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.