I recently read a comment referring to a volume of abstracts of all of Freud’s writings in which the writer states that while Freud is the indispensable starting point for any serious student of psychoanalysis or psychotherapy, he should not be taken too seriously. Of course, as a matter of principle, it is not a good idea to swallow everything anyone says hook, line, and sinker because it is usually indicative of a magical identification with the person with no reliance on scientific proof. It results in mere parroting and, often, stubborn, irrational prejudice.

But Freud himself, it seems, ultimately could not take himself too seriously. This was reflected in the amount of speculation he engaged in in his effort to find a final solution to the problem of emotional disease. We will try to understand the basis for this as we go along.

It was Freud’s early formulation of a psychic energy that Reich took seriously and utilized as the starting point for his own scientific development. What complicated things for him was that, as I have just stated, Freud could not take his concept of libido seriously enough with the result that while Reich began to search for tangible evidence of its existence, Freud gradually relinquished the idea. This left Reich with the responsibility of maintaining what Freud, with the passage of time, did little to support.

The fact that Reich refused to relinquish what others no longer adhered to was not due to an unfortunate stubbornness or because, as Freud says, he had a “hobby horse” but because the idea of a universal force that governed life had appealed to him even before he came to Freud and because he had the mental equipment and scientific background to pursue the thoughts that this question stimulated into the laboratory. It did not occur to anyone else, including Freud himself, that he, Freud, could be a “generator of propositions that could be carried directly to the laboratory for rigorous verification or refutation.” The laboratory had always been the workshop of the mechanist who has no inclination to study the emotions. Thus, for example, his reaction to the idea of analyzing the psyche was that you can analyze urine in the laboratory, not the psyche. With nothing but speculation to support it, Freud had little difficulty in disposing of libido. For Reich, who was at home in the laboratory, libido became the demonstrable orgone energy.

The purpose of this modest seminar is to attempt to understand the nature of the thought process that eventually led to the discovery of the cosmic orgone energy. In doing so, I believe we will be better prepared to cope with the confusion and the resistance we meet when we discuss Reich’s work with others.

I am assuming we do not have to introduce the subject of orgonomy. What we want to do now is find out whether or not and to what extent we understand it. I will try to set the tone of the meeting and indicate our direction more specifically.

Our subject is orgonomic functionalism. I came to the conclusion that I would have difficulty doing it extemporaneously. I would have been able to do so if I were to discuss a problem like psychoneurosis, or cancer, a circumscribed subject like laboratory procedures, etc. But I was afraid that to cover the whole subject of functionalism is a bit too elusive and I would find that in the course of a lengthy, informal presentation I would have missed important aspects of the subject. The subject is too large and in many respects too involved for this meeting and the time too brief. I trust you will understand and excuse me. I will move along slowly. I feel that our gathering is small enough so that if you did not catch something I said, don’t hesitate to ask me to repeat it.

Now we could discuss Reich from the standpoint of where he got to at each phase of his scientific development—in psychoanalysis, sociology, biology etc. Or we could discuss him from the standpoint of how he got there, i.e. his way of thinking which led him to so many different realms of science.

If we approach him from the standpoint of his findings in each phase of his development, I am afraid, as has been frequently seen, that we will have a fragmented view of his work which would tend to cast favor on one aspect and disfavor or indifference on another.

If you see Reich this way, i.e. as a psychoanalyst or a biologist or a physicist within the established framework of these realms of science, then I say you do not understand him. To be sure he was acknowledged to be an outstanding psychoanalyst and he did not object to that because that is where he began. You hear talk about his important contributions to psychoanalysis but that he then “went off.” I say to those who claim to understand his contributions to psychoanalysis and then proceed to discredit his later work, they do not understand him. Without an understanding of the orgasm theory which he had introduced almost at the beginning of his scientific career, it is not possible to understand him at all. I dare say that most people do not understand him.

As for the other realms of science in which he conducted his investigations—sociology, biology, physics—he claimed no authority in them, although it is possible he knew far more than many who were so identified. Einstein, for example, was surprised at how much he knew in the field of physics.

If you look upon him as a physician who merely developed another therapy you again misunderstand him. It is true that in his study of the human organism, his findings had therapeutic implications; and if he was merely trying to devise another therapy he would have stopped there. But in his efforts to deal with human misery in the treatment room he very quickly realized how complicated the problem is. Those with mystical expectations assume he has a cure for this or that disease, some for all diseases. The fact is that he was forced to the conclusion that treatment, in general, even as he found psychoanalysis to be before the development of his own treatment techniques, is very limited. And if a physician looked upon treatment as the final answer and as the only feature of Reich’s work that he was interested in, he would consider the physician to be a racketeer.

