10 ms·

Wilhelm Reich on pleasure and the genesis of anxiety (2021)

110 points by rzk 3y ago

PaulHoule 3y ago
... that whole Freudian paradigm based on sex seems like it could have come from a different civilization. With Freud it seemed like something that had nothing obviously to do with sex had to do with sex whereas even by the 1970s with Kohut you were finding problems with sex really had to do with something else (narcissism) Not too long ago you could take for granted that people were intrinsically motivated by sex (e.g. like they are motivated to eat) but seeing people's behavior today (like the homosocial "man-o-sphere") I've started to question that. That is, you see the person who lives by themselves who is very disturbed if their libido is absent (I dunno, I took a Lexapro and didn't think about sex at all for a week, I didn't even think that I was thinking about sex, I just thought about other things) or people for whom sexuality seems to matter just as a sort of competition.
- sdwr 3y ago
  "Everything in the world is about sex, except sex. Sex is about power." - Bob Kazamakis
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - world2vec 3y ago
    I thought it was Oscar Wilde that said that?
    - cassepipe 3y ago
      Oscar Wilde said so many things, it has to be your go to when you don't whom to attribute a quote
    - sdwr 3y ago
      David Spader's character's said something similar on the office (probably cribbed from the quote!) https://youtu.be/XCZ4xk8Xojc?si=7kwl-5x70zHBXHxP&t=2m0s https://youtu.be/XCZ4xk8Xojc?si=7kwl-5x70zHBXHxP&t=2m0s Attributed it to him
- lr4444lr 3y ago
  > that whole Freudian paradigm based on sex seems like it could have come from a different civilization That's pretty much the point Freud makes in "Civilization and its Discontents": we as a species have all our lower animal evolutionary bases to satisfy our individual urges, and modern society with its laws, taboos, and constraints in the last 10K years is a radical departure from that primitive state we are wired for. Our conscious thought uses reason to conclude that it is a worthwhile tradeoff overall l, guiding our efforts to comport ourselves publicly, but our baser instincts (and sometimes overdeveloped super-ego) chafe at these limitations, which is the origin of many neuroses.
dang 3y ago
The only person whose books were burned by the Nazis, the Soviets, and the Americans! Not much by way of past threads, but he sometimes pops up in HN comments: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=%22wilhelm%20reich%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... There was a documentary not too long ago: https://vimeo.com/ondemand/wr1897 https://vimeo.com/ondemand/wr1897. Has anyone seen it? Kate Bush's lovely "Cloudbusting" is about Reich, based on the book his son wrote about driving around the Maine countryside with WR and his cloudbusting machine. Donald Sutherland plays Reich in the video, and Kate the son. The book is seen sticking out of her pocket in one frame. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pllRW9wETzw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pllRW9wETzw, https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=kate%20bush%20cloud&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... "I still dream of Orgonon..." The woman who preserved Reich's estate for 60 years, Mary Boyd Higgins, was remarkable in her own right: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/23/obituaries/mary-boyd-higgins-dead.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/23/obituaries/mary-boyd-higg... (https://web.archive.org/web/20190124065725/https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/23/obituaries/mary-boyd-higgins-dead.html https://web.archive.org/web/20190124065725/https://www.nytim...).
- corinroyal 3y ago
  Right? The guy never caught a break from persecution. However wacky he became, Reich was one of the few in psychiatry to focus on prevention over treatment of mental illness. When he investigated the root causes of mental illness in his patients, he saw the conditions of modern life were often the source of the harm. He advocated a radical re-engineering of society so that it meets people's fundamental social, spiritual, and organismic needs. He saw fascism as a symptom of structural failures to meet these needs. Fascism is not so much an authoritarian political movement as mass mental illness. His model suggests that in such circumstances you'd see disordered thinking across the political spectrum. People's tolerance for ambiguity diminishes, tribalism increases, and we grasp at simple solutions. This flailing fails to address the systemic problems leading to positive feedback that further corrodes the social fabric. That sounds like an accurate description of the present moment.
  - 3y ago
EGreg 3y ago
Sounds like he had a diet rich in buxtehude
- 3-cheese-sundae 3y ago
