16 : The Bio-electrical Experiments: 1934-1935In 1934, Reich began his natural-scientific experiments. Before dealing with this
quite controversial subject, I should make clear that my own competence for evaluating his
scientific work is not as advanced as it is for dealing with his psychiatric and sociological
work. In addition, there is very little to draw on in making critical assessments of this work
that is not either fulsomely positive, hence inadequate, or contemptuously negative, many
writers having dismissed Reich’s experiments as absurd prima facie.
I shall limit myself then to a brief account of Reich’s scientific experiments, pre-
senting the major arguments, pro and con, which have been advanced by others. More
importantly, my aim is to show the overall theoretical framework within which his scientific
work developed and how this research influenced his psychiatric and social endeavors.
No longer a member of the psychoanalytic organization or the Communist Party,
Reich was now freer to pursue his research without having to look over his shoulder to see
what Freud or the party leaders thought about it. His social interests remained strong and
vigorously expressed in his quarterly, established this year, the Journal for Political Psychology and
Sex-economy. However, his sex-political efforts were not welcome in any political organiza-
tion. By 1934, the physiological emphasis of Reich’s therapeutic work was becoming increas-
ingly important: the investigation of the streamings of energy (libido) in pleasure; the
reverse movement of that energy in anxiety; and the muscular spasms which, along with the
character armor, prevented the free emotional expression of the organism. But Reich was
not content simply to progress further in his therapeutic technique. He also wished to prove
his own concepts and, with them, Freud’s early hypothesis of the libido, in a demonstrable,
quantitative way^1 .He wanted to provide the biological foundation for psychoanalysis that
Freud had predicted, even though Freud himself had abandoned his early efforts to link
analysis with physiology.
Crises had a way of stimulating Reich to further advances. As in the late 1920s,
when he had combined various concepts and findings from Freud, Marx, and Malinowski
to create his sex-politics and to oppose the more conservative social directions of Freud and
psychoanalysis, so now, in another furor intellectualis, Reich drew upon findings by Freud, and
by the physiologist L. R. Müller, the internist Friedrich Kraus, and the biologist Max
Hartmann, in a synthesizing effort that cut across different fields and paved the way for sub-
sequent experimentation^2.
From analysis, Reich turned once again to Freud’s early notion of “actual neu-
196 Myron SharafFury On Earth