[orgone] accumulating craziness and stripping away inhibitions

Wilhelm Reich, [whose brother Third became famous in a separate sphere], was operating at a time of great craziness, the 30s. My own study is more from the 1890s through to the early 30s, when equally weird things were happening and social experimentation was at it's height.

One manifestation of this was the hypothesized existence of orgone which, as Wiki says, entailed:

... an extrapolation of the Freudian concept of libido as a physical, bioenergetic force, developed by psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich in the late 1930s, who generalized and abstracted it far beyond Freud's semi-metaphoric use.

Reich's followers, such as Charles R. Kelley, went to the extent of claiming orgone to be the creative substratum in all of nature, and compared it to Mesmer's animal magnetism, the Odic force of Carl Reichenbach and Henri Bergson's Élan vital.

The dangers in upgrading a metaphor into a science and surrounding it with scientific trappings is especially poignant with orgone:

Freud focused on a solipsistic conception of the mind, in which unconscious and inherently selfish primal drives (primarilly the sexual drive, or libido) were suppressed or sublimated by internal representations (cathexes) of parental figures; for Reich libido was a life-affirming force repressed by society directly ...

In plain English, if you could release this sexual energy and accumulate it in an orgone accumulator, then the sky was the limit. With a world backdrop of Nazi Germany, eugenics and the like, such a concept was always going to be seized upon by both the bohemian world and twould be examined by the crazies at the top of the political tree.

Politically, it was a double-edged sword in that while it could be harnessed as a destructor of the old order of values and society, a desirable outcome for the new order, it was, at the same time, going to free humans from all social constraints and that was something up with which governments were not going to put, especially Nazi Germany, where Reich had offended Hitler anyway.

Orgone was at once anarchic and destructive, a cranked up form of hedonistic rush, where one followed basic impulses rather than any consensus of rules. It was free sex with a codicil that the only law was to do as you wished, every last person, in some sort of sexual healing claimed to set the world to rights.

In a largely sympathetic article on Reich, Gerald Grow wrote:

During the 1940s, Reich became more and more isolated, working with a small circle of trainees and close supporters and a wider circle of kindred spirits, including A. S. Neill, founder of Summerhill school, and William Steig, the cartoonist ... Like many charismatic figures, Reich could be overbearing (Sharaf reports that Reich warned one student: “Keep away from me. I am overwhelming. I burn through people.”), and his faith in his creative thinking repeatedly led him beyond what some considered to be sanity.

Therein lie two interesting threads - A.S. Neill and the borderline of sanity. Anyone over forty years of age in education is probably going to know that Neill's theories had enormous currency in education, as Spock's did with families and were one of the key factors leading to the disastrous 70s "open plan" education experiment on which it is hard to find any negative online reviews, due to education being dominated today largely by the same people. Nevertheless, this touches on the issue:

The construction of open classroom schools declined by the mid-1970s. Concerns about noise and distraction encouraged educators to return to a traditional approach. Although the open classroom movement lost popularity, certain aspects of its philosophy and methods were reshaped and used.

Were they ever and now you can observe the result - less literacy, less numeracy, inadequate socialization and inadequate interface between education and the corporate world into which graduates must survive.

But that's another issue.