Dead or Dying? Is It That Bad?

Yes it is, very definitely so. Let me give you a few facts to show you how bad the situation of orgonomy is, in particular in this country, the UK, but also in the world at large.

Wilhelm Reich, whose life-work is the foundation of orgonomy, died in 1957. Many organisations dotted about the world had commemoration conferences and seminars in 2007 to mark the fifty years that have passed since his tragic death. I nearly wrote celebration, not commemoration, but one can hardly celebrate the anniversary of a death in prison, can one? All these organisations are surviving by the skin of their teeth, unfunded, unsupported by any wide membership or external funding. I have been trying to establish an orgonomic teaching and research centre in this country for many years. How many depends on exactly when I date the start of my endeavours. You could say 40 years, certainly 20, and probably about 15 at the very minimum. And the upshot of these efforts? The results in this country? You won’t believe this, but it is true. In C O R E’s address book of serious supporters who might wish to attend any event that we run how many addresses are there in the UK? One. Yes, one. To be precise there are actually two, but one of those is of a supporter who is a full-time student here from abroad and she will before too long return to her own country, Cyprus, when she has finished her studies. She is thinking of staying here for a year or so to study with me, but she will, of course, return to Cyprus sooner or later. (Since I wrote this she has, anyway, left orgonomy completely.)

Some Personal History

How can things be in such a sorry state after so many years’ work and commitment? Yes, you might well ask, as anyone outside orgonomy won’t believe that you can work so hard at a project for so long and make so little progress. It just cannot be, can it? I mean, even if you wanted to set up a model- railway club for left-handed women over 50 born on the 29 th of February in a leap-year, you would surely get half a dozen members and possibly left-handed girls from similar organisations for the under fifties offering to help your efforts until your organisation was self-supporting. And then there would be the odd one or two really old, left-handed female model- railway fans from the days before the war when model railways were all the rage amongst left-handed girls. They would surely appear and give you advice and maybe get their grandchildren to dig out their old models from their attics, even if they themselves were unable to lift a model train onto a track themselves.

I am sure that is so, and such an organisation would doubtless soon get off the ground with small plugs on TV and local news programmes. But with

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orgonomy, no, the answer always seems to be no, even from organisations whose aims, nominally, at least, orgonomy seems to affirm and support. Even in these allegedly straitened times, when money is said to be in short supply, there is still some available for many mindless and totally insignificant activities such as raising funds to finance the erection of a monument to some local nonentity, or to preserve some building that might have been knocked down without a soul noticing, until a handful of local devotees brought the matter to the public’s notice and started a Save Sandy Castle campaign.

I first encountered orgonomy in about 1963 and my first active step in orgonomy was to go to Norway to have some orgone therapy with the late Dr Ola Raknes. Personally I count my departure in August 1969 as the beginning of my serious involvement in orgonomy. I had always wanted to tell the world about orgonomy and, if at all possible, set up some organisation that would support the teaching of orgonomy and orgonomic research. I was not one of those many admirers of Reich’s work who limit their interest to his psycho-therapeutic work. I was especially interested in the use of Reich’s discoveries in the field of self-regulation and childbirth. Slowly but surely I became known as a first point of contact for those interested in finding out more about orgonomy in this country. This was before the internet had developed. I am not sure how this used to happen. We have already got so used to the internet as a medium of contact that it is hard to imagine informal links being made in the same way without it, but we did manage it. The number of enquiries was minute, probably fewer than one a year. When you read that don’t throw up your hands and ridicule the pre-internet world. I hardly get any more ‘cold’ enquiries now, with a website, than I did then, sometimes only a couple in a year. C O R E’s present website is an expensive, useless luxury which I am about to abandon, when the current year’s hosting fee expires. It does nothing for orgonomy and brings no-one into it.

That is the crux of the problem and my present despair. Nothing brings anyone into orgonomy from this wretched desert of a country. The few people who do contact me from within the UK never remain in touch. C O R E’s website has been there for 3 years now and I still do not have a single new contact in this country! You won’t believe it, will you? If I think about it and write that stark fact down, I cannot believe it myself either. It just cannot be true, but it is. Against all logic, all experience, all common sense experience of life and the world, it cannot be true, but it is. That is what leads me to the awful conclusion that orgonomy is dying, probably dead, as far as this country is concerned.