Incidentally, I consider referring to orgone therapy as “Reichian Therapy” offensive. It is a way of avoiding the discovery of orgone energy, on which the therapy is now based. I don’t want it to sound as if it is part of a catechism but in referring to the treatment of illness we speak of orgone therapy, not Reichian Therapy, which I insist is an evasion or a confession of ignorance. If this needs clarification I hope we will bring it up later.

But to get back to the matter of how he came to venture into all the basic realms of science we will find that it was the result of an uncommon way of thinking.

He was always, consistently and not intermittently, or passingly, as most of us have been directing himself to the question “What is life?”. That he remained so occupied we now know was not an accident or evidence of a compulsive brooding but indicative of the way of thinking of a person who found himself always absorbed in the phenomena of nature.

This way of thinking is known as functionalism and with the discovery of the specific biological energy as orgonomic functionalism in contrast to mechanism and mysticism.

It is my recommendation that we should try to understand the meaning of orgonomic functionalism as our objective in this seminar because it will do more to establish the validity of the discovery of orgone energy than all the pious or fanatical mouthing of the fact of the discovery itself.

Being presented with the fact of the discovery alone without any understanding of how it came about is like asking someone to swallow a whole meal in one gulp. He will probably regurgitate it or in the case of orgone energy reject it. He may, of course, accept it unthinkingly, unquestioningly, or ravenously. These responses are entirely unacceptable ways of establishing the truth or falsity of the discovery. Besides you must realize that much remains to be investigated to fill in the gaps that scientists would be too ready to pounce upon in expressing their skepticism.

We should therefore concern ourselves with the thought process, orgonomic functionalism, its nature, its implications.

Immediately, however, we have a problem. To understand functionalism really and truly and to apply it to the problems of life we would have to live and think functionally. Before we discuss what that means, I would say, at the risk of offending you, that to all intents and purposes, if living it is a requirement for understanding it, then that would exclude all of us and, if that is the case, perhaps we should stop here. But let us not capitulate so quickly. It may be possible to learn something about functionalism by trying to understand why we do not function functionally.

Let us proceed modestly and try to understand functionalism despite our structural limitations. What we don’t want to do is merely mouth the concepts of orgonomy. That’s what most people do anyway. They merely mouth things. They are like technicians, i.e. those who say and do things without knowing why, who usually pretend to know more than they actually do. Many are just double talkers who leave you wondering what they are talking about but are nevertheless able to sell you whatever they want to, like Gablinger’s beer. This is possible and may even be acceptable when we function mechanistically. If you deal with mechanical matters it may serve a purpose and if errors occur they are usually reversible. But if you deal with the living process in this fashion you are not only an imposter you will inevitably be a failure.

To get down to the subject of orgonomic functionalism, Reich states that in reality he made only one single discovery, the function of the orgastic plasma pulsation. First it should be categorically stated that it was not an accidental discovery. It is not that he awoke one morning and found it. It came about after years of patient observation of the living process. Assuredly, he studied pathology, and utilized Freud’s conclusions to achieve results with varying degrees of success. But, instead of taking a finalistic attitude toward the phenomena he observed, he approached everything from an innocent, unprejudiced position in asking how the particular phenomenon, for example, the Oedipus complex, came about.

One might say that Freud thought functionally until he discovered the Oedipus complex. Thus, he dial not assume a priori that human misery was due to the evil will of man. Instead, his observations led him to the conclusion that the unconscious, over which the human organism had no control was far more important than the conscious and that the Oedipus complex was at the core of neuroses. But he stopped there. He did not ask how the latter came about and allowed for no further investigation by deciding it is a universal, biological phenomenon. Marx proceeded functionally when he traced human misery to social developments in the social order. But he was completely misunderstood when he emphasized, of necessity, the situation as it existed at the time. He found that the people were being exploited by the capitalists. The idea was thereby created that if you got rid of the capitalists, human misery would be eliminated. Marx too implied that the capitalist as well was the product of a pathological process and therefore could not be solely implicated as the source of human misery. We now know despite the persistence of this erroneous idea that this is not so.

The biologists, although they took into consideration a wider realm of the living process arbitrarily invoked the idea of “bad heredity” and stopped dead, thus presenting nothing more than an apology for what had occurred to the human being. And so it went.

