Bioenergy -- A Burning Issue
Is there a specifically biological form of energy? This apparently
simple and innocuous question has caused the loss of reputation of more
scientists than any other in the past two hundred years.
Chinese and Indian medicine have for centuries involved the central
idea of meridians running through the human body along which biological energy
travels, and energy centres through which this bioenergy passes and is
distributed.
Just why established medical science should be so firmly opposed to the idea
of energy meridians in the human body is a mystery, especially as there is
considerable strong experimental evidence for acupressure and acupuncture,
published in journals such as The British Medical Journal and the British
Journal of Anaethaesia.
The first Western scientist to take the ideas of Eastern medicine seriously
and to conduct experiments with them was Austrian psychotherapist Wilhelm Reich.
Among the many professional scientists who have paid the price of investigating
biological energy, none has paid more dearly than Reich.
Wilhelm Reich and Orgone
On the night of 4 November 1933, members of Adolf Hitler's
personal guard, the SA, lit bonfires in the main squares of Germany's leading
cities. The flames that disfigured the gothic architecture of Munich and
Stuttgart, Hamburg and Hanover with grotesque shadows of a grotesque future were
started with a unique fuel: the published work of many of Germany's leading
scientists, philosophers, and medical men and women -- books by Jews.
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Among the many thousands of titles burned in public on
that bitter November night were Character Analysis and The Function of
the Orgasm by a young Austrian psychiatrist, Wilhelm Reich. Reich had many
crimes against the Nazi state to answer for. He was a jew. He was a Communist
who fought against fascism. He was a prominent junior colleague of Sigmund Freud
and an exponent of the 'jewish science' of psychoanalysis -- fraudulent in Nazi
eyes. Reich had founded street sex clinics for unmarried working class men and
women. He talked and wrote of orgasms and other sexual topics. He was starting
to talk and write about something called 'Orgone' energy. As the Nazi
stormtroopers gathered round the flames, Reich started packing his bags for a
haven from intolerance and persecution in the US.
Twenty seven years later, On 17 March 1960, a convoy of
official trucks rolled along 25th street on New York's lower east side and came
to a stop outside the City public incinerator. Officials of the federal Food and
Drug Administration carried armfuls of the books contained in the trucks into
the incinerator where waiting workmen cast them into the flames. The books thus
burned included such titles as The Sexual Revolution (virtually the
blueprint for the swinging sixties), together with some familiar sounding
titles: The Function of the Orgasm and Character Analysis.
Wilhelm Reich had been dead for more than two years but he
had achieved the unique double distinction of having his books burned by both
the Nazis and the American Government. He had died in the Federal Penitentiary
at Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, sent there, Galileo-like, by a Federal court for
refusing to delete a word from his books: the word 'Orgone'. He died refusing to
recant his belief in a biological form of energy.
Reich is one of the most extraordinary scientific figures
in a century notable for scientific geniuses and charlatans. He was in his
lifetime, and is still today, called by both titles. A hero of the libertarian
left, he is also a villain of the authoritarian right. Whatever title is finally
bestowed on him by history, he will unquestionably be seen by the future as
having fathered some of the most original and influential psychological ideas
of the twentieth century.
He is personally largely responsible for the whole shape
and direction of non-Freudian psychotherapy as it is practised today. And while
the authoritarian ideas and talk-oriented approach of Freud are questioned and
largely abandoned, Reich's democratic, libertarian body-oriented style of
empowering the patient to heal himself is recognisably the dominant approach in
psychotherapy today. Reich more than any other single
individual gave rise to the revolutionary atmosphere of the 1960s and the
revolutionary aspirations of the 1960s generation; politically, socially,
sexually, psychologically.
But another, darker part of the received image of Reich is
his obsessional belief in 'bions' -- corpuscles of energy that he believed to
exist everywhere -- and his conviction that his black box 'orgone accumulators'
could cure cancer -- beliefs that took him far beyond the limits of credibility
both of his own time and of ours too. It is sometimes hard to remember that one
is reading about the same man: the passionate young shirt-sleeved Viennese
physician, helping young men and women take control of their own sexuality: the
cantankerous older man, refusing to bow to the Federal courts of his adopted
country, convinced that his courageous pioneering vision alone could save a
blind world.
From a scientific standpoint, the question is: did Reich's
theories have any experimental evidence to support them?
Interestingly, Reich was an indefatigable experimenter who
kept and published detailed notes on his experiments. Not surprisingly no
serious conventional scientist today who expects to receive research grants for
their work cares to admit to repeating Reich's experiments. But at least one
medical man has had the courage to do so, and has found evidence that Reich was
correct.
One of Reich's claims was that elementary forms of life
such as protozoa assemble themselves spontaneously from decaying organic
material -- even decaying vegetable material. He claimed that this process was
governed by a bioenergy field which informed the developing individual cells,
the energy he called 'orgone'.
In 1987, Reich's experiments were replicated by Dr Robert
Dew. Dew's published paper contains detailed colour photographs clearly showing
protozoa forming from decaying vegetable material just as Reich had asserted.
Not so surprising is the response of conventional
biologists to these experiments: it is to ignore them and hope they will go
away.
And in case anyone imagines that scientific book-burning
is a thing of the past and couldn’t happen today, consider the response of
John Maddox, editor of the world's most prestigious scientific journal, Nature,
to publication of A new science of Life by Rupert Sheldrake.
Dr Sheldrake's 1981 book was the first serious attempt by
a scientist to question the ruling mechanistic paradigm of biology. The editor
of Nature called for the book to be burnt.