  I see what you did there, I just can't quite figure out why
  - 15457345234 3y ago
    Organ pipes point at the sky (like artillery pieces) but other than that I also can't see the connection either.
    - cassepipe 3y ago
      Metal pipes pointing at the sky is what's being sold nowadays as "orgon" accumulators. That's the wacky part of WR. After some time he thought he had found the energy source of all life which he called a that. I didn't get the original joke but when you mentioned pipes, I thought it had to be that
      - euroderf 3y ago
        Well, he was only two letters off from ozone.
mock-possum 3y ago
> in the case of hunger, a negative condition is eliminated—no pleasure is produced is he suggesting that consuming food does not necessarily produce pleasure? or that there is no pleasure in satisfying hunger at all?? or even simply that there's no pleasure in eating period??? that passage leaps out at me, I can't charitably find a way to frame it such that I agree with it. Eating food is pleasurable, whether you're doing it to satisfy hunger or not. If you're seeking pleasure, you might find it just as easily in eating as in fucking, surely?
- I_Am_Nous 3y ago
  The article appears to be discussing hunger as a force which drives us, and in that respect it is a negative. We need food or we'll die, and while eating the food may be pleasurable once you obtain it, it's not merely eating the food that is pleasurable. It's filling the gaping hole that hunger has caused so you can go back to your default "not hungry" state. A little further down the article they mention: "The answer is straightforward: somehow, we are unable to experience pleasure, and we therefore confuse pleasure with mere satisfaction." In light of this point, it is very easy for us to mistake "unpleasure being reduced" for pleasure. The lack of unpleasure feels pleasurable in a relativistic sense, but that's not the same thing as being truly pleased with something. There may also be something to discuss regarding eating being pleasurable -- biological processes have incentivized us to eat, and to eat things our body finds desirable. Therefore what appears to be a pleasurable desert is our body rewarding us for loading up on fats/sugars as they are calorie dense. Even if it feels pleasurable at the time, is that pleasure just satiety? When you start adding cultural layers to it, it begins to break down a bit. Birthday cake at a party is pleasurable to eat, and you eat it because you are at a celebration, so it's not really the same as someone eating their daily loaf and gruel for sustenance.
nuancebydefault 3y ago
I think making the distinction between 'reducing the unpleasure' vs having pleasure is an artificial thought, not more than a philosophical idea. We strive for something, which is building up tension, and once we are able to do it, there is a relief of that tension, which feels pleasurable. We do this repeatedly until we die. A footballer strives to score a goal. As long as there is none, frustration is felt. When they score, that frustration is replaced by intense happiness. Or am I wrong?
- curiousllama 3y ago
  Your footballer could also remove the frustration by playing defense. In your analogy, having pleasure is scoring; reducing unpleasure is finding a new way to contribute to victory
- spandrew 3y ago
  I'm not sure if you're wrong. What about boredom? Boredom isn't pleasure, or unpleasure. There could be some unpleasure associated with it, or it could manifest in daydreaming if the boredom is a nice reprise from a busy schedule. Anyone who's been to a nil, uneventful football match has felt this.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- solumos 3y ago
  Imagine the following scenario: A footballer strives to score a goal. During the game, the footballer collides with an opponent and hits his head. He has a concussion and won't be able to play for the rest of the game, and frustration is felt. Is this different from the scenario you described? Is the frustration in the presence of unpleasure the same as frustration in the absence of pleasure?
- maxbendick 3y ago
  I agree that would feel pretty artificial, if we understand it the utilitarian way. But Wilhelm Reich doesn't really follow a utilitarian calculus. I.e., for him pleasure is not the equal yet opposite of unpleasure. Rather, the calculus is one of material tension and release, or intensity, which I think you get at quite well in your example. And yeah, if Marx, Bataille, and Spinoza are called philosophers, I guess we can call this a philosophical thought as well. Though it certainly reaches beyond the bounds of philosophy into psychoanalysis, biology, and cybernetics.
croes 3y ago
Thanks to him we have those pseudo science orgone accumulators.
carapace 3y ago
