Unveiling Wilhelm Reich: The Mind, Body, and Orgonomy Connection

Interview with Dr. Edward Chastka

The mind-body connection is undeniable—yet allopathic medicine doesn’t know what to do with it. Or rather, it actively works to discredit it. Psychiatry, however, has weaponized this constructed ignorance to sell a corrupt yet highly profitable model of the mind-body connection.

I had come across Wilhelm Reich’s name a few times in the comments but had never heard of orgonomy, so I was grateful for the opportunity to learn about both from a subject matter expert.

I deeply appreciate the time, care, and detail that went into these answers.

With thanks to Dr. Edward Chastka.

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1. Ed, could you please tell us about your journey into psychiatry and what initially drew you to orgonomy?

Graduating from the University of Virginia with a degree in Drama, my life was headed anywhere but medicine and psychiatry, but I was always a searcher for the truth and always looking for a good book to read. One day, while searching through the library stacks, I recalled something a friend had told me years before. “You should read Reich” he said at the end of a somewhat tipsy conversation about how important love was. That day in the stacks, I remembered his advice when I stumbled across a copy of Reich’s Character Analysis. I took it home and read it and I have never been the same. I devoured Reich’s books with a passion. First The Function of the Orgasm, then The Cancer Biopathy which lead to The Murder of Christ and People in Trouble. Anything I could get my hands on. They explained so much. I started to see people in a different way, particularly in my work as a choreographer of modern dance. I was trying to set a piece inspired by the movements of marine life on a reef, but no matter how much I tried to show the dancers how an octopus squirted, or a reef fish darted, I couldn’t change the style of their movement, this one a princess, that one a bit of a prig. Now I understood. It was character, not just something in the mind but anchored in the physical tensions of the body, unconsciously coloring everything we thought, said and did. I soon lost interest in choreography and decided I wanted to be a medical orgonomist.

2. You've mentioned being a Board Certified Medical Orgonomist with 32 years of practice. How does orgonomic training differ from traditional psychiatric training?

To be accepted for training in medical orgonomy, one must first complete medical school and a residency training program in either psychiatry or internal medicine. Psychologists and other therapists are trained in a parallel program in social orgonomy. Beyond this traditional training, we all complete a two-year didactic course followed by several years of supervised training. Most importantly, we all undergo our own treatment in medical orgone therapy. This begins well before admission to the didactic course as no one is accepted for training until their own therapy is well advanced. It is important that we personally understand armoring and the sensory streaming and emotional pulsation that takes place in our own bodies during therapy. Put another way, we must be able to tolerate and understand our own deepest emotions if we are to help our patients with theirs.

3. Wilhelm Reich's work was notably suppressed by various governments. What do you think makes his discoveries so controversial?

Reich was a revolutionary thinker and full of life. Governments are frequently controlled by people who secretly (and sometimes openly) hate life, or at least liveliness, and want to destroy it. Reich called this phenomenon the emotional plague, and it is as active today as it was in his time. We see this in the suppression of personal freedom and independent scientific investigation by governments during the Covid pandemic. This was murder disguised as being for the common good. People infected by the emotional plague cannot tolerate the spontaneous movement and creativity which is the essence of life, and they particularly hate true love, genuine work and the honest pursuit of knowledge which are the very qualities that medical orgone therapy seeks to develop.

4. You mentioned that Reich holds the distinction of having his books burned and/or banned by three different governments. Could you elaborate on the historical context of this suppression?

Reich was frequently attacked politically and professionally. He was initially embraced by the Communists because his sexpol (sexual politics) movement attracted many young people to the Communist Party. He was later accused of putting sexual politics over class struggle and was expelled from all communist organizations by 1934. In 1933 his works were banned by the Nazi regime and were burned along with the works of other authors in the Nazi book burnings that year. Almost simultaneously, he was expelled from the International Psychoanalytic Association. Reich insisted that the social causes of psychic misery had to be addressed, and he did this by speaking publicly, usually to socialist or sexual advocacy groups. The executive committee of the IPA wouldn’t tolerate his social activism. At the time they were trying to find a way to stay apolitical and coexist with the Nazis. This attempt to coexist with fascism is one of the most shameful episodes in the history of psychoanalysis. Reich fled Germany, first to Denmark and then to Sweden. In both places he was harassed by the police and refused a long-term visa. He found refuge briefly in Norway where he was attacked in the press and then escaped to the United States on one of the last passenger ships to sail before the outbreak of World War II. For a time, Reich worked peacefully in America. Then, in 1947, a woman named Mildred Brady published an article in The New Republic that was extremely critical of Reich. That same year the FDA launched an investigation that culminated in a 1954 injunction prohibiting Reich from the interstate shipment of orgone accumulators. The FDA interpreted this to include many of his books and publications which they called “labelling” for the accumulator. In 1956, Reich was arrested and imprisoned for contempt of court when one of his associates violated the injunction by shipping an accumulator across state lines. His accumulators were destroyed and his books and publications, and even some of his research materials that mentioned orgone energy or the accumulator, were publicly burned, first in 1956 and then again in 1960. Reich died while serving his sentence in Lewisburg penitentiary in 1957.

