Energy as a force putting things to move

It has been difficult really to catch the concept of Reich`s orgon, or, the idea of energy as a whole. We all know that from the perspective of natural sciences energy is generally speaking a force putting things to move. On the other hand it is really a metaphoric or metaphysical concept. It is almost like a phenomenon that escapes (moves in that sense itself, too?) from being defined. I remember Joseph deRivera´s book “A structural theory of the emotions” from the year of 1977, which gave many insights also to understand from one possible perspective the positive meanings of the arts. One part of my associative comments to the “Energy from inside” wells up from this source, where deRivera´s elegant “geometry” of emotions derived the word emotion from the Latin verb emovere. There is a near connection with energy then, if we think about a human being (maybe also some animals!?): In emotion we experience ourselves or the other as being moved. Of course, also here like in the trials to understand “orgon” (or other words or phenomenon behind the word, like libido, vital, prana, chi etc.) the question “Where does it come from” or “What’s the origin” (organism, orgasm, origin?...) still may stay as a mystery or, like in Reich`s case, so dangerous that the person defining or catching (and even saying it aloud) the concrete origin or essence of it was put in prison, out from the understanding of the ordinary people, the crowd. The Latin verb emovere literally means “to move out”. It was initially used in the sense of moving a crowd out of the forum, dirt out of an excacation; that is, in the sense of an authoritative force moving a resisting mass. A person’s (or even a community’s?) orgon, libido, how we ever call it, may be really dangerous for people using power. They can’t tolerate energy, which moves things out of the reach of their power. In this sense energy is wild and free, although it surely has a natural and biological dynamics if we can follow its flow.

Has this anything to do with the discussion around orgon? At least we have to return to examine the idea of the movement, if we think orgon as energy. An aspect which is important to understand in the de Rivera’s structural theory of the emotions is that the experience of being moved by an emotion may be contrasted with the feeling of having to do something because of some external force. That is, we do not find ourselves acting out of habit, or because of the requirements of our situation (what is demanded by some authority), or out of the force of some compulsion stemming from either the id or superego. Is here any connection with the following sentence from the “Energy from inside”: “Orgon is there, whatever one may think or say.” When we are moved by emotion we feel for instance desire to hit, hug, make love, whatever, though our judgment may check this action. This is the paradox of emotional experience – we are passively being moved rather than acting and yet this movement seems to be coming from within us. This means that in emotion there is a lack of action but not movement. This is an important and also practical separation. You can really hate (feel the emotion of hate, anger etc.) but not hit or beat the other, or, you can feel a strong emotion of love or desire but not make love with him/her just because of that emotion. However, the emotion is moving you (in your inner) and if you use your judgment, you may also act if the situation is suitable for that. But you are not acting out, in the psychological sense of the word.

Maybe the most important object of Reich’s scientific interest was to find out the physiological basis for the experiences of pleasure and anxiety. He inquired the bioelectricity of pleasure and anxiety, which he later called bioenergy, and, how to get a balance between them two? The idea of connections of anatomy, chemistry, electricity, and behavior, which were an often repressed novelty in Reich’s time, is basic knowledge today. Or: is it? What a big discussion opens up in front of us about the holistic way to understand the human being.

Also a big and actually an “after-Freudian” issue is the question of sexuality as a sort of origin for our creative energy. We can read from the Energy from inside: “Repression of sexual presence is the main obstacle to introduce the energy into our daily life. [---] In the case we have blocked the source of ‘orgon’ socially or culturally, we are not entitled to assume that a human being is free to make her/his choices as a free subject. [---] Without ‘orgon’, without being able to produce energy out of oneself, one is invalid, morally and spiritually. Reich sees in ‘orgon’ the human way to understand the transcendence. Transcendence [---] is [---] needed simply because a human being when free is able to estimate and evaluate her/his own choices, decisions, life-steering values, and intellectual ideas. [---] Reich does not propagate individualism although energy source is in an individual.” On the contrary, Reich pointed out that all (the important) that has happened for the individual in the decisive periods of his/her life, happen every moment recorded in the ‘board’ of his/her consciousness. With his theory of character analysis Reich could notice the close connections between neurotic disorders, and society as well as the culture.

In this connection we can return back to de Rivera’s theory of the emotions. The experience of emotion in his thinking reflects the transformation of our relation to the world – to the persons, objects, events, and actions that are important to us. These transformations are the movements of emotion and each type of emotion (like anger, fear, love) reflect a different kind of transformation. A transformation is not a passive reaction, rather it is a transaction (see the Reich’s idea of transcendence above) between the person and his environment. The person is active and often “unconsciously” responsible to “choose” how he/she will organize his relation to the situation in which he/she find him/herself. However, once an organization is chosen, an entire network of the other relations is determined. Since the organization of each different emotion is related to every other emotion, we are really dealing with a structure of emotions, individual emotions are not separable entities but are parts of a whole. One interesting part of this structural theory is the way de Rivera thinks about the movement of the person’s inner: is it toward the other (person, thing, happening…, like love), toward self (like desire), away from self (against the other, like anger) or away from other (like fear). It may be noted that the four basic movements affect the person’s relation with the other and, in fact, correspond to four basic modes of object relation: giving, getting, removing, and escaping. It would be interesting to continue of developing this structural theory and its possible connections with the bioenergy of pleasure and anxiety.

The social or cultural in our energy “world” was actually not enough for Reich. He became also interested in the connections between bioenergical processes and atmospheric phenomena. [---] He could point out connections between weather conditions and physical as well as emotional and mental states in human beings. Actually, his discovery of atmospheric orgone was a major thrust forward in Reich’s research.

Reich had found out the energy both in atmosphere and human body. This force has been called in different culture with different names: prana, mana, ki, chi, skan, löyly, väki, élan, vital etc. And because Reich had found this force with the help of the theory of orgasm and organism, he called it with the word ‘orgone’. Freud believed that some day there could be found a somatic, organic theory for his psychoanalytical theory, especially for the concept of ‘libido’. Reich thought he had found it. His finding touched upon acupuncture and many other branches of dynamic medicine based on the concept of energy. Of course, in those times Reich himself was totally ignorant about acupuncture or other oriental conceptions of health and treatment.

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Not much, if anything, has been said about the possible meanings of Reich’s thoughts or the structural theory of emotions to the arts and art education. However, there is a sphere of interesting associations, which could be an issue to continue in the near future. Just some possible questions or topics around this connection: What kind of arguments can we state for arts and artistic activity as creative energy on the basis of those thoughts (like the Freudian idea of sublimation, or the idea of the arts as transformation or transcendence)? What kind of balance/imbalance between pleasure and anxiety can making or looking at art offer (like the creative idea vs. skill or striving for the capacity to give a form to the idea)? What about the way to understand the aesthetical as a sort of contemplation and giving to the other as the basic emotional movement in it?

JI