The concept of orgone belongs to Reich's later work after he emigrated to the US. Reich's early work was based on the
Freudian concept of the
libido, though influenced by sociological understandings with which Freud disagreed but which were to some degree followed by other prominent theorists such as
Herbert Marcuse and
Carl Jung. While Freud had focused on a
solipsistic conception of mind in which unconscious and inherently selfish primal drives (primarily the sexual drive, or libido) were suppressed or sublimated by internal representations (
cathexes) of parental figures (the
superego), for Reich libido was a life-affirming force repressed by society directly. For example, in one of his better-known analyses, Reich observes a workers' political rally, noting that participants were careful not to violate signs that prohibited walking on the grass; Reich saw this as the state co-opting unconscious responses to parental authority as a means of controlling behavior. He was expelled from the Institute of Psycho-analysis because of these disagreements over the nature of the libido and his increasingly political stance. He was forced to leave Germany soon after Hitler came to power. s, a device which supposedly could influence weather by altering levels of atmospheric orgone. Reich took an increasingly
bioenergetic view of libido, perhaps influenced by his tutor
Paul Kammerer and another biologist,
Otto Heinrich Warburg. In the early 20th century, when
molecular biology was in its infancy,
developmental biology in particular still presented mysteries that made the idea of a
specific life energy respectable, as was articulated by theorists such as
Hans Driesch. As a psycho-analyst, Reich aligned such theories with the Freudian libido, while as a materialist, he believed such a life force must be susceptible to physical experiments. Reich wrote in his best-known book,
The Function of the Orgasm: "Between 1919 and 1921, I became familiar with Driesch's 'Philosophie des Organischen' and his 'Ordnungslehre'… Driesch's contention seemed incontestable to me. He argued that, in the sphere of the life function, the whole could be developed from a part, whereas a machine could not be made from a screw… However, I couldn't quite accept the transcendentalism of the life principle. Seventeen years later I was able to resolve the contradiction on the basis of a formula pertaining to the function of energy. Driesch's theory was always present in my mind when I thought about vitalism. The vague feeling I had about the irrational nature of his assumption turned out to be justified in the end. He landed among the
spiritualists." The concept of orgone resulted from this work in the psycho-physiology of libido. After Reich migrated to the US, he began to speculate about biological development and evolution and then branched into much broader speculations about the nature of the universe. He developed a therapeutic approach he called
vegetotherapy that was aimed at opening and releasing this body armor so that free
instinctive reflexes—which he considered a token of psychic well-being—could take over. ==Evaluation==