icism of his method and his findings. Over and over again he was haunted by the question:
If what I see exists, why wasn’t it discovered before? And the corollary: Am I badly off
track?
With the problem of a seemingly ubiquitous energy in mind, Reich, with Ilse, took
his first American vacation in the summer of 1940 a camping trip through New England.
After a week in New Hampshire, their tent leaked. They then drove into Maine, to the north-
west part of the state, where they rented a cabin on Mooselookmeguntic Lake, near the
small town of Rangeley. The lake was large, the cabin simple and quiet. The air was clear and
dry, not hot and humid as summer was in Forest Hills. Reich loved the region immediately.
It was to have a deep significance in his life. Here he would spend longer and longer sum-
mer periods, then establish his main research center, which he called Orgonon; finally, after
1950, he would live year round in the area.
It may have been a “vacation,” but once located on Mooselookmeguntic, Reich
wasted no time in getting down to work. Again, he proceeded in his naive way. One night
he was watching the sky above the lake. He noted stars flickering, stronger in the east than
the west, though the moon was low on the western horizon. Reich reasoned that if the the-
ory that the flickering of the stars was due to diffuse light was correct, the flickering would
have to be the same everywhere or even more intense near the moonlight. But exactly the
opposite was the case.
Just as earlier Reich had looked at the emotional expression of the body in a new
fashion, so now he began to watch the sky above the lake in a manner radically different
from that of current observation with its panoply of instruments. In relying initially on his
own organism as his main research tool, Reich returned to the earlier investigative emphasis
of Goethe: “Man himself, inasmuch as he makes use of his healthy senses, is the greatest
and most exact physical apparatus; and that is just the greatest evil of modern physics that
one has, as it were, detached the experiment from man and wishes to gain knowledge of
nature merely through that which artificial instruments show.”^4
In Reich’s view,to have limited his study of nature only to what he could measure
through instruments would be equivalent to having studied the emotions of man only by
means of quantitative indices. He would have had to rule out his subjectiveimpression that
the patient had,for example, a soft or hard or “aristocratic” character armor. However,
unlike the artist or the philosopher, Reich was as interested in arriving finally at objective
data in his study as he was in obtaining the same kind ofevidence concerning the emotion-
al life of man.
In Maine, Reich began to look at individual stars through a wooden tube.
Accidentally,he focused the tube on a dark blue patch between the stars. To his surprise, he
saw a vivid flickering, then flashes of fine rays of light. The more he turned in the direction
of the moon, the less intense these phenomena appeared. They were most pronounced in
the darkest spots of the sky, between the stars. It was the same flickering and flashing he had
observed so many times in his box.A magnifying glass used as an eyepiece in the tube mag-
nified the rays. All of a sudden, Reich’s box with its flickering lost its mysterious quality. The
21 : The Discovery of Orgone Energy: 1940 261