5. In your experience, what are the most common misconceptions about orgonomy and Reich's work?

The worst misconceptions about orgonomy distort Reich’s orgasm theory and his discovery of life energy which he called “orgone.”

Reich opposed compulsive, unhappy marriages, but he also opposed the “anything goes” and “free-for-all sex” that characterize what has been called the sexual revolution, which is sometimes attributed to him. His theory of sexuality emphasizes the quality of the sexual experience, an experience that can be deeply moving building strong emotional bonds between people as opposed to the casual and emotionally uncommitted sexuality which is currently promoted in some parts of Western culture.

Misconceptions about Reich’s discovery of orgone energy often include the claim that Reich invented an “orgone box” that he claimed could cure cancer. Reich did invent the orgone accumulator which, under certain atmospheric conditions, can spontaneously maintain a temperature above that of the surrounding air, but he never claimed it could cure cancer. He did report instances where treatment with the orgone accumulator shrank tumors, but he recognized that the tumour was only a superficial manifestation of the deeper energetic and metabolic process of cancer and this the orgone accumulator did not cure.

6. How would you explain the concept of "character armor" to someone encountering it for the first time? What is "muscular armor" and what is armor’s relationship to emotional health?

Most people have an intuitive understanding of character traits. Character can be courageous or cowardly, generous or miserly, easy-going or difficult, rigid or suggestible, decisive or vacillating and each person has many traits woven together to form a unitary whole, a character. Fewer people grasp the function of character which is implied in the term character armor. Character attitudes and traits are used to control or suppress emotional excitation such as anger, sadness, fear, pleasure or anxiety. It controls the way we express ourselves, but also, through armoring in the brain and sensory system, it controls and distorts our perception of other people and the world around us. It even controls our perception of ourselves. Freud’s unconscious is an example of armor blocking our perception of ourselves. Muscular armor serves the same purpose as character armor, controlling our feelings and their expression. Think of it as the way people hold themselves. A certain amount of tension in the musculature is necessary to maintain our posture, however most of us have far in excess of that. The excessive muscle tension inhibits the way we move and, over time, causes physical pain and dysfunction. Muscular armor is particularly common in the chest and diaphragm, inhibiting breathing and the circulation of the blood. This leads to many chronic diseases. Both character and muscular armor are formed in the conflicts of childhood in response to the demand that we behave in certain ways which often go against what we want, our nature.

7. What is the relationship between physical and emotional health in orgonomy. Could you explain how these are interconnected?

This is an area where orgonomy has much to offer the alternative medicine movement. Sometimes called integrative medicine, this term has always confused me because it seems to me that what alternative medicine lacks is an underlying theory or principal that integrates it. Physical and emotional health both depend on what Reich described as a functioning orgone energy economy, that is, the unimpeded buildup and discharge of orgone energy in the body. This energy is the drive behind all psychic and physical functions, and a disturbance can lead to emotional illness, physical illness, or both. Emotions are an expression of a particular movement of orgone energy in the body as a whole: pulsation. They are the expansion of energy outward or the contraction energy inward. Love and anger are expansive emotions whereas sadness and fear are contractions. Emotion is closely related to the autonomic nervous system. Pulsation takes place in individual organs and organ systems as well, breathing, the beating of the heart and even the movements of the bowel and bladder are examples. Pulsation can be inhibited by character and muscular armoring which leads to diseases of both the emotions and the physical body.

8. What role does the orgasm function play in Reich's understanding of human health and well-being?

Early in his psychoanalytic career, Reich observed that patients who developed a gratifying sex life during therapy were more likely to maintain the progress they made in therapy than patients who did not. This was part of his dawning recognition that Freud’s psychic concept of libido was the manifestation of an actual, underlying biological energy. Reich realized that sex, and particularly the sexual orgasm, played an important part in regulating the buildup and discharge of energy, a concept he called sex-economy. A satisfying orgasm promotes physical and mental health whereas disturbances leave one vulnerable to physical and mental illnesses. Character and muscular armoring inhibit all expression including sexuality. Removing the armoring through medical orgone therapy frees sexual expression and an improved sexual life is one sign that therapy is working.