I have been attending alternative events and fayres and conferences on and off for decades now. I have given many talks here and there on various aspects of orgonomy. I have had two articles on orgone therapy and childbirth published in the mainstream midwifery press. I have had an article published in a mainstream health-food journal and another in the newsletter of AIMS, the

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Association for the Improvement in Maternity Services. And so on, on and on. And none of these reachings out towards the wider world have produced a single lasting contact. No-one has approached me and asked how they can learn either how to practice the techniques in question or how they can even simply learn more about them.

The only conclusion that I can come to after these horrible experiences of neglect and rejection is that there is not any interest in orgonomy in this country at the moment and that logically there is never going to be any for the foreseeable future. As far as I am concerned the foreseeable future can only have at most 15 years in it. If I look back over the last 15 years, certainly the most productive in my orgonomic working life, there is no evidence whatever to suggest that there will be any change in the next 15 years, none whatever.

That would be easy enough if orgonomy were an item that I was selling, such as a bicycle model or a new invention. Customers don’t like what you are selling? Fine, easy. Find something that they do like. Try selling that. But orgonomy is not for sale. People have to come to it and embrace it because they want to. And how can one abandon something with such enormous potential, something that gets to the very core of so many of mankind’s social problems? One cannot. We are not talking about skirt lengths or curtain fabrics here. We are talking about cosmic truths. We cannot just give up on something like that because everyone else thinks we are mad, can we?

Some Facts of History

To put this in perspective and to show readers how bad things are in this country, I wish to cite some actual facts, not talk about my feelings about this situation. In the last 15 years I have attempted to organise various orgonomic events – study days, informal social gatherings, summer schools, and so on. One social event with invitations sent to over 30 people, elicited no replies at all! I have been able to run study days for midwives on 2 occasions. It was a struggle to get either event off the ground. Only about 5-6 students attended. I booked an activity centre for a summer school in 2003 and lost a £1000 deposit. There were 3 enrolments for this event. I advertised in a few magazines and sent circulars to anyone I knew who might be remotely interested. None of the advertisements produced a single response, not even one in Nexus, a journal amongst whose readers Reich and orgonomy are at least known.

The year 2007 was the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Reich, who, if you do not know, died in prison. C O R E organised a conference to mark this anniversary. My hope was that this event would attract some publicity and maybe at last put orgonomy on the map in this country. I had been planning and reflecting on this event for some time in advance, as one needs to when running

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such an event. I talked about it to James DeMeo when I was at OBRL in the summer of 2005. He very kindly gave me the names and addresses on his UK and Eire mailing list. These were all people or organisations who had bought books or equipment from him, or who had asked for information on orgonomy. There were around 300 names on this list. I thought this would inevitably lead to considerable interest in C O R E’s conference. Early in 2007 I sent a brochure about our conference to about 250 individuals. I did not write to the organisations on the list. That seemed to be a waste of money. This led to 2 bookings for the event, a success rate of 0.8%! Remember all the people on the list were in the main individuals who were already interested in orgonomy. Both these individuals already had strong loyalties to other bodies of knowledge and I am still at a loss as to why they enrolled at all. But still, at least they paid and came and took part. The conference was saved by foreign participants. A small number of people from this country also attended for occasional days. I received more packages of nutty, obsessive plans and schemes and writings from various weird alternative obsessives than I did enquiries about booking for the conference. (Incidentally, the presence of C O R E’s website produces more pornographic and commercial contacts than it does orgonomic interest, far, far more!)

The experience of running that conference led to a shattering realisation – the realisation that there is no serious interest in orgonomy in this country at all. I had never thought that there was any widespread interest, but I was shocked to realise just how little there was. Although I did not send the conference literature to publishers and similar anonymous organisations, I did send it to the various ‘Reichian’ therapy centres in London. (There are about 4 of them.) No-one from these centres contacted me about the conference.

C O R E acquired a website in early 2007, as this made running the conference much easier. Interested enquirers can contact me via the website. I get a trickle of enquiries via the site. They probably do not amount to double figures in a whole year. This traffic on the website has led to one lasting contact who is still with orgonomy a year later. Other people are usually raving ‘new age’ mystics, who want to enrol me in their own projects and tell me what to think and read. A few lurch towards orgonomy with energy and enthusiasm. They order a few booklets or ask me what to read and where they can get involved with orgonomic activities. I usually engage quite warmly with these people, as it is sometimes interesting and my passion for orgonomy craves expression somehow or other. (And, anyway, it is not at all obvious at the beginning of the contact with such people where they are coming from.) I always answer their questions in some detail and offer advice on reading material and orgonomic information. You never know, maybe just one of these enquirers might stay with orgonomy. They never do. In practice I get no more serious, intelligent enquiries via the internet than I did via the old grape vine.