My first experience with "chi" (aka "orgone") was pretty dramatic.[1] Being a rational materialist I went looking for equations for this "energy" (y'know, physics?) I didn't find anything conclusive ("Chi" might be standing waves in light? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ) But I did find out that it has been discovered and rediscovered in the West several times over the last couple of centuries, starting with Mesmer[2]. (E.g. Reichenbach's "Odic force"[3][4], and Reich's "orgone" of course.) Aaaaaanyway, I'm not a physicist so I can't begin to guess what "chi" is in the physical sense (although, like I said, it maybe could be something to do with light? Certainly luminosity is one of it's characteristics despite it being technically invisible. I'm sorry, that's the best I can do.) Over the years I've tried to interest scientists I've met in "doing science" to this "energy", but so far no takers. (I knew a guy who had access to an MRI machine, but I was too chicken to try it. No one has any idea if/how this phenomenon would interact with such intense magnetic fields, eh?) If anyone is in the San Francisco area and would like to try recording this phenomenon with sensors of some kind, or just experiencing it for themselves, let me know. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22542102 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22542102 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesmer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesmer [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Reichenbach https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Reichenbach [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odic_force https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odic_force
- akomtu 3y ago
  The irony is that Reich suspected that "orgone" is the elusive energy of vitality and sexuality, while medics since times immemorial have been using the caduceus as the symbol of healthcare, the very symbol that schematically explains that "orgone".
  - nico 3y ago
    The use of the caduceus as a symbol of healthcare is a modern American thing. Someone used the caduceus instead of The Staff of Aesculapius, and it stuck The symbol most universally, and historically, used for healthcare is The Staff of Aesculapius, which is a staff with just one snake and no wings
- carapace 3y ago
nateburke 3y ago
My viola teacher's teacher was married to a Reichian psychoanalyst. There was definitely lore shared about students getting lessons at the teacher's apartment and hearing all sorts of sounds coming from his practice downstairs. I'm not sure if the presence of an orgone box was ever confirmed though.
- dang 3y ago
  Great story! That makes sense because Reichian therapy involves working directly on what Reich called "armor" (habitual physical tension related to emotional issues) and you can be sure that people emit all sorts of sounds when that happens. It also involves methods of deep breathing that heighten arousal (not necessarily sexual arousal but nervous system activation) for therapeutic purposes. This also causes strange sounds! Btw, Reich's therapeutic use of breathing is the antecedent to the breathwork that the early psychedelic therapists turned to once LSD was banned, and which is still widely practiced. I don't know if Stan Grof ever credited Reich with this, but Frank Lake, who was doing LSD psychotherapy with clients even earlier than Grof, wrote explicitly about having taken the breathwork approach from Reich. Yet another more case in which Reich was far ahead of his time.
swayvil 3y ago
You ever try visual-ray cloudbusting? I've tried it (with concentration-meditation augmentation). Seems to work.
boredhedgehog 3y ago
It seems to me the course of Western civilization has thoroughly disproved Reich's theories. For decades now, as society has become more sexually liberal, neurosis and depression have been growing.
- jonathanstrange 3y ago
  That's difficult to assert, it is also possible that it is diagnosed more and more people seek professional help today than decades ago. I also don't think it's true that society has become sexually more liberal. I'd claim that it has become overall less liberal in comparison to the 1970s.
- ansc 3y ago
  It might sound like it disproves it, but if you look at what you wrote it is obvious that it does not. You've just presented an interesting hypothesis.
- dang 3y ago
  Reich coined the phrase "sexual revolution" but he meant something different from the sexual liberalization you're talking about, and he would have rejected that it was a movement toward what he considered health. His students who lived through the 1960s were not at all happy about the adoption of Reich by the Beats and then the hippies. What Reich did mean is beyond my capacity to articulate (it's been a long while since I read any of this stuff), but I'm sure he would draw the lines very differently. This is one of those cases where it's a mistake to back-fit our contemporary concepts onto something earlier, though of course it's almost impossible not to.