Reich, on the other hand, simply but doggedly asked, for example, where did the Oedipus complex come from, where did authoritarian patriarchal society come from? Was not the unproven idea of bad heredity merely an alibi etc? He did not do this as an exercise in speculation. He simply observed and investigated, did not draw any final conclusions and made every effort not to interfere with the living process as he proceeded.

He was unique in that he was not troubled as most scientists obviously are by the fundamental fact that everything in life moves. He did not try to stop life in its tracks, so to speak, in order to examine it, as for example, our pathologists do in killing tissues and showing them. They, that is, the pathologists, could then carefully describe what they saw and impress you but they did not have the foggiest idea of how what they saw came about. If they wanted to consider the question of how it came about, they had to speculate. They could not know what preceded what they saw or what would have happened after what they saw because they fixed what they saw, i.e. they stopped the process at the point of their examination.

Now we have to take all of this very seriously. Why did no one want to bother with simply looking at life? Of course, the scientists studied respiration and digestion for example. But they did it structurally, i.e. mechanically, chemically, and they attributed purpose to all of life’s functions. They seemed unable to approach life from the standpoint that life simply functions. Thus, they could study respiration only from the standpoint that the lungs breathe in order to take in oxygen and eliminate CO2 etc. The relation of this process to emotions, for example, was not even thought about. When they came to the orgastic function they concluded that it was for the purpose of procreation and to perpetuate the species. And as you know, we don’t buy that any more.

The point is that wherever anything was examined it was done by stopping the process of life and to explain the process they had to attribute it to a mythical something in the beyond. The tendency is as applicable to the most renowned scientist as it is to the illiterate peasant. The scientist may have struggled with the question more while the illiterate peasant would have simply taken someone’s word for it. But they have all ended up with an unseeable, unknowable god.

Reich came to realize that there is something in the human organism that has caused it to avoid simply looking at living nature and investigating it without interfering with it. He saw it in his patients; he saw it in parents who reared their children according to the demands of our culture; he saw it in educators who demanded that children do things according to a predetermined plan; he saw it in the insistence that life had to have a purpose and a meaning.

You will note that everything that interested Reich had to do with unending change in nature. Everything in nature is in flux; nothing is stationary. In everything that he examined in nature, it was movement that attracted his attention. He reacted to the rigidity in his patients and observed what happened when their armor began to break down in the course of treatment. He watched what happens when an amoeba dies; when grass disintegrates, when the human body is stimulated, when he examined microscopic specimens at 3000-5000x where structure, for all practical purposes, was no longer visible but where pulsatory movement characteristic of the living could be seen.

Of utmost importance was Reich’s realization that human beings, depending on their individual structures, see life in different ways. The rigid person sees life one way, the mystical person in another way; and the unarmored person in still another. He saw that the unarmored person, in contrast to the armored one, is literally in contact with nature both inside and outside himself and that this quality began to appear in the latter as his rigidity began to dissolve.

In essence, Reich was always occupied with one question: “What is life?” and that one question always prompted naïve, or as some would say, exasperating questions about phenomena of nature. For example, when he wanted to examine one-celled animals to study the pulsatory function in their movements and obtained some paramecia from a laboratory in Norway, he inquired of the donors: Where do the paramecia come from? He found it impossible to accept their impatient, unproven answers; and it was this inquiring attitude that led to discoveries in biogenesis.

As he states in Ether, God and Devil, he asked many naïve questions to which he received answers that were in the nature of alibis and rationalizations with which those who supplied them were, from their own unquestioning frame of reference, entirely comfortable. “Why,” for example, he asked, “if everyone wants peace, is there always another war? Why are the sexual needs of adolescents disregarded and condemned? Why are children treated so cruelly? If there is no personal god what is the reason for all personalized religions?”

All these are questions that a child or adolescent would ask and to which they would receive perfunctory answers. Originally Reich obtained many answers in the treatment room when the rigid armoring of his patients would begin to give way. With the dissolution of the armor they appeared different, their interests and values changed, they lost their sadistic qualities, their complicated, mechanical ways of thinking, etc.

Armored man will not concern himself with questions about life until life is threatened. He will not raise questions about the way things are. He will indolently assume that “that’s the way life is” and conclude that the only thing available to us is to do our best to live in this cruel and difficult world.

To see life differently, to see it from the standpoint of nature outside ourselves, he would have to separate himself from the world as it is and look at it as from a distance, that is without preconceptions and prejudices with his artificial creations, his chemicals, etc.

