Hardly a day goes by without a newspaper or television news report of a suicide bombing incident. Here, a selection of those incidents from 2010.

– On October 18th, the BBC reported from Northwest Pakistan that police shot and killed the teenage driver of a Toyota Surf jeep. The unnamed, suspected bomber was “about 13-15 years old,” and had been speeding toward a checkpoint when the police opened fire.

– Last December 9, there was an AFP report: “Teenage suicide bomber kills 17 in Pakistan’s northwest.” In this incident, “a teenage suicide bomber killed 17 people at a busy Pakistani market Wednesday, the third attack in three days blamed on Islamist extremists bitterly opposed to the US-allied government. Three boys were among those killed when the bomber struck in Kohat, a city of at least half a million and one of the main army garrisons, in the northwestern province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.”

– On April 19, 2010, The New York Times reported that “[a] teenage suicide bomber struck near a protest rally in the northwestern frontier city of Peshawar on Monday, killing a prominent police officer and as many as two dozen protesters, the police said.  A bomb disposal official said the young bomber was wearing a vest with as many as 15 pounds of explosives. “Television cameras showed a frenzied scene of Islamic youths from the protest helping people on to stretchers and clapping their hands in grief.”

Bombing in Islamabad, Pakistan

– On July 26^th, a report from France International News: “Teenage suicide bomber targets anti-Taliban minister, kills 7.”  During this incident, “seven people were killed by a teenage suicide bomber on Monday in an attack on a senior anti-Taliban minister. The minister and other officials were unharmed.” Elsewhere in the same report it is stated that while “there was no immediate claim of responsibility, suspicion fell on the Islamist militants who have wrought carnage across Pakistan, killing more than 3570 people over the last three years.”

– On November 5, 2010, Reuters News reported “A teenage suicide bomber kills 10 in Afghanistan.  It describes the following, “A teenage suicide bomber killed at least 10 people and wounded 30 in an attack at a market in Afghanistan’s remote northwest, a provincial governor said on Friday.  The suicide bomber was a 16 year old boy and the attack was launched in a bazaar in the Khoja Sabz Posh district of Faryab, about 600 kilometers northwest of Kabul.

– On April 2, 2010, The New York Times reported on one of the two female suicide bombers who had killed 40 people in Moscow subway station attacks carried out during morning rush hour.  One of the bombers was a 17-year-old woman, Dagestani Dzhanet Abdullayeva; she detonated a belt of explosives inside the Park Kultury station. “Baby-faced, she looks barely a teenager,” reports the New York Times, “but the pistol she is holding in the photograph suggests the violent destiny that she would choose: blowing herself up in a subway station in Moscow during the morning rush on Monday.”

– On December 31, ABC News issued a report an intervention attempt for would-be bombers, “Rehab for terrorists,” read the headline, “Pakistan Tries Reintegration Program on Teen Extremists.” The report described the effort of Pakistani military officials in their attempt to “rehabilitate more than 150 teenage extremists” with “psychiatry, education and religion,” with an uncertain effects. “The opinion on whether terrorists can be rehabilitated are still mixed,” the article asserts. “Saudi Arabia has tried to reeducate known Jihadist’s for the past few years with limited success, but the Pakistani military believes its program can teach young men, ages 14-17, how to think for themselves and how to become productive members of society.”

Elsewhere the news goes on, endlessly depicting young teenagers blowing themselves up into pieces, with one excuse or another. The website Human Rights Today even has a separate page devoted to teenage suicide bomber reports. Perhaps surprisingly, most of these teenagers are not from areas with a history of violent conflict or genocide, places in which their homes were destroyed and their lives were dismantled. No reports exist that justify these suicidal missions.  Instead, most of these incidents occurred as a direct result of ideological differences, such as one religious sect against another; Sunni against Shiite, Muslim against Christian, Shiite against Sunni, or one political sect against another political sect, all under one nation and similar culture.

If these political and religious differences are so crucial and intense, necessitating this radical action, then why aren’t the parents and grandparents of these teenagers carrying out these missions?  The parent and grandparents must be more ideologically convinced of their righteousness.  One may ask, why wouldn’t their parents or community leaders carry out these missions on their own in order to let their youngsters live happy and full lives?  Furthermore, this trend raises the question of what is it about adolescents that makes them so readily available and prone to accept such missions, to blow themselves up, killing themselves and others.

Pakistani military official Pakistani Col. Iman Bilal explains the effort to “rehabilitate” young extremists as such: “The basic concept is to provide them all their comparative education, where they are able to decide for themselves what is right and what is wrong, that whatever was told to them previously is not true.” Imam Bilal continues, “It is not all about being radical, it is about being a decent human being first.”

The orgonomic and Reichian point of view in this matter is rather different from the Pakistani officials. We believe that without the inclusion of the orgonomic principles, the vulnerability and risk of youngsters taking up such actions will continue, and with it will continue endless incidents of suicide bombings.

The vulnerability of these teenagers and young men to volunteer themselves so readily for such suicidal missions can be explained in terms of Reichian ideas.

Comprehension of the human psychological structure is essential for understanding both rational and irrational, social or anti-social, and healthy or sick behavior. Orgonomy recognizes the basic significance of bio-psychosexual-energy functioning in every living organism. It recognizes its pulsating quality and other characteristics of such an energy, the life energy, the orgone energy. This is the same energy that Freud named libido energy. In the book, Reich Speaks of Freud, Reich states  “Freud introduced the energy principle into psychology, and, in doing so, he broke the barrier which separated the science of that day from that of today.”

Elsewhere in the same book, Reich says the following “Basically, Freud discovered the principle of energy functioning of the psychic apparatus. The energy-functioning principle. This was what distinguished him from all other psychologists. Not so much the discovery of the unconscious. The unconscious, the theory of the unconscious, was, to my mind a consequence of the principle he introduced into psychology. That was the principle, the natural scientific principle, of energy – the ‘libido theory.”

Reich says the following, “Now, what are these social consequences? What are the social consequences of the libido theory? You have it in all of my publication.  I would like to summarize it in a few words: If you have a stream, a natural stream, you must let it stream. If you damn it up somewhere, it goes over the banks.  That’s all. Now when the natural streaming of the bio-energy is damned up, it also spills over, resulting in irrationality, perversions, neurosis and so on.”

Without recognition of the significance of this theory – the libido theory, or the theory of the psycho-sexual energy, orgone energy – human psychological structure can not be comprehended adequately; the disciplines of Psychology and Psychiatry will continue to be lost in convoluted and confusing theories.  For further information please see Reich’s Points of Departure from Freud.

Every human organism shares a basic function with all other living organisms starting from the protozoa. It is of the sharing the function of the pulsation.  This pulsating energy flows from the center of the organism to its periphery and it requires orderly metabolism.  In orgonomy, we describe it as economy of the energy.  Proper production and discharge of the energy is crucial in the healthy functioning of the living organism including humans.  Reich also called it “Sex Economy”, since biological energy and sexual energy are of the same and one entity, referring to the proper production and discharge, proper metabolism of this energy.  When the flow of this energy – when the economy and metabolism of this energy – is disturbed, it causes numerous psychological and physical disturbances in the body and psyche.  Energy production is highest in childhood and adolescence, and unfortunately its economy is also most disturbed during those years because of social restrictions.  If it is not discharged properly, this pulsating energy that constantly and incessantly springs inside the human organism will make the organism resemble a grossly over-inflated ball. Reich made the analogy of such an elastic ball with an organic bladder. In a section of the book The Function of the Orgasm, under the description of masochistic behavior, he describes the following;

“How would an organic bladder behave if it was inflated with air from within and was unable to burst – in other words, if it’s covering was capable of being stretched but not being torn? The picture of the human character as an armor around the core of the living organism was extremely significant. If such a bladder were put into an unresolvable condition of tension and it could express itself, it would complain, rendered helpless, it would seek the causes of its suffering outside of itself and make reproaches. It would beg to be pricked open. It would provoke its surroundings until it believed it has reached its goal. What it had failed to bring about spontaneously from the inside it would passively and helplessly expect from the outside.”

Discharge of this psychosexual energy is most complete and satisfactory by orgastic convulsions of the organism.  Without such satisfactory discharge of energy, significant part of the energy remains accumulated, and makes the teenager feel ready to explode.  Most of these teenage suicide bombers are from the cultures that are the most repressive and disapproving of sexuality in adolescence, causing the most severe repression of sexual discharge and consequently a sense of hopelessness of any prospect of pleasurable encounter and discharge of the energy. Making them vulnerable to the ideas of explosion, a sense that they already feel from within.  Such an idea of explosion would be appealing since it would relieve them from the painful pressure inside, let alone the prospect of pleasurable scenarios depicted for them after the explosion with sexual innuendoes.

