeckung Der Orgonenergie (After Reich: New Research in Orgonomy: Sex-Economy, Discovery of the Orgone Energy), Zweitausendeins Verlag, Frankfurt, 1998.
• Kendrick, William (1983). “The Analyst as Outsider”, a review of Myron Sharaf's Fury on Earth: A Biography of Wilhelm Reich, The New York Times, April 3, 1983.
• Laska, Bernd A. (1981). "Sigmund Freud contra Wilhelm Reich", Wilhelm Reich. Bildmonographie. Rowohlt, Reinbek 1981, 1999.

The Einstein experiments

• The Einstein Affair, Orgone Institute Press, 1953.
• Aspden, H. "Gravity and its thermal anomaly: was the Reich-Einstein experiment evidence of energy inflow from the aether?," Infinite Energy, 2011, 41:61.
• Bearden, T. "Energy from the vacuum," Cheniere Press, 2002, pp. 333–337.
• Brian, Denis. Einstein: A Life, John Wiley & Sons, 1996. Reich is discussed on pp. 325–327, 382, 399.
• Clark, Ronald W. Einstein: The Life and Times, Avon, 1971. Reich is on pp. 689–690 of the paperback edition.
• Correa, P and Correa, A. "The thermal anomaly in ORACs and the Reich-Einstein experiment: implications for blackbody theory," Akronos Publishing, 1998.
• Correa P and Correa A. "The reproducible thermal anomaly of the Reich-Einstein experiment under limit conditions," Infinite Energy, 2001, 37:12.
• Mallove, E. "Breaking Through: A Bombshell in Science," Infinite Energy, 2001, 37:6.
• Mallove, E. "Breaking Through: Aether Science and Technology," Infinite Energy, 2001, 39:6.

External links[link]

Media related to Wilhelm Reich at Wikimedia Commons Quotations related to Wilhelm Reich at Wikiquote

Nikola Tesla
Tesla, aged 37, 1893, photo by Napoleon Sarony
Born	(1856-07-10)10 July 1856 Smiljan, Austrian Empire (Croatian Military Frontier)
Died	7 January 1943(1943-01-07) (aged 86) Manhattan, New York, USA
Residence	Manhattan, New York, USA Karlovac, Croatia Budapest, Hungary
Citizenship	Austrian Empire (10 July 1856 – 29 October 1918)[citation needed] United States (30 July 1891 – 7 January 1943)
Fields	Electrical engineering Mechanical engineering
Institutions	Edison Machine Works Tesla Electric Light & Manufacturing Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Co.
Alma mater	Graz University of Technology Charles University in Prague
Known for	Alternating current Bifilar coil Death ray Electrogravitics Induction motor Particle beam weapon Rotating magnetic field Teleforce Tesla coil Tesla electric car Tesla principle Tesla turbine Tesla's Egg of Columbus Tesla's oscillator Telegeodynamics Terrestrial stationary waves Wireless technology
Influences	Ernst Mach
Influenced	Gano Dunn
Notable awards	Order of St. Sava (1892) Elliott Cresson Medal (1894) Edison Medal (1916) John Scott Medal (1934)
Signature

Nikola Tesla (Serbian Cyrillic: Никола Тесла; 10 July 1856 – 7 January 1943) was a Serbian-American inventor, physicist, mechanical engineer, electrical engineer, and futurist. He was an important contributor to the use of commercial electricity, and is best known for developing the modern alternating current (AC) electrical supply system. His many revolutionary developments in the field of electromagnetism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were based on the theories of electromagnetic technology discovered by Michael Faraday. Tesla's patents and theoretical work also formed the basis of wireless communication and the radio.

Born in the village of Smiljan (now part of Gospić, present day Croatia), Tesla was a subject of the Austrian Empire by birth and later became an American citizen.^[1] Because of his 1894 demonstration of short range wireless communication through radio^[2] and as the eventual victor in the "War of Currents", he was widely respected as one of the greatest electrical engineers who worked in America.^[3] He pioneered modern electrical engineering and many of his discoveries were of groundbreaking importance. In the United States during this time, Tesla's fame rivaled that of any other inventor or scientist in history or popular culture.^[4] Tesla demonstrated wireless energy transfer to power electronic devices in 1891,^[5] and aspired to intercontinental wireless transmission of industrial power in his unfinished Wardenclyffe Tower project.

Tesla became reclusive towards the end of his life, living alone in a New York City hotel room and only appearing occasionally to make unusual statements to the press.^[6][7] Because of his pronouncements and the nature of his work over the years Tesla gained a reputation in popular culture as the archetypal "mad scientist".^[8][9] He died with little money to his name.^[10]

Tesla's work fell into relative obscurity after his death but since the 1990s his reputation has experienced a popular culture comeback.^[11] In 2005 he was listed amongst the top 100 nominees in the TV show "The Greatest American", an open access popularity poll conducted by AOL and The Discovery Channel.

The SI unit measuring magnetic field B (also referred to as the magnetic flux density and magnetic induction), the tesla, was named in his honor (at the CGPM, Paris, 1960).