  - LargoLasskhyfv 3y ago
    Did you only read about that? Or experienced some of the things described there? Let me try to articulate how I think about that. It's just another means and description of the phenomenon known as awakening the Kundalini Chakra by way of meditation, tantric massage, or whatever. What this does, if applied successfully, is elevating you to another level of existence, and giving you glimpses of even higer levels of existence, in similar gravity to what is often told here about various psychedelic drugs. I think similar things could be said of that part of Satanism, if it wouldn't be abused to degrade and harm other people so much. There are levels of orgasm/sexual energy/orgasmic potency/however you want to call this, which will meld your 'field/aura/spirit/mind' with your partner and vice versa, giving you the most intense intimacy imaginable. Insert: While being melded together, what happens 'down there' as seen from above in some sort of out-of-body experience (Yes. I really mean that.) is almost unimportant, like some far echo from below. Happening automatically, maybe interupted by some synchronous 'Oh, that must have been good? Again!', giggling detached, and surfing the waves up there, whereever that is. /endinsert But that is not all. They can also give you slightly superhuman abilities regarding physical fitness. For a time. Then there are things which can only be called supernatural, like precognition for example. For other people there may be different supernatural phenomena. I write this, because I experienced this only once in this full intensity in the summer of 1988, giving me insight to several overlapping timelines, and their probabilities, showing me events up to the summer of 2023. And now I'm blind. S..T! Well, not really, there are more, but rather discrete, not continous and vague, clustered around somewhere 2045 to 2050, and personal, not telling much about world events, or science & technology. And they 'feel' censored, because everything is looking normal, but I can't get one look at the sky. Isn't that strange? Anyways, too much personal stuff. What I want to say and repeat is that things can happen during sex between 'initiated/like-minded/loving/trusting' partners, which simply aren't possible with just sex, especially under the constraints of stress due to safer sex practices, hormonal imbalance, fear, physical unfitness, and the general pressure most people seem to feel. It's really hard to describe, the same way psychonauts can't describe their rides on a heroes dose, or something. One can try, but it can only be a pale shadow of the real experience. Edit: I realize that this could be interpreted as rambling "Good sex is good!", but that is not what I mean. It's just that there are different levels, and I'm thinking most of you haven't experienced them. So even if you are satisfied, you can't know what you have missed, so far. Until...
smokel 3y ago
How can it be that so many people accept this kind of oversimplified thinking as valuable? Most processes in humans are pretty complex. The processes in between humans at times even more so. It does not make sense to model these processes with pre-elementary school mathematics. Sure, people will understand the models, but that still leaves them totally incompetent. In that respect I much prefer religious models rather than pseudoscientific ones. At least there complexity is hoovered up under the concept of "mystery", and we try not to understand that.
- cf141q5325 3y ago
  Not familiar with his work yet, but there is some room for insight/observations below the threshold of complete explanations. The confidence into these just have to reflect that.
- peepee1982 3y ago
  The illusion of understanding feels just as good as real understanding in the short term (it releases a lot of tension), and is much easier to achieve. That's what makes it so seductive and dangerous.
- time4hn 3y ago
  There's multiple kinds of value. As an individual, learning new understandable models can help with developing a useful view of the world and others. Even if that benefit is simply feeling good about "understanding" something - that might still "scratch the itch" of concerns. This understanding might be detached from the material reality of the processes involved, but who cares? With this perspective, they're hardly incompetent if they're getting value from it. This isn't very far from religion after all. You could consider it a kind of rational spirituality. The scientific community has its own values, and might rightly reject simplified thinking like this. And that's fine for scientists, but an individual is going to have an easier time accepting stories of pleasure and drives than stories of gene expression and neurotransmitters.
- mbg721 3y ago
  We really lucked out, that Newtonian physics works with the basic math that it does.