We wonder if educators in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Afghanistan, who want to rehabilitate these youngsters will have the structural health capable of gaining insight and courage to implement these principles and include them in their programs for their rehabilitations of the youth. We wonder if the public of Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan or Pakistan will support them in including such principles in their rehabilitation program.  We wonder if educators in the United States will be able to take a leap and have the courage to incorporate these principles in the upbringing of youth as Reich has suggested some 70 years ago, to prevent incidents like Columbine High School and other mass killings that have occurred in the United States.  Or will we wait for another 50 years, if we haven’t blown ourselves up by then.

The following is Dr. Victor Sobey’s lecture in October of1993, which was arranged by the Institute for the Study of the Work of Wilhelm Reich. In this lecture, Dr. Sobey talked about the scientific basis of orgonomy.  The seminar was moderated by Dr. Harry Lewis and Mr. David Silver  recorded  the lecture.  We thank both Dr. Lewis and  Mr. Silver for making this lecture possible and  available.  The edited version of the video has been posted in this journal, and the reader can see it by clicking here.

Dr. Victor Sobe was a long time student of Dr. Reich and he stayed loyal to him up to the end.  He treated many patients and trained clinicians and orgonomists  throughout  his carier as a psychiatrist and orgonomist.

The following is a transcription of the edited version of the video for those who would like to read it.

Dr. Sobey:  I’m recommending that if you really want to get a good idea and synopsis of Wilhelm Reich’s work, look at The Selected Writings and Introduction to Orgonomy, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.  That’s the way one should really approach this.  I remember around 1951 or so, there was a lot of talk about orgonomy in periodical newspapers, so the American Psychiatric Association obviously got a lot of inquiries as to an explanation for orgonomy.  Instead of appointing one or two of us to be on the board to answer the letters of inquiries, they wrote a lot of form letters to each of the orgonomists, at that time about 25 or 30 of us, and saying please put in your own words explaining orgonomy.  So when we had our regular seminar with Dr. Reich, we all brought this to his attention, and he said, what do they want to know?  My books are out there.  And none of us could describe it as well as his writing, so he had us write the form letter back saying to refer them to the books, and to appoint one or two of us to answer the inquiries, which of course we never heard from them.  So that’s why I really recommend to read the book.  I am picking out the highlights of what he thought was the most important part of his work and discovery.  He used to say that he only discovered one thing, and that was the orgonotic pulsation.  The orgonotic pulsation was only a pulsation energy, an energy which is before mass, and in difference to Einstein who exploded mass into energy which is dangerous.  Whereas orgone energy is not dangerous. He said, from there on there’s only a skeleton building and the rest has to be filled in.   He said, by the time he went to jail, he filled in very little of it, so the whole world was left open.

I met Dr. Reich in December, 1947.  I was in my psychiatric residency at the veterans administration and one of the new residence came in and he had all of Dr. Reich’s books and was raving about the works, and we were all doctors and psychiatric residence after WWII.  We had been exposed to all the prominent schools of psychiatry at the time and we were all really quiet impressed.  One of the lectures we had was from NY psychoanalyst Dr. Shillianski, he was one of the top guys.   We weren’t really happy with it, he was a very stiff guy very dogmatic, and we asked him if he knew Wilhelm Reich and his work. Well you’d think we’d introduced the devil into that lecture room. He said, I don’t want to hear that name any more, and if you’re gonna discuss it I’m not going to come.  So we continued to discussing it among ourselves, and one by one we went up to see Dr. Reich.  I went over by myself, and before I went, by that time I had read all his material, I expected to see a giant, the man was very imposing, and if you look at the pictures, you see he looked like me.  I looked at him and thought, how could he be any good if he looks like me!  But it didn’t take me very long to get back to my fantasy I built up about him because he really was something different, he was out there, his energy field was out there, he was kind and sympathetic but at the same time he was quiet definite in what he wanted.  So I like to bring in some of the personal things about him, which I don’t know is known or not, to give you an idea of how kind he was, even though he was attacked viscously by people. For example, at one time, that must have been around 1950 or so, there was a complaint brought against him from Hillside psychiatric hospital. At that time Hillside hospital was the psychoanalytic establishment in the United States.  A rumor came out that Dr. Reich had gotten an older women out of the hospital who was very ill and brought her over to his office and laboratory in Forest Hills and examined her, and was accused that he put her behind an X-ray machine, which he didn’t have, and masturbated.  Well, that was a pretty serious accusation. At the time there was a psychiatric resident at the Hillside Hospital, Dr. Singer, who had by himself gotten interested in Dr. Reich’s work and he heard about the rumor and he knew the woman. In fact she was a patient of his, and he was flabbergasted. The woman had never left the hospital, and when he asked her, she said that she never left the hospital.  Well, Singer came to Dr. Reich and told him the whole story and signed an affidavit to that effect, and we brought it to our lawyer, Earnest, the number one civil rights lawyer at the time.  And he looked at the stuff and said you have a very good case.  So we all met and Dr. Reich said, “Oh, so our lawyer contacted the head of the hospital and said our client got a case against you”, and he said “I know, I should have had my head examined but I went along with it”. So when we had our meeting, we discussed it and Dr Reich said “Can I see a show of hands, should we go ahead with it”, and we all raised our hands and thought, let’s go to battle.  He looks at us and said , “no, I cant do it, if we do this, Miller is ruined, the others are ruined”…that was the kind of man he was.

Another plague we had when the government served Dr. Reich with selling fraudulent material and writing fraudulent books about a fraudulent device, the accumulator.  Mr. Green was the lawyer in Jersey and he was a republican and he new the top republican officials, in fact he was a lawyer for the pharmaceutical companies in New Jersey.  And one time, they had a national convention of  The American Association of Pharmaceutical houses, and Mr. Green was also involved. His daughter had gone into treatment and improved quite a bit with one of the orgonomists after she had been in treatment with many other psychiatrist and didn’t get much help from them. So he was quite impressed.  So the president of the american pharmaceutical industry was there, and Mr. Green went up to him and said, “I heard a lot of things about this orgonomy and Dr. Reich”.   He said, “don’t worry about it, it’s nothing”.  And he looked at me and said “but you know, if that was for real, we wouldn’t want it anyhow, we’d do everything to kill it”  So that’s what we had to content with.

Much of this is not known and it’s so interesting to me.  I remember the second international orgonomic conference up at the Orgonon.  That was after the Alice Brady article.  She was hired by the American Psychiatric Association to write a rather contemptuous article about Dr. Reich and it was copied by all the psychiatric magazines.  At that time we had Dr. S, he was a resident there also and he became very interested in orgonomy.  He heard the top brass manager himself talking about Reich and saying “this guy has something, but he’s going to make us go back to school and study this”.  They were all buying character analysis but they wouldn’t show it to anybody.  So anyhow, Dr. Reich at that time said that the plague is going to grow and it’s  going to come to the point that I feel I could be sent to jail, but I’m not going to leave it, if any of you want to leave that’s okay with me.  And you know that was the beginning of the whole campaign.

Here’s a picture of Dr. Reich, afternoon and evening sessions.  Here we have an evening session, this is the lab.

Dr. Reich, came upon the concept of orgone energy way after Freud had the theory of LIbido and libidinal energy.  At that point it was subjective of concept, it was never objectified, which Dr. Reich later did.

He brought in a hodgepodge, a witches brew of organic material and then diligently looked at the detritus or broken down material, and saw little blobs which he called vegetative bions, then he got he idea to look at inorganic material, like sand, which he felt would be very rich in energy. He heated that up to incandescence and then cooled it and looked under the microscope and saw very well defined bions, little  vesicles, blue in color, and he decided to see what effect they would have on the body.  So he made little packets of it and put it on different parts of the body, and it would give it a redness and then tan, then he used it over wounds and cuts and they healed very fast.  He called those SAPA bions. Then he worked with an electroscope, to measure the electricity in the air. You charge it up with any kind of electrical instrument and the leaves separate, and as they discharge the leaves come back to the original position. So he decided to charge the electroscope with the back light, which he felt will give it charge, but then did it at different times of the day, in the morning and cloudy days it would discharge much faster, but in the middle of the day, he found it would discharge much slower.  He corroborated that with what he called T0 – T2,  temperatures, he had a fine thermometer and he put one over accumulating substance and one over non accumulating, and the T0 over the accumulating substance would almost always show a higher temperature than  the thermometer that was over plain material.