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I have thought long about these enquiries and how and why they always come to nothing. I think the reason why they come to nothing is that generally, but particularly at this stage of orgonomy’s existence, it falls completely outside the market economy model of involvement in an organisation with social and psychological objectives and hopes. This model amazingly, fits many charitable organisations that one can become a member of, for example the RSPB, The Soil Association, Amnesty International, and the Woodland Trust, all of which I am a member of myself. All you have to do to become a member is to pay your membership fee and sit back and receive your quarterly package of information. Occasionally you will receive entreaties to donate some extra money above your normal subscription to support a campaign with some specific aim or to support the purchase of, say, some new land that has suddenly appeared on the market. There are already events to participate in, centres to go to for days out, many activities that one can join in with immediately. And by becoming a member you benefit immediately. You can get in without charge or for a reduced charge and so on. No-one is demanding anything from you.

The situation with orgonomy is completely different. It is so thin on the ground that there is next to nothing to join in with. It is no good combing through the literature or websites to find something, as it probably does not yet exist. Some of my e-mail enquirers will ask about something that would be an excellent idea, for orgonomy, if it were put into practice. Or they will ask, has anyone carried out such and such a research project. Usually the answer is no, but would you like to get it going yourself, that is a brilliant idea. And some people coming into contact with orgonomy from the outside straight away do have very intelligent, profound ideas about experiments that we could carry out, if we had but the physical space, time, and pairs of hands to get on with these projects. So, as soon as you are in contact with orgonomy, it is demanding things from you, rather than simply throwing a package at you and leaving you to get on with it. The most orgonomy can offer at the moment is a newsletter and the occasional event such as our forthcoming Easter school. I started a newsletter, but abandoned it after a couple of issues, when it became quite clear that no-one was taking any notice of it at all.

This little episode is a good example of the complete apathy amongst even nominal supporters of orgonomy in the UK. Thoemmes publishers had just brought out a multi-volume edition of work on The Origin of Life Debate, a massive collection of source material very relevant to Reich’s bion research and my own investigations of this field. It was going to cost, I think £650. I appealed to readers of the newsletter for contributions to help buy it for C O R E’s research library. (I had worked out that 13 donations of £50 apiece would raise the amount needed without too much distress to anybody.) There were no responses, not even the odd apology for being unable to contribute. It dawned on me that I was

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moving heaven and earth every day of the week almost to keep orgonomy afloat and recognisable in this country and that no-one else gave a damn about it and whether it lived or died. That is still true today, perhaps even truer now than it was then a few years ago. Since then C O R E’s mailing list has, if anything, shrunk rather than expanded. The outcome of this story is sobering, too. As I could not get any money from alleged supporters, I wrote to Thoemmes to ask for at least a small discount, explaining that C O R E was a small non-profit-making concern working like a charity with no funding, all expenses being paid out of individuals’ private pockets, (in practice mine, though I didn’t tell them that). They offered C O R E a set for half the normal selling price! So, a commercial concern out to make a profit, was kinder to C O R E and orgonomy than its own supporters. No comment.

An overwhelmingly powerful effect of our consumer culture is passivity. A consumer is at root passive. Orgonomy demands exactly the opposite of passivity. Even a reading of a book by Reich implies that you should take action. A commitment to orgonomy demands this even more so, and most people do not want any demands made of them. This explains why so few people engage with orgonomy, but it does not explain why there are so few serious students of orgonomy in this country does it? Why should we be so different to so many other countries, where orgonomy has taken root and started to grow a little, in spite of all the forces discouraging people’s interest?

If someone expresses a serious interest in getting involved in orgonomy I very quickly ask them either to do various things or want to know what skills they have to contribute to orgonomy. There is a queue of jobs waiting for any would-be volunteer to do for C O R E. They do not necessarily demand orgonomic knowledge or skills. At the moment I am printing large numbers of booklets for our forthcoming Easter school. Anyone with a smattering of basic office skills could do this, and probably do it better than I can. So far, in spite of various vague offers of help, I have in fact received no help at all, except when an event has actually been running. But in between events, by far the largest period in any year, I am out on my own and no-one so much as licks a stamp or takes a parcel to the post for me. The work involved in preparing the 2007 conference was enormous and when I planned things out roughly on a large piece of paper, I estimated that I need about half a dozen volunteers to take charge of various aspects of the organisation – publicity, cooking, printing, accommodation, transport, scientific equipment, etc. In the end no volunteers appeared and I did the lot myself! The same is happening with this year’s Easter school, though there is not so much work for this, even though it is still considerable.