110 points by rzk 3y ago

... that whole Freudian paradigm based on sex seems like it could have come from a different civilization. With Freud it seemed like something that had nothing obviously to do with sex had to do with sex whereas even by the 1970s with Kohut you were finding problems with sex really had to do with something else (narcissism) Not too long ago you could take for granted that people were intrinsically motivated by sex (e.g. like they are motivated to eat) but seeing people's behavior today (like the homosocial "man-o-sphere") I've started to question that. That is, you see the person who lives by themselves who is very disturbed if their libido is absent (I dunno, I took a Lexapro and didn't think about sex at all for a week, I didn't even think that I was thinking about sex, I just thought about other things) or people for whom sexuality seems to matter just as a sort of competition.

sdwr 3y ago
"Everything in the world is about sex, except sex. Sex is about power." - Bob Kazamakis
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- world2vec 3y ago
  I thought it was Oscar Wilde that said that?
  - cassepipe 3y ago
    Oscar Wilde said so many things, it has to be your go to when you don't whom to attribute a quote
  - sdwr 3y ago
    David Spader's character's said something similar on the office (probably cribbed from the quote!) https://youtu.be/XCZ4xk8Xojc?si=7kwl-5x70zHBXHxP&t=2m0s https://youtu.be/XCZ4xk8Xojc?si=7kwl-5x70zHBXHxP&t=2m0s Attributed it to him
lr4444lr 3y ago
> that whole Freudian paradigm based on sex seems like it could have come from a different civilization That's pretty much the point Freud makes in "Civilization and its Discontents": we as a species have all our lower animal evolutionary bases to satisfy our individual urges, and modern society with its laws, taboos, and constraints in the last 10K years is a radical departure from that primitive state we are wired for. Our conscious thought uses reason to conclude that it is a worthwhile tradeoff overall l, guiding our efforts to comport ourselves publicly, but our baser instincts (and sometimes overdeveloped super-ego) chafe at these limitations, which is the origin of many neuroses.

dang 3y ago

The only person whose books were burned by the Nazis, the Soviets, and the Americans! Not much by way of past threads, but he sometimes pops up in HN comments: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=%22wilhelm%20reich%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... There was a documentary not too long ago: https://vimeo.com/ondemand/wr1897 https://vimeo.com/ondemand/wr1897. Has anyone seen it? Kate Bush's lovely "Cloudbusting" is about Reich, based on the book his son wrote about driving around the Maine countryside with WR and his cloudbusting machine. Donald Sutherland plays Reich in the video, and Kate the son. The book is seen sticking out of her pocket in one frame. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pllRW9wETzw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pllRW9wETzw, https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=kate%20bush%20cloud&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... "I still dream of Orgonon..." The woman who preserved Reich's estate for 60 years, Mary Boyd Higgins, was remarkable in her own right: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/23/obituaries/mary-boyd-higgins-dead.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/23/obituaries/mary-boyd-higg... (https://web.archive.org/web/20190124065725/https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/23/obituaries/mary-boyd-higgins-dead.html https://web.archive.org/web/20190124065725/https://www.nytim...).

corinroyal 3y ago
Right? The guy never caught a break from persecution. However wacky he became, Reich was one of the few in psychiatry to focus on prevention over treatment of mental illness. When he investigated the root causes of mental illness in his patients, he saw the conditions of modern life were often the source of the harm. He advocated a radical re-engineering of society so that it meets people's fundamental social, spiritual, and organismic needs. He saw fascism as a symptom of structural failures to meet these needs. Fascism is not so much an authoritarian political movement as mass mental illness. His model suggests that in such circumstances you'd see disordered thinking across the political spectrum. People's tolerance for ambiguity diminishes, tribalism increases, and we grasp at simple solutions. This flailing fails to address the systemic problems leading to positive feedback that further corrodes the social fabric. That sounds like an accurate description of the present moment.
- 3y ago

