orgone energy accumulator Archives

Actor Orson Bean’s book, Me and the Orgone, about his experiences with orgone therapy under Dr. Elsworth Baker, is an interesting look at a little known therapy. My one disappointment with the book is that his therapy didn’t involve the use of the orgone accumulator box that was so popular with beat generation writers and poets. According to J.D. Salinger’s daughter, he used to sit for days at a stretch in the accumulator and drink his own urine. (Daughter obviously had “issues” with dear old Dad.)

Orgone therapy involves circulating the natural flow of energy around the body by pushing and pounding and pinching various places in the body to loosen the bodily armour (defense mechanisms) that build up due to life’s traumas and layer like scar tissue. The body adapts, but is locked.

The trauma that Orson’s Bean confided to in the book was how badly he felt when his parents got rid of his dog when he was about ten and that he never cried when his mother died. It was also obvious that he felt unfulfilled sexually and that was largely the reason behind his entering into orgone therapy. Three and a half years of orgone therapy once a week accomplished more than what ten years of psychoanalysis did for him. He felt released.

Orgone therapy involves the manipulation of what has come to be called putative (non-measurable) energy or chi. It can be consider a category of energy medicine and is cathartic in nature.

See also Psychiatric home remedies.

From The Master of Lucid Dreams, a psychiatrist’s introduction into the ancient shamanic practices of Uzbekistan.

There is only one experience in daily life that unites action and perception, past and present in the same way as lucid dreams do. It is the experience of orgasm. Its unity can be also used for healing the memory demons but it is not our way of practice.

The orgasm kind of healing cure doesn’t need a partner and can be done in the privacy of your own home. Some would say you don’t need a psychiatrist, you just need a good lay or a spare hand.

Dr. Wilhelm Reich constructed something he called an orgone energy accumulator in 1940. This was based on the work he had done with Freud’s theory that traumatic events block the natural flow of energy in the body, leading to neurosis and other illnesses. The orgone accumulator involves putative (non-measurable) energy (biofields or chi). Reich was found to be in violation of the United States Food, Drug and Cosmetics Act and ordered to destroy all the machines and references to these machines. In 1956 he was found guilty of violating interstate commerce laws and jailed. He died in jail the next year. Flat earth people of the world unite!

Today, you can order orgone accumulator building kits and have them shipped anywhere you like. I understand that they are used in hospital settings. They are slowly gaining acceptance in the world of complementary and alternative medicine. Authors William Burroughs and J.D. Salinger would sit for days in one (although presumably not together). The actor Orson Bean, of all people, wrote a book Me and the Orgone about his experience with orgone therapy. He claimed that orgone therapy fixed what ten years of psychoanalysis had been unable to achieve. Wiki call the book “a strongly personal account of a man who gets a second chance at a personal sexual revolution, feeling his body beginning to change, feeling freer and more alive, and also seeing his relationships transformed.”

So, it seems to me a rather simple way to get rid of the demons of trauma while embracing who you are is to get laid, masturbate, sit in an ozone machine and/or embrace your lucid dreams. These ideas are generated and being acted upon by consumers, not psychiatrists, who are finding their own solutions to mental and physical health.