As I write this I realise that the initial question - is orgonomy in this country dead or dying? - is wrong from the start. It has never even been alive! No wonder I am finding it difficult to make any progress with it.

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Orgonomy in Other Countries

The situation for orgonomy in other countries is not much better, but in the US various orgonomic centres appear to have large enough mailing lists to produce regular yearly numbers of visitors to support regular events such as seminars, independent learning weeks, and research seminars that present new orgonomic research. The numbers at these gatherings are not huge. I have been to some of them myself, but they are at least viable and the events are run from year to year. Only small numbers of serious students take up training in orgone therapy or other sub-specialties of orgonomy and some people think orgonomy is on the verge of extinction in the States.

There are quite a few groups in Germany, which with the US is probably the most orgonomically active country in the world. Many of these groups are ‘Reichian’ rather than orgonomic. By Reichian I mean that they are mainly interested in his psycho-therapeutic discoveries and little else. Their version of these is often itself very limited indeed and boils down to a belief in the effectiveness of what is called ‘bodywork’. This is a very bowdlerised version of Reich’s original orgone therapy and often a travesty of it. Most of the supporters of this approach are not even interested in the preventive aspect of Reich’s psychological work, his realisation that just as a therapist is treating an average neurotic and helping them to live a little more effectively damaged infants with high levels of armouring are being produced all the time by our child-rearing and educational habits. They will certainly not be very interested in Reich’s orgonomic research after his psycho-therapeutic work. I don’t suppose any of them will have done any scientific orgonomic work at all, not even have made an orgone accumulator. When I have invited such Reichian therapists to come and look at a bion experiment they have shown no interest at all and have not even bothered to reply to my invitations.

There are some workers in Spain, Italy, and Greece that I know of who have conducted experiments and are still active in experimental orgonomic work. There are individual workers dotted about the globe carrying on against all odds with scientific orgonomic research, but none of these groups or individuals are thriving or attracting wider attention from the public. They do run public events and seem able to attract enough participants to make them viable. As a known orgonomist I occasionally get leaflets on line advertising these events. So orgonomy is obviously more alive in these countries than it is in the UK, even though it may be struggling to survive.

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Solutions?

It seems that in this country to collect a small handful of active supporters who might be willing to become actively involved in orgonomy and eventually contribute to it we would need a massive exposure, for example a documentary on orgonomy on BBC 1 or Channel Four, or a serious interview in some mainstream radio programme such as Woman’s Hour or The Material World. Even if a programme were seen or heard by a million people, I think, going on previous experience, that it would only produce a handful of enquiries. Of those most would soon disappear again once they had perused some orgonomic literature and realised the deep implications of what they had read. I say that because that is exactly what happens when orgonomy gets a mention in some article or programme or lecture. This is on a small scale, of course, so the enquiries would be more from some large-scale exposure, but there is no reason to think that a larger audience would behave any differently.

Even when we have got a few contacts, there is a long period when they need to be nurtured and encouraged and helped with orgonomic study, before we can be sure that they will stay with orgonomy and carry on contributing or helping. Again, I say that from experience. I have known people who have gone as far as coming to stay with me to talk about orgonomy, see an accumulator and a bion experiment, perhaps have the Reich blood test carried out on their own blood, bought a good range of my booklets and Reich’s books and after a while they have quietly, without saying why, stopped communicating. I am not sure exactly what the qualities needed are that allow an individual to stay with orgonomy, but whatever they are, they must clearly be quite rare.

The first quality is a sort of moral courage that seems to be very rare nowadays. Its opposite is encapsulated in the modern idea of being ‘cool’ and ‘coolness.’ The concept of cool depends totally, as far as I understand it and observe it in use by younger people, on approval, certainly acceptance, by others. The worst nightmare, for a younger person nowadays, as far as I can see, is to be thought ‘uncool’ by others. It is also completely wrapped up with appearance and what other people know about one. Orgonomy does not even touch on these spheres, except perhaps to fall so beyond the pale of the cool as to brand an individual as completely unacceptable by current standards of social, even individual morality, if one can use that word about this.

A second is a certain intellectual and emotional independence which keeps one asking questions and unafraid to follow where they lead.

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