EGreg 3y ago

Sounds like he had a diet rich in buxtehude

3-cheese-sundae 3y ago
I see what you did there, I just can't quite figure out why
- 15457345234 3y ago
  Organ pipes point at the sky (like artillery pieces) but other than that I also can't see the connection either.
  - cassepipe 3y ago
    Metal pipes pointing at the sky is what's being sold nowadays as "orgon" accumulators. That's the wacky part of WR. After some time he thought he had found the energy source of all life which he called a that. I didn't get the original joke but when you mentioned pipes, I thought it had to be that
    - euroderf 3y ago
      Well, he was only two letters off from ozone.

mock-possum 3y ago

> in the case of hunger, a negative condition is eliminated—no pleasure is produced is he suggesting that consuming food does not necessarily produce pleasure? or that there is no pleasure in satisfying hunger at all?? or even simply that there's no pleasure in eating period??? that passage leaps out at me, I can't charitably find a way to frame it such that I agree with it. Eating food is pleasurable, whether you're doing it to satisfy hunger or not. If you're seeking pleasure, you might find it just as easily in eating as in fucking, surely?

I_Am_Nous 3y ago
The article appears to be discussing hunger as a force which drives us, and in that respect it is a negative. We need food or we'll die, and while eating the food may be pleasurable once you obtain it, it's not merely eating the food that is pleasurable. It's filling the gaping hole that hunger has caused so you can go back to your default "not hungry" state. A little further down the article they mention: "The answer is straightforward: somehow, we are unable to experience pleasure, and we therefore confuse pleasure with mere satisfaction." In light of this point, it is very easy for us to mistake "unpleasure being reduced" for pleasure. The lack of unpleasure feels pleasurable in a relativistic sense, but that's not the same thing as being truly pleased with something. There may also be something to discuss regarding eating being pleasurable -- biological processes have incentivized us to eat, and to eat things our body finds desirable. Therefore what appears to be a pleasurable desert is our body rewarding us for loading up on fats/sugars as they are calorie dense. Even if it feels pleasurable at the time, is that pleasure just satiety? When you start adding cultural layers to it, it begins to break down a bit. Birthday cake at a party is pleasurable to eat, and you eat it because you are at a celebration, so it's not really the same as someone eating their daily loaf and gruel for sustenance.

nuancebydefault 3y ago

I think making the distinction between 'reducing the unpleasure' vs having pleasure is an artificial thought, not more than a philosophical idea. We strive for something, which is building up tension, and once we are able to do it, there is a relief of that tension, which feels pleasurable. We do this repeatedly until we die. A footballer strives to score a goal. As long as there is none, frustration is felt. When they score, that frustration is replaced by intense happiness. Or am I wrong?

curiousllama 3y ago
Your footballer could also remove the frustration by playing defense. In your analogy, having pleasure is scoring; reducing unpleasure is finding a new way to contribute to victory
spandrew 3y ago
I'm not sure if you're wrong. What about boredom? Boredom isn't pleasure, or unpleasure. There could be some unpleasure associated with it, or it could manifest in daydreaming if the boredom is a nice reprise from a busy schedule. Anyone who's been to a nil, uneventful football match has felt this.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
solumos 3y ago
Imagine the following scenario: A footballer strives to score a goal. During the game, the footballer collides with an opponent and hits his head. He has a concussion and won't be able to play for the rest of the game, and frustration is felt. Is this different from the scenario you described? Is the frustration in the presence of unpleasure the same as frustration in the absence of pleasure?
maxbendick 3y ago
I agree that would feel pretty artificial, if we understand it the utilitarian way. But Wilhelm Reich doesn't really follow a utilitarian calculus. I.e., for him pleasure is not the equal yet opposite of unpleasure. Rather, the calculus is one of material tension and release, or intensity, which I think you get at quite well in your example. And yeah, if Marx, Bataille, and Spinoza are called philosophers, I guess we can call this a philosophical thought as well. Though it certainly reaches beyond the bounds of philosophy into psychoanalysis, biology, and cybernetics.

