Orgone Accumulators
Psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich sold orgone accumulators like the three versions pictured here to capture a mysterious force used to treat a variety of serious diseases. Wilhelm Reich (March 24, 1897 - November 3, 1957) was an Austrian psychoanalyst, a member of the second generation of psychoanalysts after Freud, and one of the most radical figures in the history of psychiatry. His promotion of sexual permissiveness disturbed the psychoanalytic community and his associates on the political left. He moved to New York in 1939, and shortly after arriving there coined the term orgone, derived from orgasm and organism, for a cosmic energy he said he had discovered, which he said others referred to as God. In 1940 he started building orgone accumulators, devices that his patients sat inside to harness the reputed health benefits, leading to newspaper stories about sex boxes that cured cancer. The FDA obtained an injunction against the interstate shipment of orgone accumulators and associated literature. Charged with contempt in 1956 for having violated the injunction, he was sentenced to two years in prison, and in August that year six tons of his publications were burned by order of the court, one of the most notable examples of censorship in the history of the United States. He died in jail of heart failure just over a year later, days before he was due to apply for parole.
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