Orgone

Abstract: William Burroughs' work was dedicated to an assault upon language, traditional values and all agents of control. Produced at a time when he was at his most extreme and messianic, "The Job" lays out his abrasive, incisive, paranoiac, maddened and maddening worldview in interviews interspersed with stories and other writing. On the Beat movement, the importance of the cut-up technique, the press, Scientology, capital punishment, drugs, good and evil, the destruction of nations, Deadly Orgone Radiation and whether violence just in words is violence enough - Burroughs' insights show why he was one of the most influential writers and one of the sharpest, most startling and strangest minds of his generation.

Abstract: I was too busy at the time to do the article, but the suggested approach intrigued me and started a process of thought. My teacher, Wilhelm Reich, was a psychoanalyst and student of Freud. His work departed from the work of Freud because instead of focusing on the content, the meaning, the history of the associations of his patients, Reich began to pay special attention to the expression; not to what the patient was saying but how he was saying it. This inevitably brought him from dealing with the history, the background and interpretation of the material into what was happening here and now. Reich noted the process going on, what the body was doing, the breathing, how the patient held himself, what he did with his eyes. This led him to his first major discovery, the muscular armor, those chronic patterns of body tension through which feelings are blocked. Observing the muscular armor then carried him on to the second major finding in his life, the discovery of the life force which Reich came to call orgone energy. Reich's concept of the life force differed from the life force concept of predecessors because of the way he observed it and tied it to real natural processes. Reich went from Freud's libido and the energy of the instincts to the pulsation of the body, charge and discharge, emotion and the action of the muscular armor in blocked emotion.

Abstract: Psychoanalyst, political theorist, pioneer of body therapies, prophet of the sexual revolution-all fitting titles, but Wilhelm Reich has never been recognized as a serious laboratory scientist, despite his experimentation with bioelectricity and unicellular organisms. Wilhelm Reich, Biologist is an eye-opening reappraisal of one of twentieth-century science's most controversial figures-perhaps the only writer whose scientific works were burned by both the Nazis and the U.S. government. Refuting allegations of "pseudoscience" that have long dogged Reich's research, James Strick argues that Reich's lab experiments in the mid-1930s represented the cutting edge of light microscopy and time-lapse micro-cinematography and deserve to be taken seriously as legitimate scientific contributions. Trained in medicine and a student of Sigmund Freud, Reich took to the laboratory to determine if Freud's concept of libido was quantitatively measurable. His electrophysiological experiments led to his "discovery" of microscopic vesicles (he called them "bions"), which Reich hypothesized were instrumental in originating life from nonliving matter. Studying Reich's laboratory notes from recently opened archives, Strick presents a detailed account of the bion experiments, tracing how Reich eventually concluded he had discovered an unknown type of biological radiation he called "orgone." The bion experiments were foundational to Reich's theory of cancer and later investigations of orgone energy. Reich's experimental findings and interpretations were considered discredited, but not because of shoddy lab technique, as has often been claimed. Scientific opposition to Reich's experiments, Strick contends, grew out of resistance to his unorthodox sexual theories and his Marxist political leanings.