croes 3y ago

Thanks to him we have those pseudo science orgone accumulators.

carapace 3y ago

My first experience with "chi" (aka "orgone") was pretty dramatic.[1] Being a rational materialist I went looking for equations for this "energy" (y'know, physics?) I didn't find anything conclusive ("Chi" might be standing waves in light? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ) But I did find out that it has been discovered and rediscovered in the West several times over the last couple of centuries, starting with Mesmer[2]. (E.g. Reichenbach's "Odic force"[3][4], and Reich's "orgone" of course.) Aaaaaanyway, I'm not a physicist so I can't begin to guess what "chi" is in the physical sense (although, like I said, it maybe could be something to do with light? Certainly luminosity is one of it's characteristics despite it being technically invisible. I'm sorry, that's the best I can do.) Over the years I've tried to interest scientists I've met in "doing science" to this "energy", but so far no takers. (I knew a guy who had access to an MRI machine, but I was too chicken to try it. No one has any idea if/how this phenomenon would interact with such intense magnetic fields, eh?) If anyone is in the San Francisco area and would like to try recording this phenomenon with sensors of some kind, or just experiencing it for themselves, let me know. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22542102 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22542102 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesmer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesmer [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Reichenbach https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Reichenbach [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odic_force https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odic_force

akomtu 3y ago
The irony is that Reich suspected that "orgone" is the elusive energy of vitality and sexuality, while medics since times immemorial have been using the caduceus as the symbol of healthcare, the very symbol that schematically explains that "orgone".
- nico 3y ago
  The use of the caduceus as a symbol of healthcare is a modern American thing. Someone used the caduceus instead of The Staff of Aesculapius, and it stuck The symbol most universally, and historically, used for healthcare is The Staff of Aesculapius, which is a staff with just one snake and no wings
carapace 3y ago

nateburke 3y ago

My viola teacher's teacher was married to a Reichian psychoanalyst. There was definitely lore shared about students getting lessons at the teacher's apartment and hearing all sorts of sounds coming from his practice downstairs. I'm not sure if the presence of an orgone box was ever confirmed though.

dang 3y ago
Great story! That makes sense because Reichian therapy involves working directly on what Reich called "armor" (habitual physical tension related to emotional issues) and you can be sure that people emit all sorts of sounds when that happens. It also involves methods of deep breathing that heighten arousal (not necessarily sexual arousal but nervous system activation) for therapeutic purposes. This also causes strange sounds! Btw, Reich's therapeutic use of breathing is the antecedent to the breathwork that the early psychedelic therapists turned to once LSD was banned, and which is still widely practiced. I don't know if Stan Grof ever credited Reich with this, but Frank Lake, who was doing LSD psychotherapy with clients even earlier than Grof, wrote explicitly about having taken the breathwork approach from Reich. Yet another more case in which Reich was far ahead of his time.

swayvil 3y ago

You ever try visual-ray cloudbusting? I've tried it (with concentration-meditation augmentation). Seems to work.

boredhedgehog 3y ago

It seems to me the course of Western civilization has thoroughly disproved Reich's theories. For decades now, as society has become more sexually liberal, neurosis and depression have been growing.