Question from audience: How did he see the blue aura, was it in the microscope?

Dr. Sobey:  Up in Orgonon we had an accumulating room, 10 by 10, which  the walls were made out of the accumulating substance, organic, inorganic, organic, inorganic.  It was pitch black, when you sat in it you saw nothing, and after 10 minutes when ones eyes became fixed on the atmosphere, you suddenly saw blue all around your body, and you could walk around and see someone’s arm and shake hands with them, then there would be clouds in there. The longer you stayed, they would be floating around, when you took an electroscope in the room, it never discharged, and thats where we saw the blue.

He took a vacuum tube and put it in the accumulator room and after a few days, he took it out and sent in the smallest charge of amperage electricity he could do, and the whole tube just glowed blue.  When you mention it to physicists, they said you just can’t do it.  There’s a picture of it, a very beautiful picture, and it still glow.  In the blood you get a very good view of orgone energy.  So one of the three big things that Dr. Reich said were the best things he did for mankind was the Reich blood test.  At one time I used to give all my patients the Reich blood test. But it’s a tedious procedure so I discontinued.

Now with the Reich blood test, we take a prick of blood and put it under the microscope, and we look at the blood and you see in the picture, it is like a donut, and you see inside the donut is the nucleus which is yellowish and the frame inside the donut is a deeper yellow, and outside you actually see a blueish field radiating. Then  you look at the size and shape of the blood cells, the frame and it’s evenness, regularity, the orgone energy field outside, it’s so spectacular, and the center is large small round, colors pink or reddish to violet.  Then the cell breaks down. Now the break down is a good determination of how rich, how much, what the energy concentration in the body is, the higher the energy concentration is, the slower the red blood cells break down.  And they disintegrate very slowly, but if the blood energy level is high in the body and the blood, the frame doesn’t break down, the glow on the outside doesn’t break down,  and in the frame you see these little, they’re called large blue bions, they form in that part, and I’ve seen cases of about 10 or 12, and they look just like a pearl necklace, it’s beautiful. We call those PA or B reaction. If you get 4 or less bions,  then that’s a T reaction, if you get 5 or more, that’s a B reaction and it stays that way as long as you keep putting in saline solution.   If the energy level is low in the body, you don’t get those bions you see, T spike cells. You don’t get those bodies, you don’t get those PA bions, you get on the periphery spiking, you can’t miss it, and the thing is of course with cancer patients, you get this almost with everyone. So it was always a good test for any one who had cancer or tended towards cancer. Then we would test it for people on different medications.  In 1950 they were still giving people sulfa drugs  and even in classical medicine, they knew that Sulfa drugs had deleterious side effects, but with the way we observed it, it formed a solid mass then. Now how do we counteract the T spike, the T reaction?  We used to put those patients in the accumulator and take a blood test, once a month every 3 or 4 months, and almost invariably, the T spike phenomenon would not occur, and you’d get the PA or B reaction. We had a lot of cancer mice that we got from the laboratory in Maine, used to grow cancer mice strains, maybe 500 generations, pure cancer mice. We would put the cancer mice in the smaller accumulators, and you see the healthy mouses blood and the cancer mouses blood.  And also the white blood corpuscles, they were always slightly larger, the lymphocytes slightly were brightly luminous and very resistant to disintegration. They are  easily distinguished after settling has been completed with the fine adjustor of the microscope, and that would show that the energy level was low, leukocytosis and leaning towards leukemia, which about 70% of the time reverse itself after being in the accumulator.

And it took a lot of experience and looking at a lot of blood to be able to really tell, because it was up to the observer, and the more you were in contact with your own body the better you could distinguish  B reaction from T reaction.

The estimation of the criteria for healthy or sick blood requires much experience. Many samples of blood from different sources must first be examined and compared with each other. It means long and patient hours at the microscope. For the acquiring at this scale it is important that the same microscope, same magnification, the same centering of the light and the same intensity of the light source be used by the observer. One should not loose sight of the fact that the examination of the blood cells and tissues outside the living organism brings about a rapid modification of these cells. In order to gain the close examination to the true physiological appearance of the cells, the blood must be examined immediately.  I’m getting very technical, and I don’t know how not to do it, I’m used to giving this explanation to doctors, but I’ll continue. The appearance of bions, with the frame of the red blood cells is due to the fact that the even distribution of the orgone energy has been modified.  There is a gradual loss of orgone energy so there is not enough to maintain a tautness characteristic of a healthy cell.   Now that’s an important statement.  Now  Dr. Reich felt, the cause of cancer was  lower  orgone energy in the body, the body cells, and that classically  was felt that cells proliferate into more cells than the organism could accommodate, and as a result, the normal chemistry and physiology would be deleterious to the body.  We see in the breakdown of the red cells, you get the T spike cells, and when you allow the normal cell to breakdown, the energy will dissipate, and you keep it alive, it breaks  down into an amoeba and that’s what Dr. Reich said  cancer was, the break down of the cell, the lowering of the energy of the cell into a newer form and newer type of cell.

Disintegration of both the healthy and sick cells, the process is the same but the bionic disintegration of the healthy cells begins at a much higher level of energy.  In both instances, shrinking occurs but in the case of the weaker blood the power of expansion necessary to keep the membranes stretched is reduced.  In other words the tautness, the life of the weaker cell is not as great as that of the stronger.  From the observation, a logical deduction can be made as to the original energy content of the cell, and you see that the weaker cell goes into spiking, and you know the energy content of the cell was not very high

There are two different variations of disintegration. The healthy and the sick are referred to as B or beta reaction or PA reaction, which is healthy.   The second is T shrinking or sick reaction, and in diseases such as cancer where the biological debility is extreme, the disintegration of the cell is almost a 100% in the T reaction.  The cell which disintegrates in the PA or B manner has a greater amount of orgone energy from which the bions are formed.  As a consequence, these bions are larger and deeper blue and more sharply delineated in the cells which disintegrate in the T manner, due to the lower energy content, only small bions or T spikes will be formed.  The T type of disintegration while almost always found in cancer, may be found in other biopathic conditions, diseases arising from a disturbance in bioenergetic pulsation. We never went into other diseases, we never had that many cases available.  We tried to get permission at hospitals, but they just said a lot of nonsense.

So that work all has to be done, little by little. I don’t know if anyone is doing the blood tests. I think almost nobody is doing them now.   It takes a lot of time and money.

Dr.Harry Lewis: You did work with TB patients?

Dr.Sobey: I did work with 3 tuberculosis patients, there was one woman, she was away in the navy and she developed tuberculosis, and it was pretty fulminating, and at that time, they did treat her, they had a couple of streptomycin and a couple of other drugs. She wasn’t getting anywhere, and they were recommending that they do a lobectomy with her lungs.  Her husband had been in treatment with me and asked me what the accumulator would do. I was young and daring, and I said, bring her around and let’s see.  I had her on the couch and would have her siting in the accumulator 3-4 times a day.  In the meantime, I said I better get some protection. I knew a doctor at Seaview Tuberculosis Hospital.  I asked him if he would follow the case and if he thought at any time that she was getting worse then he would recommend that she get the operation. After a couple of weeks she started feeling a lot better, and I sent her to him and he examined her, and he took x-rays and said she still has them but it’s much better, took a couple of x-rays, and he continued to follow her for 3 months and after 3 months said she was in remission.

And then she went on, she got married, she had girls, and I see the mother down in Florida and this was 40 years ago, and still no reoccurrence, the daughters are fine, never had anything, the husband is  fine and I had several others, not as serious as she was.  They responded quite well.  They never needed any medication any more, and Dr. Reich wanted me to give a report.   I went up there and gave the whole history, he looked at me and he said, I would never have done that. So, I said what do you think, he said, you’re the specialist not me. That was in the young days. Then of course the government came and soon after that, like all the orgonomists I stopped using the accumulator in the office and stopped prescribing to the patients, the only one that still did it was Dr. S.  But I still kept the accumulator in my office and I did prescribe it to patients, but after Dr. Reich developed the accumulator blanket, which he felt was better, and I liked better too.  Anyhow, the other doctors, after Dr. Reich died, Dr. Baker decided to leave the group and he had 3 or 4 younger doctors.

They did more to destroy the accumulator than the FDA because they said that the DOR emergency had gotten so bad, DOR does change orgone energy to more DOR.  They said it was so bad, especially in NYC, that the accumulator was useless. That helped the FDA and no one was going to use it because it was [claimed] very dangerous.

Question from audience: Is there any truth to that?

Dr. Sobey:  No, that’s ridiculous, I have all my patients that still have their accumulator blankets and they never developed  DOR reaction.