The functionalist realizes that there is a lawfulness in nature but no final answers which the mechanist demands. If you try to compete with the mechanist you are doomed to failure. He is quick to provide an answer even where there are no solutions. The functionalist accepts the fact; and I quote Reich, “That all processes in nature in spite of all their basic unifying laws are variable in the highest degree, free in the sense of being irregular, unpredictable and unrepeatable.” Because the mechanist cannot tolerate such uncertainty you can imagine what a formidable adversary he is.

To be able to conduct orgonomic research, whether it is in observing and investigating human pathology or phenomena in the atmosphere one must be in touch with one’s own nature, with one’s own bodily sensations. That implies being free enough to view what is before our eyes without any internal interference.

What do we mean when we say “to be free enough?” We refer here to the freedom of movement of the life energy which is enclosed in a membrane. This arrangement—energy contained within a membrane—represents the basic unit of organic life, and it is the variations in the flexibility of the confining membrane that determines the freedom of movement of the energy. From this fact we can extrapolate our understanding of the differences that exist in human beings in whom the movement of energy is impeded or relatively free. The more rigid the membrane, the more restricted the movement of energy. If the emotions are an expression of this movement we can see why they are, to a large extent, excluded in the mechanist whose rigidity is extreme.

In his research he even seeks to exclude the emotions entirely. For the functionalist, in whom the movement of energy is relatively unimpeded, the emotions are an essential quality in his communication with the world, in his observations of nature, in his scientific research. He literally moves out to the object of his interest or research. In moving out he experiences pleasure and as Reich puts it “he literally loves the object of his research.”

The mystical person is no less rigid essentially than the mechanist but he is capable of experiencing the movement of energy within his confining membranous structure. His rigidity, however, makes it difficult or impossible for him to make direct, unimpeded contact with nature outside himself. Being unable to make genuine contact with the pulsatory world outside himself, he attributes his own sensations to a mythical force in the beyond that he feels is forever unobservable and unknowable.

Primitive people who are not restricted by chronic rigidity or armoring are not impeded in their observations of life in the world around them; they are merely unable to understand what they can literally see. They resolve this difficulty by “animating” observable nature but in contrast to the mystic do not create an unobservable fantasy. Thus, to use Reich’s words: “Animism takes for granted a soul in a cloud or the sun which is not correct, but it does not tamper with the form and function of such natural objects. A devil or an angel, (the creations of the mystic) on the other hand, no longer corresponds to any reality, neither in form nor in function. The only reality at the root of this mystic kind of animation is the distorted organ sensations of armored man.

Let us return to the mechanist once again to make clear the fact that he excludes the emotions from his observations. I would like to indicate its significance from the standpoint of my professional position as a physician. The mechanistic physician will use his mechanical techniques in his efforts to diagnose an illness and if they reveal nothing of importance he will assure the patient that he is healthy. The functionalist will see that the patient is ill, will inquire into the patient’s emotional state, observe the fact that he is shrinking etc. and conclude that the patient is dying. If the patient dies shortly thereafter, the mechanist will find on autopsy that the patient had a heart attack. The functionalist knew that the patient was dying without any technical confirmation and will look upon the heart attack as the last step in a dying process. When the statement is made that Reich died of a heart attack in a prison cell,—everyone ignores the fact that the confinement, the immobility it created killed him. And it is not necessary to invoke the idea that he was poisoned as some have claimed; the confinement was poisonous enough.

As for the mystic, he too cannot see nature directly, the distortion that exists within his own organism because of the energetic restrictions due to his own biological rigidity leads him to project this distortion onto nature outside himself. The physical energy process in nature, assuming he sees it, he will explain away with ideas about god and devil.

As for the functionalist, he is not without his own difficulties. In a world such as ours, he must be forever alert to the problem of the interference with his capacity to function freely—whether it is in his relationship with people, treating patients, investigating nature, etc. His concern is life and his primary object of interest is “what is life?”. And how to protect it. Because his emotions do not participate in his inquiries, the mechanist is not interested in the question; in fact he is bored with it.

We must not conclude that the mechanist is devoid of emotion. All we can say is that it is weakened, restricted, inhibited, and avoided. If he is interested in nature as an object of research, the interest is usually brief and quickly wanes. As we have already indicated, he is most comfortable when he is immersed in what is complex and ill at ease with what is simple.

He avoids basic comparisons. For example, it would offend the mechanistic neurologist to compare the functioning of the autonomic nervous system with the functioning of an amoeba.