jonathanstrange 3y ago
That's difficult to assert, it is also possible that it is diagnosed more and more people seek professional help today than decades ago. I also don't think it's true that society has become sexually more liberal. I'd claim that it has become overall less liberal in comparison to the 1970s.
ansc 3y ago
It might sound like it disproves it, but if you look at what you wrote it is obvious that it does not. You've just presented an interesting hypothesis.
dang 3y ago
Reich coined the phrase "sexual revolution" but he meant something different from the sexual liberalization you're talking about, and he would have rejected that it was a movement toward what he considered health. His students who lived through the 1960s were not at all happy about the adoption of Reich by the Beats and then the hippies. What Reich did mean is beyond my capacity to articulate (it's been a long while since I read any of this stuff), but I'm sure he would draw the lines very differently. This is one of those cases where it's a mistake to back-fit our contemporary concepts onto something earlier, though of course it's almost impossible not to.
- LargoLasskhyfv 3y ago
  Did you only read about that? Or experienced some of the things described there? Let me try to articulate how I think about that. It's just another means and description of the phenomenon known as awakening the Kundalini Chakra by way of meditation, tantric massage, or whatever. What this does, if applied successfully, is elevating you to another level of existence, and giving you glimpses of even higer levels of existence, in similar gravity to what is often told here about various psychedelic drugs. I think similar things could be said of that part of Satanism, if it wouldn't be abused to degrade and harm other people so much. There are levels of orgasm/sexual energy/orgasmic potency/however you want to call this, which will meld your 'field/aura/spirit/mind' with your partner and vice versa, giving you the most intense intimacy imaginable. Insert: While being melded together, what happens 'down there' as seen from above in some sort of out-of-body experience (Yes. I really mean that.) is almost unimportant, like some far echo from below. Happening automatically, maybe interupted by some synchronous 'Oh, that must have been good? Again!', giggling detached, and surfing the waves up there, whereever that is. /endinsert But that is not all. They can also give you slightly superhuman abilities regarding physical fitness. For a time. Then there are things which can only be called supernatural, like precognition for example. For other people there may be different supernatural phenomena. I write this, because I experienced this only once in this full intensity in the summer of 1988, giving me insight to several overlapping timelines, and their probabilities, showing me events up to the summer of 2023. And now I'm blind. S..T! Well, not really, there are more, but rather discrete, not continous and vague, clustered around somewhere 2045 to 2050, and personal, not telling much about world events, or science & technology. And they 'feel' censored, because everything is looking normal, but I can't get one look at the sky. Isn't that strange? Anyways, too much personal stuff. What I want to say and repeat is that things can happen during sex between 'initiated/like-minded/loving/trusting' partners, which simply aren't possible with just sex, especially under the constraints of stress due to safer sex practices, hormonal imbalance, fear, physical unfitness, and the general pressure most people seem to feel. It's really hard to describe, the same way psychonauts can't describe their rides on a heroes dose, or something. One can try, but it can only be a pale shadow of the real experience. Edit: I realize that this could be interpreted as rambling "Good sex is good!", but that is not what I mean. It's just that there are different levels, and I'm thinking most of you haven't experienced them. So even if you are satisfied, you can't know what you have missed, so far. Until...

smokel 3y ago

How can it be that so many people accept this kind of oversimplified thinking as valuable? Most processes in humans are pretty complex. The processes in between humans at times even more so. It does not make sense to model these processes with pre-elementary school mathematics. Sure, people will understand the models, but that still leaves them totally incompetent. In that respect I much prefer religious models rather than pseudoscientific ones. At least there complexity is hoovered up under the concept of "mystery", and we try not to understand that.

cf141q5325 3y ago
Not familiar with his work yet, but there is some room for insight/observations below the threshold of complete explanations. The confidence into these just have to reflect that.
peepee1982 3y ago
The illusion of understanding feels just as good as real understanding in the short term (it releases a lot of tension), and is much easier to achieve. That's what makes it so seductive and dangerous.
time4hn 3y ago
There's multiple kinds of value. As an individual, learning new understandable models can help with developing a useful view of the world and others. Even if that benefit is simply feeling good about "understanding" something - that might still "scratch the itch" of concerns. This understanding might be detached from the material reality of the processes involved, but who cares? With this perspective, they're hardly incompetent if they're getting value from it. This isn't very far from religion after all. You could consider it a kind of rational spirituality. The scientific community has its own values, and might rightly reject simplified thinking like this. And that's fine for scientists, but an individual is going to have an easier time accepting stories of pleasure and drives than stories of gene expression and neurotransmitters.
mbg721 3y ago
We really lucked out, that Newtonian physics works with the basic math that it does.