Question from audience: What would that look like?

Dr. Sobey:  The DOR reaction is a generalized reaction that somewhat simulates a really bad cold and also whatever weak spot the patient has, the DOR would exacerbate it, liver lungs or whatever else.

Dr.Harry Lewis: These comments by Baker had no clinical support and there was no research to support their claims.

Dr. Sobey:  Around August 1954, the blueberry farmers in Maine, which was a big industry there, were having a terrible drought, and it reached the point that if they didn’t get rain in 2-3 days, the crop would be ruined.  Dr Reich had been working on producing rain around the Organon which he’d done quite a few times.   So he contacted the blueberry farmers to see if he could help them with their problem.  So they looked at them, by the way, they had seeding done before that and it didn’t work.  And the forecast on WBZ from Boston showed no rain for at least another 3-4 days, so the blueberry farmers said, okay, you can come over and do your cloud buster, he said, I’ll do it but I want some money before hand. They were desperate.  He asked for 600 dollars, so he went there, notified the weather bureau in Boston and television stations, he did it all out in the open, he wanted them to know and didn’t want to hide, he drew for 2-3 hours, in a way that only he could do, you just don’t take the cloud buster and point it in the sky like a lot of people thought you could do. You had to have the structure and the feel of the atmosphere, it’s all public knowledge.  Well, it rained like hell, and the blueberry crop was saved.

I can go on further. Around January 1953, he had been in the dessert around Tucson with the idea of studying the DOR in the dessert. The DOR  has an affinity for water and moisture.  They really had a drought there for a couple of years and the cattle farmers were suffering with the idea that they would have to move away. So he went down and studied the atmosphere there for a while and then he started the cloud buster.  By that time, there wasn’t cloud busting, he called it “space gun”. Anyhow,  the air force had a base there, he would notify them all the time what he was doing, and would notify everyone, the weather bureau took his information.  Well,  by December it started to rain and I, Edgar Rayfield, and Baker on January 15th, went to see what he was doing out in the dessert with him, in the morning you could see the DOR, we call it a haze.  It was every morning, and he would use the cloud buster/space gun to clear up the atmosphere in different ways, and every time he did it you couldn’t see the DOR haze in the dessert, and you would get rain. You’d do it in the morning, and for lunch there was a place where all the cowboys and ranchers would go, they would say.   “Hi Dr. Reich, you going to make rain for us?”

The night before we left, he said I’m going to make some rain for you, and it wont be dessert rain, where it comes down and floods, so he started during the day, his assistant Ruiz was doing it for him at that time.  We were watching it, Ruiz came in, he said it’s starting to rain, we went out, and very nice  soft rain, it kept raining and raining.  We left about 11 o’clock.   I got up in the morning, I had a car and went to the airport, and it’s raining and I said to the woman at the ticket office, “Is the plane going to land?”  She said “we’ve never had an occasion where we couldn’t take off or a plane land”.  I said okay, I have a wedding in NY, not mine. So about 10:30, you hear a plane that came in from LA, going around and around, and they announce that the plane isn’t going to land because of wether conditions.  I called up Dr. Reich, and he said, what’s the matter? I said it’s raining hard and I told him they’ve never had an occasion where a plane could not land. He said, my god, I did more than I thought I did. He said “When’s your next plane,”  I said “5 o’clock”.  He said,  “okay, go to town and go to a movie.” When I came out, the sun was shining and we took off.  He came back and he showed us the statistics, it rained more that winter than the total of the previous 15 winters. They all knew about it, and said these phenomena happen all the time.

Question from audience: Did they write about it?

Dr. Sobey: They  wrote about it but they said that it was just a coincidence, most of the newspaper articles mentioned that Reich was doing this work but said it was a crack pot claim.

He was also very much interested in UFO’s, he called it EA’s, and energy.  He’s never talked about them as well.  At times he would say, maybe there are people from other planets or other galaxies, or what not,  but all he knew were that there were these lights were  their movements didn’t conform with the stars. He took many many pictures.

Anyhow, he also was able to correlate the appearance of, these, he called them lights and they seemed to have a bluish thrust every so ofter. And when they appeared,  there would be a lot of haze the next day.  And he said “please don’t go back and tell the people in NY, then they’ll really think I’m crazy.”  He said, “I have a right to speculate.”

Each time Dr. Reich went into something new, you would think he’s gone off the deep end now, so that was that, and then he couldn’t go any further because he got in trouble with the government and went to jail.

I thought this was sad. The last time I met Dr. Reich was two weeks before he went to jail and he was living in Washington and he saw each one, the ones who really trained with him individually.  He said to me, “I probably wont see you again… I don’t see how I’ll come out of jail alive”. So I said, “okay, looking back what would you do differently?”  He said I wouldn’t have published as much as I did, I didn’t realize it was too early.and the structured people could not take my work. and he said it was only on the insistence of TP Wolfe, he was his translator, excellent therapist. The fact that he and Dunbar wrote the first definitive book on psychosomatic medicine. He kept pushing Reich, pushing Reich. He said I wouldn’t publish any more and as we know in his will, there is maybe about 1000  manuscripts which weren’t published. He said,  don’t want this to be published for at least 50 years after my death.  He also told me at that time … If he had the ability and the power, he would take all the books and therapists, and put us all into limbo and wait till our generation is out, and then the new generations  40 or 50 years ago, would be able to deal with it better.  I think he’s wrong, certainly from the sexual standpoint, society has advanced tremendously, when you consider 52, 55,   you couldn’t mention the word  masturbation in therapy, now of course we’re way past that, and he predicted that in the progress that was brought on by the sexual revolution  there would be a lot of chaos  which we are seeing now.  But if we all survived that chaos, the middle layer, stuff that’s coming out since the top layer is removed,  many innocent people would go down and those who survived would be the better off.  At that time the atomic bomb specter was very much in evidence, he said unless we blow ourselves off the face of the earth.

And well this is a personal thing, when I went to Dr. Reich I was a real radical, in fact I was a member of the communist party and of course in Europe he had a lot of  contact with the communist party.  He went to Russia for about a year to study the whole thing, when he became very disillusioned, he was bout 26 or 27. I was the only one that had that sort of background.  So we talked about it, I guess he had to get it in, the last thing he said to me, He said “You know, Dr. Sobey, there is such a thing as a good communist, but there aren’t any around now, they’re all fascists, and then he said “I’m still a Marxist.”  Now I kept it quiet for many years, and it got to the other group, Baker and his group and he said “That’s absolutely ridiculous that Dr. Reich said that, you see his latest writings.”  Well, they didn’t understand what Dr. Reich was writing about. So that was his last statement to me.

Questions:  You alluded to Bakers group and their departure from Reich?

Answer: No they didn’t depart from Reich.  They left the doctors, the orgonomists, he left the orgonomist. It was nothing philosophical.

Question: On the tape, Dr. Reich says that cancer is a prenatally acquired disease.  I just want to know apart from exterior things like smoking or working in the coal mines?

Answer: No, not apart from that at all.  He never proved it, but again, he said, If the child is in the uterus and if the uterus is armored which could have been brought on by the smoking and everything else, and sexual impotency, the uterus would be, and remember the first statement I made, was Dr. Reich said the only thing I discovered is the orgonotic pulsation.  Now if the uterus is, if that’s the energy, and it’s pulsating like this, pulsating like that, it’s going to affect the fetus.

Questions: But is the implication that if you make it out of the fetus intact, healthy, that you’re not likely to succumb to emotional disease?

Answer: Yes, even in classical cancer they talk about genetic predisposition, but they said that the nurturing could change it, so one doesn’t contradict the other.

Question: Just given today, the prevalence of medication for patients of psychology, do you think that Reich’s work would be well received today, I mean it just seems like the pharmaceutical industry is so strong?

Answer: Psychiatry and psychotherapy had been going down, I mean even the traditionals said, we’re not getting anywhere with this.  Came out originally with the tranquilizers, and Dr. Reich said, “look at, that’s going to predominate now for a good long while, because the number of chemical combinations that can be made, tranquilizers and narcotics, is countless, so as soon as one had its day, then another one is developed.  I can’t keep up with them.  So that’s going to last for  along time.  That’s what Dr. Reich said, if he had the power he would put everything of his work into limbo until the next 3 or 4 generations.

There’s one psychiatrist, he was in training and everything.  He did orgone therapy for a while, and his family and wife. He had a big need for money. I see him every so often. I play tennis with him.  In fact he’s editor of one of the journals of psychopharmacology, and he said, “come on, start writing some articles, you make  a lot of money”, and I said no. Last summer I saw him, he said, “I’m back into electric shock therapy, you can’t believe the money I’m making.”  So you know.