In orgonomic functionalism, on the other hand, the common is sought in the variations. We can discuss examples of this later, I from the standpoint of my profession and you from the standpoint of your own profession or interests. The functionalist, to continue my generalization, has no difficulty in comparing the living functioning of a human being with an amoeba because using his primary orgonotic sense, he is confident that from a functional standpoint all living substances pulsate and are therefore functionally identical.

It is impossible to observe this process as clearly in the multicellular organism as one can in the one-celled amoeba. But having assured ourselves that in living functioning the processes are identical, we can look at the one-celled amoeba and without interfering with it see what happens—how it expands and contracts in response to various stimuli. And we may then observe the one-celled amoeba as it dies and see what happens after death. We do not say that it dies and let it go at that. We continue to observe what happens after death. We observe the appearance of very small bions that Reich called T-bodies. If we observe disintegrating grass we see the same process and we can draw the same conclusion about dying tissue in the human organism—initially, in the general appearance of the individual, then in his shrinking, then in the evidence of putrefaction (odor) etc.

If we examine life from this position we are functionalists. If we examine life from the standpoint of an isolated, fixed position we are structuralists. The latter, because of their rigidity, must take a different attitude toward life. They must force themselves to move; their organisms will not function spontaneously. They must make themselves function and in doing so they develop artificial ways of functioning; they organize things in a hierarchical way, commanding, giving orders, not trusting others as well as themselves to function spontaneously, individually, and yet unifiedly.

Again, it must be emphasized that armored man functions this way not because he cannot conceive of another way, but because he is structurally incapable of functioning differently. Within his frame of reference, he is absolutely justified. You can see the tragic error in the way he functions only when you stand outside this frame of reference and observe it. It is therefore an error to try to convince him that his way of functioning is unnatural. It is a failure to understand functionalism when you try to organize, to convince others that they must function differently. It is, for example, axiomatic in orgone therapy that you do not tell the patient how to be healthy. You draw attention to the way he functions automatically, you help him to perceive himself and in that way his armored way of functioning is gradually undermined.

Reich makes an interesting statement. He refers to the fact that the realm of the devil is a vicious circle. The harder you try to get out of it, the more you become stuck in it. If you try to force a person to break out of his armor, he becomes frustrated and desperate. If he breaks out, he does so briefly, often cruelly, but the armor is quickly restored. As a physician who treated people with electric shock therapy, I know how little effect it had on their armor.

I will not in this statement go into the many details of how the armor effects the functioning of the human animal. You may want to do that in our discussion which I hope will not merely be a question and answer discussion but a lively interchange of thoughts and ideas and, yes, feelings.

There are just two more points I want to make before we, throw this meeting open for discussion:

The first one is that merely breaking down armor is not what we have to contend with. There is the crucial, unfortunate fact that in the breaking down of the armor a terror appears that Reich refers to as orgasm anxiety, an anxiety that is felt as a total loss of one’s psychic equilibrium, a fear of dissolution. The fact that an individual has been bound up all his life, has developed every conceivable means of maintaining control over himself, makes it impossible for him to accept the free flow of life within himself with ease and comfort. But the knowledge of this dangerous state of affairs that can come about with the breakdown of the armor, the fact that we can understand it and anticipate it, can afford protection against the potential dangers of this response.

The final question is: How did this diabolical armor come about in the first place? It is easy to see how it has been perpetuated in patriarchal society once it has come about. But how did it come about in the first place? This is the area in which Reich consciously, and admittedly began to speculate.

With the appearance of orgonotic sensations arising from the movement of energy within a confined membrane, it became possible for man to begin to reason about himself and in doing so, to quote Reich, he conceivably turned involuntarily against himself. As he became capable of observing himself, he gradually became separated from himself, began to feel frightened, and began to stiffen or armor against his sensations and to interfere with their full expression. He states that a few apparently escaped from the fear of this self awareness. They represent the great scientists, artists, etc. The question he finally asks is: Are these abnormal exceptions? Do the majority represent what is natural and the remaining few what is not natural? If that is so, then he sees no hope. If the opposite is true, i.e. the majority are abnormal, then with the knowledge we are beginning to possess, it may be possible for the mass of humanity eventually to begin to function in harmony with nature. It will take an enormous effort. The tangible evidence of the existence of a universal force that he called orgone energy, will if taken seriously and investigated gradually weaken the enormous resistance to an understanding of and respect for life. We will encourage our children through our respect for their basic nature; we will not interfere with it, we will strive to answer their simple, honest questions about life and assist them in avoiding the rigidities, the armoring that characterizes today’s average human being.

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