Description
This was Reich’s first published book in the United States, which he wrote specifically to introduce his work to an American audience. He summarizes his clinical and scientific work with the human organism over a period of twenty years from its roots in the Vienna Seminar on Sexology and his first contact with Sigmund Freud, to his laboratory experiments in Oslo which confirmed his orgasm theory and led to the discovery of a radiating biological energy, the orgone.
The discovery of orgone energy was the result of a consistent clinical investigation of the concept of “psychic energy,” at first in the realm of psychiatry. Experience has shown beyond any doubt that the knowledge of emotional functions of the biological energy is indispensable for the understanding of its physiological and physical functions. The biological emotions which govern the psychic processes are in themselves the immediate expression of a strictly physical energy, the cosmic orgone.
The Function of the Orgasm is an excellent presentation of the whole development of Reich’s work in its rapid progression from the realm of psychology into that of biology.