Question:  One more question about the blood. When the energy is so sapped that the cell starts to degenerate and at the point that it becomes pathological is there any identification of another energy or is it just another function of orgone energy that allows it to become cancer?

Answer: Well part of it the energy level is lowered  which causes the cell to reorganize at a lower lever, and part of it turns into DOR.  I mean, actually armor is nothing but sequestered DOR,  and as a results, I mean that’s a good function in the beginning because it’s sequestered DOR and it doesn’t affect he body, but then as the DOR is increased in the body, the armor can’t absorb it any more, then it floods the body, and becomes free floating anxiety, and organs break down.

Question: But normally it would  just be expelled?

Answer: Yes, DOR, if the body is free, the reflex is there, is expelled, well actually it’s discharged through the orgasm really.  That’s one of the functions of the orgasm, but  there could be complete impotency and if you’re not discharging the excess DOR through the genital embrace, the body remains flooded and armoring increases.

Question:  You said that orgone energy is energy before mass. I’m sure there are a lot of differences between different energies, can you elaborate on that.

Answer: Well orgone energy has it’s own type of physics, and mechanical energy has it’s own physical laws.   Orgone energy which is the basis of the cloud buster, energy goes from a low to high whereas in mechanical physics energy goes from a high to low. Electricity goes from high to low, a waterfall goes from high to low.  That’s one of the main differences between the two energies. Also, orgone energy is not destructive,  whereas, when matter is destroyed, broken up, like in the atomic reactor, the energy which is released is destructive.

Question?   when you look at the lumination from the sun, lightbulb or fluorescent tube, you get entirely different patters.  The florescent tube is really sharp and harsh, and the light bulb is fairly benign and sunlight is a little dancier.  I think that you can see some distinction in movement in the mechanical energy charge which is what the fluorescent light does.  Well the flourescent light, there’s a very harsh line of  movement in the air, short little dashes and stabs, and the orgone movement, you can see, not an undulation from the sun.  The sunlight, you get a softer light, a softer affect in the air.

Answer:  But Dr.Reich said, lumination, when we look at a lightbulb, or flashlight into the sky, he said it was sending off mechanical energy and what you’re seeing  is the lumintaion of the orgone energy in the atmosphere.

Question: I understand but I think what a high electrical charge dose, it insights the orgone energy, it gives a much higher charge, and it changes the visible form.

Answer: I’ll do what Dr. Reich would say, Mr. Teeger, that’s a good idea, why don’t you do some more research on that and give us a report. In the beginning in those seminars we would say, Dr.Reich, we saw this, we observed that, thinking, here Dr. Reich [would be impressed] but it was instead more work for you. He would say, why don’t you do some more research and  write a paper.   After a while, no one would say anything.

Question:  I wonder about the scientific evidence in the term of what value it actually has, there seems, Dr. Reich and the orgonomist have come up with incredible resistance in society and the world.   No matter what he did, he had all the writings and he had everything out there had all that it seems to have fallen on deaf ears in many respects.  My question is what value is there in research, is that where the affect on the world is going to happen, or is it going to happen in some other way?

Answer: Well if you listen to me,  Dr. Reich said, if he had the ability he would put everything into limbo. In fact there are a thousand pages[manuscripts] in unpublished work which he felt that the character armoring of the world at the present time at that time or for a long time will not be able to deal with it. There are a lot of people, in Europe today and, in South America, you would be surprised, the hundreds of thousands of people are interested in orgonomy now.  Reichian institute in Italy, Berlin, France are very big, the books have been published in Finish of all places and even in Japan. Maybe you have a good explanation of why people are ignoring or resisting it.

Question: My wondering is  weather greater affect is going to happen more indirectly, not necessarily through research based on orgonomy, but through advances in other fields that have an affect.

Answer: Well, we do know that  many of the things that Dr. Reich discovered and developed has been accepted by many areas of science.  Like touching the patient, it was unheard of when I started, now it’s nothing. When Dr. Reich talked about the virus aspect of Cancer, and even emotionally, remember, back then they though what do[emotions] have to do with cancer, now you hear it all the time, stress reduction, bio-feedback.

Dr.Harry Lewis: In fact, someone told me that Dr. Reich said, that what’s going to happen to my work is that it’s going to be picked apart and piece by piece people will take bits of it and use it to make movements on it and build treatments on it. Dr. Reich said, he had no choice, you do the science because you do it, not because people are going to accept it or see you as the great discoverer. There was the famous quote by Dr.Reich that at 50 years they are going to come to my grave with bouquets and say, you were right and forgive us.

Dr.Sobey: No,No, Then I am suppose to to say “thank you”!

You’ve asked me and a lot of patients have asked me if I think things are worse than ever, and I say no.  With the top layer coming off, if the top layer would come off, the super ego, high morality, and the middle layer come to the surface, pornography would develop. which it has, and a lot of healthy sexual attitudes and behaviors develop too. The adolescents, in NY city, 45% of the births are adolescent single mothers, but  nature created the woman and the male to procreate at the time she menstruates. Now society, well, number one hasn’t affirmed sexuality yet, they say it happens and there’s nothing we can do about it [but] it’s an improvement from 45 years ago, things are getting better.  People say the atomic bomb! the atomic bomb! but I think the atomic bomb was a good thing because it’s the first time in history of the world when we haven’t had a major world war, it’s been a long time.  I remember WWI ended in 1918 and then in 1939 we had another one.

So you know, It goes back and forth, every action there’s a reaction.  But the next action is a little further ahead, a little further ahead.  Expansion and contraction, that’s the pulsation.

Question: so even if there is a break up of all of Reich’s little ideas …

Answer: It’s not important, some guy maybe even in the Congo is working in his barn working on Dr. Reich’s [theories], or even independent of Dr. Reich.

Talking about the adolescents, the whole economic structure should be set up so that they be taken care of and not be looked upon in a negative way.  It’ll come to that.

Dr.Harry Lewis:   That’s the history of science anyway and scientific discovery.  The guy in the 30’s that came up with the idea that the continents were moving and they

laughed at him and said he was a crackpot.  Then all of a sudden someone in the

1960’s begins to realize that not only was he right but they can begin to

demonstrate the efficacy.  Someone else who was the leading scientist of his

time  who had everything to say becomes just a clown in terms of history, so you

know you just do the work.

Mr. Ahmadinejad, the president of the Islamic Republic of Iran, visited New York in September of 2007.  He was invited to speak at Columbia University on September 24, 2010.  Among the different issues that he talked about, which elicited some applause from the audience,  he was also asked the following question; “Mr. President” a student asked, “Iranian women are now denied basic human rights and your government has imposed a doctrine of punishment including execution on Iranian citizens who are homosexuals.  Why are you doing those things?”  President Ahmadinejad through a translator replied “… We in Iran do not have homosexuals like in your country.  We don’t have that in our country, in Iran there are no things like this.  We don’t know who told you those things.”  This prompted laughter and booing of the audience.

Mr. Ahmadinejad in a way is right.  There was no homosexuality “like this” in the United States too about fifty years ago.  There were no gays in the military, the policy of “don’t ask don’t tell” was unheard of, let alone repealing it.  There was no issue of gay marriage.  Such issues were unheard of. So one may ask, where did this issue come from and how did this issue gain such importance today in the United States.  The answer to this question is that the issue of homosexuality existed then, but was harshly repressed and therefore was partly hidden and partly denied.  Now how does this matter relate to orgonomy and what is the Reichian prospect of it?

The character analytic technique which was discovered and introduced by Dr. Wilhelm Reich, leads us to the recognition of the human psychological structure in a way that is different from the previously comprehended one.  It leads us to the realization that the human psychological structure is composed of three layers.  The outer layer, the middle layer, and the core.  The outer layer of the human character structure is the one that the person superficially presents to the world, usually restrained, polite, compassionate, social, etc.  The middle layer however, through character analytic techniques, is discovered to be full of conflicting feelings and secondary drives consisting of different sexual and violent perversions, desires, fantasies, rage, sadness, and in short, whatever is repressed.  This corresponds to the Freudian  unconscious segment.  In the core however, we find the good characteristics of humans, with genuine love, compassion, sexual desire with love and affection, industrious potentials, etc.  Dr. Reich, in the book, Mass Psychology of Fascism, says the following;

“Extensive and painstaking therapeutic work on the human character has led me to the conclusion that, as a rule, we are dealing with three different layers of the biopsychic structure in the evaluation of human reactions.  As I demonstrated in my book Character-Analysis, these layers of the character structure are deposits of social development, which function autonomously.  On the surface layer of his personality, the average man is reserved, polite, compassionate, responsible, conscientious. There would be no social tragedy of the human animal if this surface layer of the personality were in direct contact with the deep natural core. This, unfortunately, is not the case.  The surface layer of social cooperation is not in contact with the deep biologic core of one’s selfhood; it is borne by a second, an intermediate character layer, which consists exclusively of cruel, sadistic, lascivious, rapacious, and envious impulses.  It represents the Freudian “unconscious” or “what is repressed”; to put it in the language of sex-economy, it represents the sum total of all so-called “secondary drives…

If one penetrates through this destructive second layer, deeper into the biologic substratum of the human animal, one always discovers the third, deepest, layer, which we call the biologic core. In this core, under favorable social conditions, man is an essentially honest, industrious, cooperative, loving and, if motivated, rationally hating animal.”