Early years[link]

Nikola Tesla was born to Serbian parents in the village of Smiljan, Austrian Empire near the town of Gospić, in the territory of modern-day Croatia. His baptismal certificate reports that he was born on 28 June (N.S. 10 July) 1856 to father Milutin Tesla, a priest in the Serbian Orthodox Church.^[12] His mother was Đuka Tesla, née Mandić, whose father was also a Serbian Orthodox priest.^[13] She was talented in making home craft tools and memorized many Serbian epic poems, but never learned to read.^[14] Tesla's biographer John O'Neill relates that "the Tesla and Mandić families originally came from the western part of Serbia near Montenegro."^[15]

Nikola was the fourth of five children, having one older brother (Danilo, who was killed in a horse-riding accident when Nikola was five) and three sisters (Milka, Angelina and Marica).^[16] His family moved to Gospić in 1862. Tesla attended school at Higher Real Gymnasium in Karlovac.^[17] He finished a four-year term in the span of three years.^[18]

Nikola Tesla's house (parish hall) in village Smiljan where he was born and the church where his father served (present day Croatia).

Tesla went on to study electrical engineering at the Austrian Polytechnic in Graz (1875). While there, he studied the uses of alternating current. Some sources say he received Baccalaureate degrees from the university at Graz.^[19][20][21] However, the university says that he did not receive a degree and did not continue beyond the first semester of his third year, during which he stopped attending lectures.^{[22][23][24][25]} In December 1878, Tesla left Graz and broke all relations with his family. His friends thought that he had drowned in the Mur River. He went to Marburg, (today's Maribor, in Slovenia), where he was first employed as an assistant engineer for a year. He suffered a nervous breakdown during this time. Tesla was later persuaded by his father to attend the Charles-Ferdinand University in Prague, which he attended for the summer term of 1880. Here, he was influenced by Ernst Mach. However, after his father died, he left the university, having completed only one term.^[26]

Nikola Tesla c. 1879 at age 23, and his passport from 1883

Tesla engaged in reading many works, memorizing complete books, supposedly having a photographic memory.^[27] Tesla related in his autobiography that he experienced detailed moments of inspiration. During his early life, Tesla was stricken with illness time and time again. He suffered a peculiar affliction in which blinding flashes of light would appear before his eyes, often accompanied by visions. Much of the time the visions were linked to a word or idea he might have come across, at other times they would provide the solution to a particular problem he had been encountering; just by hearing the name of an item, he would be able to envision it in realistic detail. Modern-day synesthetes report similar symptoms. Tesla would visualize an invention in his mind with extreme precision, including all dimensions, before moving to the construction stage; a technique sometimes known as picture thinking. He typically did not make drawings by hand, instead just conceiving all ideas with his mind. Tesla also often had flashbacks to events that had happened previously in his life; these began during his childhood.^[27]

In 1880, he moved to Budapest to work under Tivadar Puskás in a telegraph company,^[28] the National Telephone Company. There, he met Nebojša Petrović, a young, Serbian inventor who lived in Austria. Although their encounter was brief, they did work on a project together using twin turbines to create continual power. On the opening of the telephone exchange in Budapest, 1881, Tesla became the chief electrician to the company, and was later engineer for the country's first telephone system. He also developed a device that, according to some, was a telephone repeater or amplifier, but according to others could have been the first loudspeaker.^[29]

Drawing from U.S. Patent 381968, illustrating principle of Tesla's alternating current motor

Working for Edison in France and the U.S[link]

In 1882 he moved to Paris, to work as an engineer for the Continental Edison Company, designing improvements to electric equipment brought overseas from Edison's ideas. According to Tesla's autobiography, in the same year he conceived of his induction motor and began developing various devices that use rotating magnetic fields for which he received patents in 1888. The paternity of the invention remains controversial since a prototype induction motor was demonstrated in Europe in 1885 by Galileo Ferraris.^{[30][31][32][33]} Ferraris published his findings in 1888.

On 6 June 1884, Tesla first arrived in the United States, in New York City^[34] with little besides a letter of recommendation from Charles Batchelor, a former employer. In the letter of recommendation to Thomas Edison, it is claimed that Batchelor wrote, 'I know two great men and you are one of them; the other is this young man', but the exact contents of the letter is disputed in McNichol's book. Edison hired Tesla to work for his Edison Machine Works. Tesla's work for Edison began with simple electrical engineering and quickly progressed to solving some of the company's most difficult problems. Tesla was even offered the task of completely redesigning the Edison company's direct current generators.^[35]

In 1885 Tesla claimed he could redesign Edison's inefficient motor and generators, making an improvement in both service and economy. According to Tesla, Edison remarked "There's fifty thousand dollars in it for you - if you can do it".^[36] This has been noted as an odd statement from an Edison whose company was stingy with pay and did not have that sort of cash on hand.^[37] After months of work when Tesla finished the task and inquired about payment Edison claimed he was only joking replying, "Tesla, you don't understand our American humor".^[38][39] Edison offered a $10 a week raise over Tesla's US$18 per week salary, but Tesla refused it and immediately resigned.^[36]