Bioenergy versus Mechanistic Science
Two Worldviews Collide, by Michael Mannion, Journal of Psychiatric Orgone Therapy, 2025.
The artwork Orgone Box, from here.
Having explored the Jungians the other day, I set out to find whether the Reicheans have any journals of their own – and came upon this rather obscure journal. In fact, although it’s called a journal, this seems to be more of a website where Reich’s followers post occasional research and reports on their conferences. It seems a small group of people have kept alive Reich’s legacy through the decades since his death, although their output is rather limited.
Wilhelm Reich was an early Freudo-Marxist who developed an eccentric theory of biological life-energy following his expulsions from both the IPA and the Comintern. His early work, in which he theorizes psychodynamic character-structure as the main intermediary between individual psychology and social systems, is more often used by scholars than his later work, which is based on the idea of a particle of life-energy called the orgone. Critics maintain that Reich had a psychotic crisis leading to his new theory. He was later persecuted to death by the US state for claims regarding the medical efficacy of his devices, which opposed those of mainstream medicine. His work was brought into prominence not long after his death through his influence on the sexual revolution, including the student radicals who launched the France 1968 revolt, groups like the Situationists, A.S. Neill, Maurice Brinton, Bertell Ollman, Hakim Bey, and others. Offshoots of Reichean therapy include Alexander Lowen’s Bioenergetics, Pierrakos’ Core Energetics, Gabor Maté’s trauma theory, and authors in the weird science field such as James DeMeo.
Michael Mannion’s article uses the 1941 meeting between Albert Einstein and Wilhelm Reich to illustrate a profound clash between two scientific worldviews: mechanistic physics and functional, life-centred science. The encounter is presented not as a personal dispute, but as a collision between fundamentally different ways of knowing the universe.
Einstein, the world’s most famous physicist, embodied the dominant mechanistic and relativistic worldview that treated space as empty and energy as arising only after matter. This worldview was socially validated and institutionally powerful, culminating in Einstein’s indirect role in triggering the Manhattan Project and the creation of nuclear weapons, an outcome Einstein later deeply regretted. Reich, by contrast, was an impoverished émigré scientist working alone on what he believed was a primordial, mass-free life energy (orgone) that permeated space and governed both living and non-living systems. His work lay entirely outside accepted science and was ignored, ridiculed, or actively suppressed.
During their five-hour meeting, Einstein personally observed phenomena Reich claimed demonstrated orgone energy, including visible light effects seen under a specially designed telescope called an organoscope, and a persistent temperature difference around an orgone accumulator that contradicted mechanistic physics. Einstein was interested and had Reich provide him with an experimental orgone device. Reich’s journals suggest that he hoped Einstein would work with him on orgone energy.
However, Einstein later accepted his assistant’s conventional explanation of the heat issue (convection from the room’s ceiling) and ceased responding to Reich, despite Reich’s detailed attempts at scientific rebuttal. Einstein apparently became uninterested in Reich’s research and explanations, deciding (perhaps under the influence of rumours about Reich) that he was a crank or a fraud. Mannion argues that Einstein’s reaction illustrates how worldviews shape perception, determining which facts are accepted or dismissed.
Reich later concluded that their meeting represented an encounter between “two completely hostile worlds”: a powerful, established mechanistic science and a fragile, emerging functional science concerned with cosmic life energy. Mannion extends this analysis to modern culture, arguing that Western society has overwhelmingly supported mechanistic science, particularly destructive nuclear technologies, while marginalising life-affirming approaches like Reich’s.
The article concludes that this unresolved clash of worldviews continues today: between a vision of a dead, meaningless universe and one of a dynamic, living cosmos. Mannion suggests that humanity’s survival depends on becoming conscious of our inherited assumptions and remaining open to new ways of knowing that reconnect science with life, development, and energy rather than domination and destruction.
What it means for radicals: Mannion and other contributors to the journal seem to have an exclusive devotion to proselytizing for Reich’s later theories, with rather limited attempts to test or develop them. However, the issues Mannion raises about life- versus death-focused worldviews overlap with those found in ecological thought, such as the work of Ellul.
From what I’ve read of Reich’s work, the orgone seems to be a development of the Freudian concept of libido, with the main difference being that Reich assumes that the entity in question has physical substance (rather than being a way of talking about dynamics in the psyche). It’s also important to remember that Reich was working at a time when research on neurotransmitters, pheromones, hormones, and so on in its infancy.
I’m not sure whether orgone energy exists in any scientifically verifiable sense, but I’m very attracted to the idea that a life-energy, rather than mechanistic forces, is the driving force of existence. Similar ideas (qi, mana, etc.) exist in many cultural systems and similar theories, such as those of Deleuze and Bergson, periodically reappear in philosophy. Character-armour is well-documented in psychoanalytic practice, and it seems likely to be linked to various existential disturbances with both psychiatric and physical effects. When not used too dogmatically, Reichean approaches offer an appealing alternative to biomedical models, particularly with regard to psychological and psychosomatic issues.