Our social structure and social institutions correspond to our individual character structure. In fact, it can not be any different.  Under the superficial but harsh repression of strict, compulsory moralistic social structure, many desires and impulses are repressed.  Some of these core impulses become distorted because of environmental pressures.  Aggression becomes hate, spite, meanness, etc. Warm, open contact becomes superficiality, turbidness etc.  Others are simply repressed because they are punishable or merely dishonored in society.

We know by our experience in treatment of individuals that unless the functions of the outer layer are exposed and the secondary layer is revealed, one cannot reach the individual’s core.  This process is also true in the social domain. In the book Reich Speaks of Freud, Reich says the following:

“It goes very deep. I don’t know whether you are acquainted with the orgonomic picture of the structure of the human character–the  “core,” the “middle layer,” and the “periphery.”  It gives one a very practical tool with which to work with patients.  It is a bio-energetic tool.  You can’t get at the human character by psychoanalytic means.   You have to reach it with character analysis or orgone therapy.  Human beings live emotionally on the surface, with their surface appearance.  Correct? In order to get to the core where the natural, the normal, the healthy is, you have to get through that middle layer. And in that middle layer there is terror.  There is severe terror. Not only that, there is murder there. All that Freud tried to subsume under the death instinct is in that middle layer. He thought it was biological. It wasn’t. It is an artifact of culture. It is a structural malignancy of the human animal.  Therefore, before you can get through to what Freud called Eros or what I call orgonotic streaming or plasmatic excitation (the basic plasma action of the bio-energetic system), you have to go through hell. Just through hell!  This is true for the physician as well as the patient.  In this hell, there is confusion, schizophrenic breakdown, melancholic depression.  They are all there. I have this in Character Analysis. I don’t have to repeat it. But why bring the Life Force in here?  There is only one reason: to show you why nobody wanted to touch it or to get at the biological core where I was working at that time. Before you can reach that core, you must encounter hate, terror, murder. All these wars, all the chaos now–do you know what that is to my mind? Humanity is trying to get at its core, at its living, healthy core. But before it can be reached, humanity has to pass through this phase of murder, killing and destruction. What Freud called the destructive instinct  is in the middle layer.  A bull is mad and destructive when it is frustrated.   Humanity is that way , too. That means that before you can get to the real thing–to love, to life, to rationality- you must pass through hell. This has very grave implications for social development.  I don’t want to go into it now, but I wanted to explain why the psychoanalysts refused, unconsciously, to touch what I was working with.  If I had fully known its consequences, I would have run myself.  I don’t want to make myself better than the others, you understand. At that time, I would have run.  I couldn’t run today.  The bridges are burned behind me.  Looking back,  I understand it. It is very dangerous…”

So, if our observations, our theories, our deductions and generalizations are right and logical, which seem to be so as we see them in our patients, and which history also reflects and attests to it’s righteousness in the social domain, then Mr. Ahmadinejad and for that matter any other leader, should expect the emergence of repressed elements, some of them undesirable and not social, and some of them progressive and social, but unacceptable in the present day social structure.   This is of course if the repressive, compulsory authoritarian and harshly punitive structure in the process of democratic movements softens up.  This, from our point of view, will be a good thing, and is the only hope that eventually societies and humanity will reach to it’s core and embrace the values that humans are ordained to have.

Orgonomy, based on principles and guidelines set forth by Dr.Wilhelm Reich, can provide an understanding of natural and healthy versus unnatural and distorted, and can function as pharos to navigate through this process.

In August of 1939, Reich received a visa to travel to the United States.  On August 19th, he set sail on the last boat to leave Norway for the United States before WWII broke out on September 3rd.

Dr. Theodore Wolfe had a crucial role in Reich’s immigration to the United States and his role needs to be acknowledged and appreciated.

Dr. Myron Sharraf

Dr Myron Sharraf, himself a student of Dr. Reich, in Fury on Earth, which is a biography of Dr. Reich gives the following account:

“Confronted by the opposition of his enemies, the license requirement to practice therapy, and uneasiness of his friends, Reich no longer found Norway a viable home for his work. A possible solution emerged when, late in 1938 a psychiatrist came from the United States to study with Reich.  Theodore P. Wolfe, then 37 years old, had been born in Switzerland, and had acquired most of his medical and psychiatric training there before moving to America.  At the time he met Reich, he was a member of the Department of Psychiatry at the Columbia Medical School, and had done research for pioneering psychosomatic text, Emotions and Bodily Changes, written by his former wife, H. Flanders Dunbar.  Reich’s writings and his whole approach deeply impressed Wolfe, so he resolved to visit Norway, to undergo therapy with Reich, and to study his work first hand.

For Wolfe, as for many others, meeting Reich and his work, represented a turning point in his life.  As Gladis Mayer, Wolfe’s last wife, wrote in an obituary;

Dr. Theodore P. Wolfe

“Real” life began for Dr. Wolfe with his work with Dr. Reich. He would describe how everything he read, saw, heard, and felt changed in quality; and the vague impatient emptiness (he had previously experienced) began, with a great anxiety to be filled up.  A bond of gratefulness to Reich stemmed from that deepest core of himself which Reich had made accessible to him.  And he loved Reich, as Neill and Roknes and other old associates loved him.

In the course of his visit, Wolfe suggested that Reich move to America, where he could find a more congenial atmosphere.  Exhausted by Oslo’s situation, fearing the outbreak of a disastrous war in Europe, attracted to settling in America ever since 1933, Reich leaped at the idea.  Furthermore, Wolfe now offered to help facilitate the move.

Like others who at least in the early stages of their relationship with Reich, were  grateful for the contact with their “core”, Wolfe was prepared to expend endless energy to aid Reich and to further his own association with him.  On Wolfe’s return to the United States, he managed to obtain an official request from an academic institution for Reich to teach in the United States, an invitation that was necessary for a residence visa.  The new school for social research was prepared to make such an offer, after Wolfe and Walter Briehl, another American and an old student of Reich’s put up several thousand dollars guaranteeing Reich’s salary.  However the immigration question was so complicated at that time with the influx of refugees from Nazi Germany, that Wolfe had to pull strings through Adolf Behler, a high official in the U.S. State department for Reich to actually get the visa.  Reich meanwhile was waiting impatiently in Norway.  He had sent his secretary and laboratory assistant, Gertrude Geesland, ahead to New York in May 1939 to find a new home and to setup the laboratory.  Reich expected to follow in a matter of weeks, but the bureaucratic entanglement entailed a longer delay.

The months of waiting proved difficult.  In anticipation of an early departure, Reich had stopped his research, teaching and therapeutic activity.  He had sold his car to Ola Roknes and dismantled his apartment, staying with friends.  He and Elsa still saw each other, but she had definitely decided not to accompany him to the States then, although she did not exclude the possibility at a later time.

……Above all there was the steady drumbeat of his work.  He could not wait till the bureaucracy decided to let him leave.  With his talent for finding the good news in the bad, he had the feeling that the move to America, uprooting as it was, might help his work to go forward.  He also told Roknes that without his work he simply could not live.

In August 1939 Reich finally received his visa.  On August 19, he set sail on the Stavenyer Fyord, the last boat to leave Norway for the States before World War II broke out.”

In relation to this topic, we also would like to post excerpts from a letter that Dr. Reich wrote to the Minister of Justice on May 4th of 1939 requesting a passport.  This letter is published in Beyond Psychology, a book of letters and journals that spans from 1934 to 1939 and is significant because it reflects Dr. Reich’s uncompromising character when the truth was at stake.

To Minister of Justice Lie

4 May 1939

My dear Sir:

The following matter is extremely urgent, difficult, and embarrassing to me.  I have therefore taken the liberty of addressing this request for advice and assistance to you personally.