9. Could you share a particular case that demonstrates the effectiveness of medical orgone therapy?

There are many beautifully described case histories of patients treated with medical orgone therapy in the orgonomic literature. None is better than the one described in the final chapter of Character Analysis, “The Schizophrenic Split.” Get the translation by Theodore P. Wolfe if you can as it was authorized by Reich and greatly superior. The website of the American College of Orgonomy contains multiple case histories of patients who presented with different types of emotional and behavioral problems and were treated with medical orgone therapy.

10. How does medical orgone therapy use psychiatric medications differently from conventional psychiatry?

When patients ask me to prescribe psychiatric medications, I am careful to point out that no psychiatric medicine cures any psychiatric problem. Psychiatric medicines can relieve symptoms but often at a cost to the patient’s emotional liveliness, and there are various side effects, some of them serious. This does not mean that patients should never receive medication. Medication is useful to prevent a patient from breaking down and being unable to function due to depression, anxiety or psychosis. Sometimes they are necessary to help the patient tolerate the feelings that are always part of therapy until they can learn to tolerate their feelings without them. In orgonomic terms, medications help supress or bind up life energy, and protect the patient from being overwhelmed by feelings, similar to the way armor functions. It is important to point out here that armor is itself is neither good nor bad. Rather, It depends on its function in a person’s life. Armoring is protective as well as restrictive, and it is doubtful that anybody could survive in our current world without armoring. I tell patients that they are ready to begin reducing their medications when they are ready to feel more in their lives and in their therapy, and then the medication can be gradually reduced so they can learn to tolerate the increased emotion.

11. Could you explain Reich's discovery of orgone energy and its significance to therapy?

Reich began his psychiatric work with Freud and Freud’s theory of libido, a psychic concept of the drives behind impulses and instincts. Early on, he observed that drive could build up and then be discharged and that the body had an “energy economy,” that is, a person requires regular buildup and discharge of energy to remain healthy, and that discharge of energy in the sexual orgasm was an important part of this process. He observed that the buildup and discharge of drives followed the specific, four beat formula of physical tension-energetic charge-energetic discharge-physical relaxation, first in the orgasm and later in all organs governed by the autonomic nervous system. Muscular and character armoring blocks this process, so Reich designed vegetotherapy to release the patient’s armoring. During therapy, patients experienced sensations of something moving in their bodies, when parts of the armor were released. Reich called this phenomenon streaming and concluded that there must be some form of moving energy behind these feelings. Initially he thought this might be electricity and from 1934 to 1936 he did a series of experiments that demonstrated a difference in electrical potential at the skin’s surface between pleasure and anxiety. Clearly, life involves electrical energy, but Reich was unsatisfied with the model of electrical energy as the basis for life. There were too many discrepancies between the way electricity functioned and the way life functioned. Reich thought that the basic functions of a biological energy should be as apparent in single cell organisms as in human beings, so he began observing amoebas where he was able to observe the energetic functions of expansion and contraction, and biological streaming, in these single cell organisms. When he began to grow his own amoebas, he noted a new and fascinating phenomenon: amoebas did not grow from cysts, as was commonly thought, but developed from coalescence of small vesicles formed by the breakdown of leaves of grass in water. These vesicles clumped together, formed a membrane, and eventually broke loose from the decaying blade of grass as amoebas. He called the vesicles bions. Reich found that other substances formed bions as well, particularly if they were heated and then caused to swell in fluids. While observing a preparation of bions formed from sand through a monocular microscope, Reich developed inflammation in the single eye he was using for observation. When he switched to using his other eye, he developed inflammation in that eye as well. Reich realized he must be dealing with some form of radiation. Further investigation with the sand bions showed that while the sand bions had no direct effect on an electroscope, the sand bions were able to charge organic material such as rubber or cotton, which could then charge the electroscope. Exposing cotton or rubber to sunlight has the same effect. With this experiment, Reich demonstrated that the energy given off by the sand bions (and by the sun) was not electricity but could produce electricity through the charging of organic material.

The discovery of an underlying energy that was not, and did not behave like, electricity provided a physical basis for Reich’s discoveries in psychology and biology and a mechanism for understanding the relationship between psychological and physical diseases such as cancer.

