Love, Work, and Knowledge
A documentary, a book, and an overview of the work and life of Wilhelm Reich
Wilhelm Reich began his intellectual life as one of Freud’s star pupils, and ended it as the prey of a McCarthy-era manhunt, dead in federal prison at the age of 60, his books burned and lab destroyed by the FDA. But Reich’s trouble with orthodoxy began in his twenties, in Berlin, where Freud evicted him from the International Psychoanalytic Society to appease the Nazis. In Oslo, researchers competing with him for grant money smeared his character and ideas in the press, resulting in a lapsed visa and a flight to America. Despite the opposition he faced, he published antifacist texts, organized sex-ed clinics for German youth, pioneered a body-oriented theory of psychoanalysis, thrice fell in love and fathered as many children, and ultimately bequeathed us a mountain of groundbreaking experimental results supporting his heterodox theory of life energy, orgone.
Love, Work, and Knowledge is a beautiful look at a brilliant man’s life and work.
Having a passing familiarity with both already, I appreciated the documentary most for its illumination of the transitions between his theoretical foci.
When he found psychoanalysis disappointingly ineffective in his clinical practice, he began to look for a physiological basis of Freud’s theory of libido.
When he found that skin conductance rose with pleasure and fell with pain, he wondered if microörganisms exhibited similar energetic responses.
When he observed amoeba forming spontaneously in a culture of grass and water, he hypothesized the existence of an aether-like energy he called orgone and began to study its properties.
When he found cancer cells shrinking and withering in the presence of orgone radiation from his miraculously conceived amoeba, he began to study orgone’s potential as a treatment for cancer.
When he noticed that orgone effects were enhanced within faraday cages meant to shield his experiments from electromagnetic interference—and moreso when the cages were covered in a layer of organic material—he built orgone accumulators that extended the lifespan of cancer mice.
And when dark clouds refused to leave the sky above his Rangely, Maine lab where an experiment with radioactive matter had brought an energetic blight to the lab’s environs, he dispersed them with an array of pipes connected to water that he called a cloud buster and began studying atmospheric orgone.
While these pivotal moments tell the story of Reich’s theoretical evolution, they fail to capture the compelling results of his studies that make his work worthy of re-examination today, something James Strick, Ph.D. has been asking scientists to consider since publishing his book Wilhelm Reich, Biologist in 2016.
If his theories are correct, we stand to reap a bountiful harvest in terms of human well-being and understanding of the natural world.