As a consequence of last year’s campaign against my scientific work, I have not received an extension of my residency and work permit for the past year and a half.  I now have an appointment to do research at Columbia University and require a traveling document in order to emigrate.  In accordance with instructions from Mr. Konstad, I duly approached the German embassy in Oslo. Mr. Annaeus  Schjodt, a lawyer, and Mrs. Constance Tracey can both testify to the fact that the German embassy issued a passport to me under the name of Wilhelm Israel Reich and bearing the stamp “Jew.”  The above name does not correspond with my other documents and I refused to accept a passport in which my name had been changed without my request.  My letter to the German embassy will attest to this.  Mr Schjodt then approached Mr. Konstad in order to obtain a Norwegian alien’s passport such as is customarily issued.  In response to this request Mr. Konstad replied that I was neither a Norwegian nor a stateless person and therefore not entitled to a Norwegian alien’s passport.  However, he was willing to issue me an identity paper bearing my photograph for the passage…

…This matter would be of no importance had I not already booked a passage for 20 May.  I fear that a delay in the issuance of the papers will not only render my passage on the scheduled date impossible but also cause me great extra expense.

I therefore urgently request that you, esteemed Sir, take the necessary steps so that a Norwegian alien’s passport can be issued to be by the beginning of next week.  Since I shall be employed by Columbia University in New York, the American consul in Oslo has promised me a nonquota visa.

Video from Fall 2009 conference of the Institute for Orgonomic Science.

Video from Fall 2009 conference of the Institute for Orgonomic Science.

Recently, the American media was barraged with news of the harassment of homosexuals and suicides that followed.  The New York Times on Wednesday, October 27th, 2010, reported the following regarding the suicide of a young promising violinist:

“Tyler Clemeni was an 18 year old Rutgers University freshman when he jumped from the George Washington Bridge in an apparent suicide in September 2010, days after he had been secretly filmed during an intimate encounter which was then broadcast on the Internet.

Mr. Clementi’s roommate and another classmate were charged in the case.  Authorities say the students used a camera in Mr. Clementi’s dormitory room to stream an intimate encounter involving Mr. Clementi live on the Internet.

Three days later, Mr. Clementi, an accomplished violinist, jumped into the Hudson River.  Witnesses told the police they saw a man jump of the bridge just before 9 p.m., said Paul J. Browne, the New York Police Department’s chief spokesman.  Officers discovered a wallet there with Mr. Clementi’s identification, Mr. Browne said.”    – The New York Times, Wednesday October 27th, 2010.

Another newsletter reported the following;

“Either way, Clementi’s death marks the fifth suicide by a gay teen in the past month.  Justin Aaberg, openly gay and just 15, committed suicide after being bullied in school.  Billy Lucas, also 15 wasn’t out, but was mercilessly bullied in school.  He hanged himself.  Asher Brown, 13, who told his parents he was gay the morning he shot himself in the head, was also bullied.  Ash Seth Walsh, also just 13, hanged himself after suffering from years of bullying.”  – Julie Gerstein, The Frisky.com, October 1st, 2010.

An abnormal condition in which a person takes pleasure in hurting another, an unwholesome love of cruelty, excessive cruelty, in the Webster dictionary is defined as sadism.  In psychiatry and psychoanalysis, sadism is attributed to different psychological mechanisms, for example, a sexual impulse which is manifested as a tendency to strike, abuse, or humiliate the object.   It is also defined as a defense against castration, fear, and the fear of ones own sexual excitement.  What might occur within the subject passively, is instead done actively to others-  “identification with aggressor”.  It is also described that the perversion of sadism depends upon the fusion of destructive energy with libidinal energy.  The discharge of aggression is in itself pleasurable, but sadism further implies pleasure in destruction of others.

There is no satisfactory explanation in general psychiatry and psychoanalysis of how this mechanism occurs, where and why the destructive energy appears, nor how it fuses with sexual energy.

In orgonomy however, we consider such behavior to be a consequence of the distortions of primary drives, which in orgonomy are called secondary drives.

We have described the emergence of secondary drives from primary drives in different articles in this journal.  In short, character analytic techniques in orgonomy  lead to the comprehension of  the human psychological structure, which schematically is composed of core, middle layer and outer layer, or periphery.  The  primary impulses which are emitted from the core of the organism, the impulses of love, sexuality, and rational anger, are fiercely blocked by outer prohibitions.  In due time, such environmental and outer inhibitions through the process of armoring, become internalized within the structure of the person. Suppression of primary motives in turn causes distortions and its distorted version in orgonomy is called secondary drives.  Secondary drives may turn inward and cause neurotic symptoms that agonize and torment the person with neurotic symptoms such as obsessional thoughts, anxiety, panic attacks, phobias, etc., or it may turn into a destructive force which operates  in the social scene. The latter in  orgonomy is called  “the emotional plague”.  The development of the secondary drives are related to the mechanism of armoring which is described by Dr.Reich in different books, most essentially in Character Analysis and The Function of The Orgasm and also is described in different articles in this journal.  Hence, the orgonomic model of the human psychological structure is the following: On the surface layer, the personality of the average man is polite, compassionate and conscientious.  At the core, he is honest, benevolent and longing for love. However the surface layer and the core are separated from each other by the middle layer, an intermediate layer which is the product of the outcome of forces that are on one hand primary and genuine, and  on the other hand opposing forces from the outer layer, from the armor. As a result of this conflict and stagnation, secondary motives develop in the  intermediate layer, which  consists of cruel, sadistic, lascivious, rapacious and envious impulses.  These secondary layers represent the Freudian “unconscious”, or that which is repressed.  In the language of orgonomy and sex economy, it represents the sum total of all secondary drives.

Dr. Reich, in The Function of the Orgasm, under the topic of destruction, aggression, and sadism, states the following:

“In psychoanalysis, the term aggression, sadism and destruction and death instincts were used randomly and interchangeably.  Aggression seemed identical with destruction which in turn was “the death instinct directed against the world”.  And sadism remained the primary partial instinct which begins to be active at a certain stage of sexual development.   On the basis of their origin and intentions, I attempted to assess all the human actions that are included under the concept of “hate”.  In my clinical work, I never encountered a death instinct, a will to die, as a primary instinct corresponding to sexuality or hunger.  All psychic manifestations that could be interpreted as “death instincts” proved to be a product of neurosis. Such for instance was the case in suicide, which was either an unconscious revenge on another person with whom one identified, or an action to escape the enormous unpleasure caused by an extremely embroiled life situation.

The patients fear of death could always be traced back to a fear of catastrophe and this fear, in turn, could be traced back to genital anxiety.  Moreover, analysts who  accepted the theory of the death instinct frequently confused anxiety and instinct.  It was not until 8 years later that the matter became clear to me; fear of death and dying is identical with unconscious orgasm anxiety.  The alleged death instinct, the longing for disintegration, for nothingness, is the unconscious longing for orgastic resolution of tension….

A living creature develops destructive impulses when it wants to destroy a source of danger. In this case the destruction or killing of the object is a biologically meaningful goal.  The original motive is not pleasure in destruction. Rather the destruction serves the “life instincts”…. In short, the impulse to destroy serves a primary biological will to live. As such it does not have a sexual connotation.  It’s goal is not pleasure, even though liberation from unpleasure is an experience similar to pleasure.  ……. An animal does not kill another animal because it takes pleasure in killing. It would be sadistic murder for the sake of pleasure.  It kills because it is hungry or because it feels that it’s life is threatened. Thus, here too,  the destruction serves the “life instincts”.

Aggression in the strict sense of the word, has to do neither with sadism nor with destruction, the word means “approach”.  Every positive manifestation of life is aggressive, the act of sexual pleasure as well as the act of destructive hate, the sadistic act as well as the act of producing food. Aggression is the life expression of musculature, of the system of movement.  The reassessment of the aggression is of enormous importance for the rearing of children.  Much of the  inhibition of aggression which our children have to endure to their own detriment, is the result of equating “aggressive” with “wicked” or “sexual”. Aggression is always an attempt to provide the means for the gratification of a vital need.  Aggression is not an instinct in the strict sense of the word; rather it is an indispensable mean of gratifying every instinctual impulse. The latter is inherently aggressive because the tension demands gratification. Hence there is a destructive, a sadistic, a loco-motor and as sexual aggressiveness.

