Einstein tested Wilhelm Reich's orgone box and blamed a temperature gradient
Wilhelm Reich claimed to have found orgone, a universal life energy he could trap in wooden boxes and use against disease, even cancer. Albert Einstein agreed to check an experiment, concluded the effect was just warmer air near the ceiling, and asked Reich not to use his name. The FDA later destroyed Reich's devices and books.
Reich began as a Freudian psychoanalyst but broke with Freud over the libido, which he saw as a life-affirming force crushed directly by society rather than by inner parental figures. His politics and theories got him expelled from psychoanalytic circles, and he left Germany soon after Hitler took power, reaching the United States in 1939. He had long been drawn to vitalist ideas, such as Hans Driesch's argument that living wholes can grow from parts in a way machines cannot, while insisting as a materialist that any life force must yield to experiment.
In America he described bions, glowing sub-cellular vesicles he believed he saw in decaying matter, and then announced a new measurable force named orgone, probably from a Greek root meaning impulse or excitement, the same one found in orgasm. He pictured it as massless and everywhere, organising matter from cells to clouds and galaxies, and blamed blocked orgone for illnesses including cancer. Neurosis, for him, was physical body armour that his vegetotherapy tried to loosen. He founded the Orgone Institute around 1942 and built orgone energy accumulators for study and treatment.
Critics saw weak controls and unchecked bias. The post-war press painted his circle as a cult of sex and anarchy, and psychoanalysts dismissed the healing claims as quackery. In 1954 the FDA won an injunction against false and misleading medical claims and interstate shipment of devices. When an associate broke it, Reich was jailed and his orgone materials were ordered destroyed; he died in 1957.
Students such as Charles Kelley carried the idea on, and an Institute for Orgonomic Science opened in New York in 1982, yet no empirical support ever emerged in medicine or physics. The US National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health groups orgone with qi and prana as putative energy fields that no reproducible method has measured. Some body psychotherapists still use his emotional-release ideas, and his accumulators featured in Dušan Makavejev's 1971 satire W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism.
Source: Orgone