12. What changes have you observed in patients who successfully complete medical orgone therapy?

The changes I see in patients are usually gradual although there can be sudden breakthroughs as well. Often the first change that I see is a change in the patient’s capacity to work or to study. As this improves, patients gradually become less tolerant of working just to make money and begin looking for work that satisfies their need for emotional expression and personal growth. Patients become more serious about happiness and satisfaction in their personal relationships as well and may pull away from old toxic or codependent relationships and look for relationships with more emotional gratification, both at work and in their personal lives. This can mean leaving a bad marriage, although more commonly marriages are improved. Symptoms such as anxiety or depression tend to fluctuate throughout therapy. As the muscular and character armor are broken down, the energy that is bound up in them is released. This can lead to emotional expansion, reaching out to the world and to new experiences and relationships, but it can also provoke anxiety until people learn to tolerate living with increased emotional and intellectual intensity, thus there is often an alteration between feelings of anxiety and feelings of well-being during therapy. I would like to emphasize that being healthy does not mean being without anxiety; anxiety is part of life. Health means not getting stuck in the state of anxiety and having the emotional and intellectual ability to face and resolve situations that are causing anxiety.

13. How has orgonomy evolved since Reich's time, and what new developments have emerged?

Many of the new developments in orgonomy since Reich’s time have been in social orgonomy. When Reich was imprisoned in the federal penitentiary in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, his students and colleagues were shocked that a man who gave so much to the world could be so persecuted. In his work, Reich wrote about the emotional plague, a true medical diagnosis, which opened the door to the scientific and bioenergetic study of destructive human behavior. Reich recognized that human armor results in intolerance and persecution of the lives of other people. This is because people who are dynamic, creative or sexual, excite us, but the armored person reacts to excitement with anxiety. The neurotic character defends himself from this anxiety with armor, but the emotional plague character doesn’t have enough armor to control his anxiety and so tries to stop the anxiety by attacking and destroying the people who provoke it, that is, people who are freer, more emotional, more creative, and more sexual. This behavior is always rationalized as being for the common good; it is to save the planet, to help the children or to promote equity but the stated reason is a disguise for the true motive which is to destroy free living life. This can be seen by looking at the effects of emotional plague behavior, which never truly saves the planet, helps the children, or promotes true equality, it just destroys people.

Reich laid the foundation for social orgonomy with his discoveries of armor, individual character and the emotional plague. In his book Man in the Trap: The Causes of Blocked Sexual Energy, first published in 1967, Dr. Elsworth Baker recognized that people not only have an individual character type but also a sociopolitical character type. Individual character is the defense we develop against the destructive effects of our environment and is usually well developed in childhood or early adolescence. The sociopolitical character type develops after the individual character and describes the way we act in the social and political world, usually to meet our own irrational needs. Sociopolitical character types very on a spectrum from the communist (progressive) on the far left to the fascist on the far right. Most people fall somewhere in between but it is crucial to understand that liberals and conservatives have different patterns of armoring; they see the world differently, think about the world differently and act in the world differently.

Dr. Charles Konia was the first to study recent political changes in the Western world from the energy perspective of orgonomy. He describes what he calls “the antiauthoritarian transformation of society,” which includes the sexual revolution of the 60s and 70s through political correctness, Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter to the recent push to “deconstruct” biological sexual differences. The antiauthoritarian transformation is not so much against authority but against the traditional authority of parents, teachers, ministers and local government officials; the traditional social institutions. It favors the authority of a leftist, pansexual, anything goes ideology propagated online and by entertainers, social media influencers and leftist politicians. This left shift in society is accompanied by a shift in people’s armoring from muscular armoring to the perceptual systems, particularly the eyes, the ears and the brain.

Functional thinking describes Reich’s technique of thinking about nature using the rules of how nature, and orgone energy, function. Dr. Peter Crist applied the principles of functional thinking to organizations and relationships and found that relationships and organizations followed the same principles. Who knew, businesses have character armor, too!

The American College of Orgonomy now offers a training course in social orgonomy and sponsors a discussion group “Readings and Social Orgonomy.”

14. For readers interested in learning more about orgonomy or potentially seeking treatment, what resources would you recommend and how can they stay connected with developments in the field?

The website of the American College of Orgonomy contains of wealth of information on the science of orgonomy and treatment with medical orgone therapy. There you will find videos and podcasts as well as select articles from The Journal of Orgonomy. Many books on orgonomy are for sale as well as subscriptions to The Journal. The web address is: aco@orgonomy.org.

For the serious student, the works of Wilhelm Reich form the core of the science of orgonomy. Character Analysis, The Function of the Orgasm, The Cancer Biopathy, The Murder of Christ, People in Trouble and Ether, God and Devil/Cosmic Superimposition are just a few of his many works. The translations by Theodore Wolf, M.D. are superior if you can find them.

Important advances in the science of orgonomy are contained in Man in the Trap by Elsworth Baker, M.D., and in social orgonomy in The Emotional Plague: The Root of Human Evil and Clueless: The Great Human Disconnect by Charles Konia, M.D.

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