If aggressive sexuality is denied gratification, the urge to gratify it in spite of denial continues to make itself felt.  Indeed, the impulse arises to experience the desired pleasure at all costs.  The need for aggression begins to drown out  the need for love. If the pleasurable goal is completely eliminated, ie. made unconscious, or imbued with anxiety, then aggression which originally was only a means, becomes a tension releasing action in itself.  It becomes pleasurable as an expression of life, thus giving rise to sadism.  Hate develops as a result of the exclusion of original goal of love. And the hate is most intense when the act of loving or being loved is blocked.  This is what brings the sexually motivated destructive intention into aggressive actions. An example of this would be sexual murder. Its precondition is the complete blocking of the ability to enjoy genital pleasure in a natural way. Thus the perversion of sadism is a mixture of primary  sexual impulse and secondary destructive impulse.  it does not exist anywhere else in the animal kingdom and is exclusively a characteristic of a man acquired late in development, a secondary drive.

Every seemingly arbitrary destructive action is a reaction of the organism to the frustration of a vital need, especially a sexual need.”

As we described earlier, these destructive impulses in the social scene, in orgonomy are called the emotional plague .  In character analysis, there is a chapter that Dr. Reich devoted to the description of the emotional plague.  He gives examples of specific reactions of inflicted people with emotional plague. Here is the description of such behaviour in the area of sexuality:

“The sexuality of the genital character (normal healthy character) is essentially determined by the basic natural laws of biological energy. He is so constituted that naturally takes pleasure in the sexual happiness of other, in the same way, he’s indifferent to perversion and has an aversion to pornography. The genital character is easily recognized by the good contact he has with healthy children. He considers it quite natural that children and adolescents are essentially sexually oriented.  The same way he foresees or at least strives to fulfill the “often socially restricted” demand which result from those biological facts.  This attitude exists spontaneously, whether a corresponding knowledge has been acquired or not….

In the plague-ridden character, the process is usually as follows;  The secondary drive held in check by the cultural and religious ideals break through.  The sexuality of the character afflicted with emotional plague is usually sadistic and pornographic. It is characterized by parallel existence of sexual lasciviousness (owing to the incapacity to achieve gratification) and sadistic moralism. This dualism is a part of his structure;  The plague afflicted individual could not change it even if he had insight  and knowledge.  In terms of his structure he cannot be anything but pornographically lascivious and sadistically moralistic at the same time.  This is the core of the character structure of the plague afflicted person.   This structure develops viscous hatred against every process which provokes its own orgastic yearning and hence orgasm anxiety…..

Clinical investigation leaves no room or doubt that sexual gossip or defamation afford these emotionally plagues individual a kind of perverse sexual gratification; they can thus attain sexual pleasure without the natural genital function…..”

Looking to the problem of homosexual harrasment from this point of view, from the point of view of irrational hatred attributed to the emotional plague, raises the following question; If the distortion and sickness is part of the emotional structure of the perpetrator of the harassment, then why should the victim feel ashamed and guilty and commit suicide?

One of my patients, who was a lady in her late 70’s, and had chronic depression with many hospitalizations and later committed suicide, once told me that in her youth she had a sexual encounter and was made to feel ashamed of it.  Another middle-eastern patient who had a pregnancy out of wedlock and  later  had a psychotic breakdown, upon admission to the psychiatric ward, in her confused and psychotic state, painted the word “whore” all over her face with lipstick.

The answers to these questions need individual analysis of the structure of each victim.  However, we can rationally speculate that a significant part of it is the anti-sexual upbringing of children that plants the seed of guilt and shame around sexual activity.  It is however their right and naturally constituted.

In the orgonomy literature, specifically literature that has been written by Dr. Wilhelm Reich, we come across  the term “sex politics”.

Sexual oppression and authoritarian systems, according to orgonomic theories, are two inseparable entities and one can not exist without the other. Fascistic and dictatorial regimes therefore would not exist without the sexual oppression of the masses and without the anti-sexual upbringing of children and adolescents. Hence the political movements that revolve around sexual freedom gains significance in establishing democracy in society and in orgonomic literature is called sex politics. All oppressive regimes must also sexually oppress  the masses, otherwise they would not survive.  A generation that grows without the denial of embracing love and by the inclusion of sexual satisfaction in their lives, will grow healthy and will not submit to authoritarian fascistic regimes. Recent history witnesses such sex political movements in Europe and USA.  These movements are spreading to different corners of the world and continue to be met with reactionary forces that are harshly fighting to suppress them.

Today we see political movements and political struggles for freedom and democracy parallel with the struggle for sexual liberation.  This matter has been well described in The Sexual Revolution written by Dr. Wilhelm Reich some seventy years ago.  Although other books of Dr. Wilhelm Reich also reflect aspects of the political struggle for sexual freedom, it is described most extensively in the book The Sexual Revolution.

Dr. Reich in The Sexual Revolution describes sex politics by giving many examples. Here we will use one example given by Dr. Wilhelm Reich.  Although some 70 years have passed from the initial publication of the first edition of this book, similar events are present today around the world, of course far more viciously wherever dictatorship is ravaging.  In this book, Dr. Reich under the topic of revolutionary youth states the following:

Courtesy of the Wilhelm Reich Infant Trust:

———————

“In the Russo-Turkish republic of Azerbaijan the revolution had claimed an enormous number of victims.  It is true that the laws were changed by the revolution, that the economic foundation was restructured, that religion had been declared a private matter of the individual, but ‘under the newly built roofs, the old cruel discipline of the harem was still raging.‘   Girls were sent to religious institutions; they were forbidden to learn how to read and write, for a literate girl might establish contact with the outside world by writing a letter, she might escape from the institution, and bring disgrace down on her family.  Girls were their fathers’ serfs.  When they were sexually mature, they became serfs of their husbands, who  they were not allowed to select themselves, whom they had never even seen prior to marriage.  Women and girls were not allowed to show their faces to a man; fully veiled, they looked through the window on to the street. They were carefully guarded on the rare occasions when they were allowed to go outside. they were not allowed to work any more than they were permitted to read a book or a newspaper. It is true that they were legally entitled to divorce, but they did not know it. Although the knout had disappeared from Russian jails, women in the harem were still being beaten. These women had to give birth unaided because there were no midwives or women physicians, and to show oneself to a male doctor was forbidden by their religion, which they practiced in secrecy.

In the middle of the 1920’s, Russian women founded a central women’s club which organized education. Gradually, education spread.  The schoolrooms became crowded and girls listened to white-haired teachers (young men were not permitted to teach). Thus, many years after the outbreak of the social revolution, the “revolution of mores” began. These girls learned that there were countries with a coeducational system where women engaged in sports, went to the theater unveiled, attended meetings and took an active role in them, and generally participated in the life of their time.

This sex-political movement became widespread. Fathers, brothers, and husbands felt their interests were threatened when they learned what was being discussed in the women’s club. They circulated the rumor that the club was a whorehouse. As a result, it became dangerous to visit it. According to a report by Balder Olden, girls who attended had been scalded with hot water and had dogs set on them. Even in 1923, girls who wore sports shirts that exposed arms and legs risked death. Hence it is understandable that even the idea of a love relationship outside of marriage was far from the thoughts of even the most courageous women. In spite of all, there were many girls who, within themselves, had broken with tradition and were determined to take up the fight for the sexual liberation of young women.  They were exposed to incredible martyrdom. They were of course immediately recognized; public opinion considered them lower than prostitutes, and none of them could ever expect that a man would marry her.

In 1928, the twenty-year-old Sarila Haliliva ran away from home, called meetings, and proclaimed the sexual emancipation of women.  She went unveiled to the theater; she addressed  the women in the clubs; she walked around in a bathing suit at the beach and in sports arenas.  Her father and brothers held court over her, condemned her to death, and cut her up alive.  This happened in 1928, eleven years after the outbreak of the social revolution. Her murder provoked a tremendous upsurge of the sex-political movement among women.  Her body was taken away from her parents and was placed in the club, where an honor guard of boys and girls guarded it day and night. Girls and women streamed in droves to the club.  Sarila’s murders were executed, and since then neither fathers nor brothers have dared to take similar measures against women’s and youth movements.

Balder Olden describes these events as a general cultural movement. More concretely, it was unquestionably a sex-political upheaval which, for the first time, stimulated the cultural consciousness of women and girls.  By 1933, 1,044 girls were studying at the university; there were 300 midwives as well as 150 women’s and girls’ clubs, which produced many writers and journalists.  The chairman of the Supreme Court was a woman; another woman presided over a Soviet commission.  Women were trained as engineers, doctors and airplane pilots. Revolutionary youth had won it’s right to live.”

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Sex political movements are important political movements that inevitably leads to democracy in society and physical and emotional health in individual. From our point of view, from orgonomic point of view, these political movements should be supported by all who prefer democracy over dictatorship and health over sickness.

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