Wilhelm Reich and Orgonomy: The Brilliant Psychiatrist and His Revolutionary Theory of Life Energy

by Ola Raknes

In this book Ola Raknes presents important aspects of the life and work of Wilhelm Reich and describes how Reich discovered orgone energy. Raknes, a close friend of Reich, has written his book in three parts. The first deals with Reich's logical, step-by-step development of ideas, based on his clinical experience and scientific experimentation. In the second part he presents basic facts about orgonomy, the science of orgone energy, and how natural science and human functioning can be understood from an energetic point of view. The third part is concerned with the orgonomic concept of health and its social consequences. This book is for anyone fascinated by nature, from the general public to physicians and psychiatrists, to other scientific and mental health professionals.

Genres: Psychology, Nonfiction

151 pages, Paperback

First published December 30, 1971

About the author

Ola Raknes was a Norwegian psychologist, philologist and non-fiction writer. Born in Bergen, Norway, he was internationally known as a psychoanalyst in the Reichian tradition. He has been described as someone who spent his entire life working with the conveying of ideas through many languages and between different epistemological systems of reference, science and religion. For large portions of his life he was actively contributing to the public discourse in Norway. He has also been credited for his contributions to strengthening and enriching the Nynorsk language and its use in the public sphere. [wikipedia]

Reviews

[Halvor (Raknes) · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm Ola Raknes' great grandson. I read this book about ten years ago and found it very well written and very informative and inspiring. My great grandfather was known for his ability to popularize difficult academic material, and this book is a classic example of that. Strangely, even though its first edition was published in Norway by the Norwegian University Press ("Universitetsforlaget", now defunct), the book was never translated into Norwegian.

I'm 51 years old now, but oddly enough, it wasn't until about 12-15 years ago that I started acquainting myself with the work of my great grandfather and that of Wilhelm Reich. Among the rest of Ola's descendants I'm unaware of any other than myself who have taken up working with this material. It is still too contentious, and although I can understand this, I find it to be a sad state of affairs.

Although Ola made a conscientious effort to remain close to Reich's continued research, even after Reich left Norway for the US just before WWII broke out, and also, as this book testifies to, kept himself fully abreast of Reich's evolving his research into orgone physics, which he hadn't basically began while he was still in Europe, my great grandfather in his practice as a therapist remained with his focus on vegetotherapy and character analysis, Reich's earlier modalities from which orgone therapy developed. I personally do not believe this was due to him not being capable of following Reich into his newer scientific ventures, but rather a result of a conscious choice to retain his focus on the most important part of Reich's discoveries. I strongly believe that Reich's first discipline, which came out of his discovery of the function of the orgasm (detailed in The Function of the Orgasm) and which he called Sex Economy, remains the most important discovery he made. People tend (very strongly) to emphasize the orgone-related material. I can understand that since that is all very exotic, but the neglect this has caused insofar as people not studying the more basic Sex Economy, I find regrettable. The essay below was published in 1942 and later twice in Norwegian books (1949 (Fri vokster : psykologiske essays) and 1975 (Det Levande i muskelpanseret : om kropp og sjel, muskelspenningar og psykoterapi, seksualitet og tilhøve mellom barn og vaksne)), and apart from being another excellent example of Ola Raknes' qualities as an educator and communicator, I personally think it is the most important text he ever wrote.

https://www.scribd.com/doc/286104088/...

[Staffan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Best introduction to the genius that was Reich. Great overview of all his key findings and their implications. My sense is that the rest of the world is still largely trying to catch up with Reich. He may very well have been 100-150 years ahead of his time.

[Nick Davies · Rating 2 out of 5]

I have mixed thoughts on this. As a biography of Wilhelm Reich, broad and interesting, the author has done a decent job here. As a book to teach about the field of orgonomy, less so. As a book to convince me that there was a lot of merit/truth in Reich's theories it failed utterly.

Reich, in the early part of the Twentieth Century, expanded on Freudian psychiatry with a theory about orgone, life energy, and its role in everything. What followed was many years of 'research' involving machines to bust clouds, electrical measurements, boxes with metal/organic walls, microscopes looking at sterilised matter wobbling about, discussions of release via orgasms, and all kinds of other stuff. Reich developed quite a following peaking in the 1950s.

Alas to my modern/scientific eyes it all read irritatingly flimsy. I was frustrated with the frequency with which the book stated "...but we will not go in to this here" referring to so-called proofs elsewhere which the reader was to take as fact. I was puzzled with the number of times Reich's theories were not backed up with scientific method (often they took the form of seeing something that could not at that point be explained, and then making something up to explain it - rather than postulating a hypothesis and testing it). Sadly many of the things which Reich cites as evidence would likely be explained now, many years later with a greater understanding of science, in terms of experimental artifacts and now better-defined natural phenomena.

Though interesting, it was not convincing. Overall this all felt more like someone discussing a religious movement - everything coming down to the 'it will only work if you believe it, and if it doesn't work then obviously you didn't believe it enough' argument, and a series of mysterious half-explanations which could not be verified.

[noah]

Crazy ass book

[Daniel]

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