The Function of the Orgasm

Wilhelm Reich was born in Austro-Hungary in 1897. By the 1920s, Reich had become a doctor of medicine and taken his place as a prominent psychoanalyst in Sigmund Freud’s inner circle. He went on to focus his attention on the relationship between the emotional, physiological and physical functions of the biological energy underlying human emotional experience, which he called orgone. He saw psyche and soma as a unified whole and the goal of therapy to balance the body’s energy metabolism by dissolving characterological and muscular defenses which he called armor. He saw the function of the orgasm, which he described as any natural living process involving the buildup of mechanical tension, energetic charge, energetic discharge and mechanical relaxation, as central to the understanding of healthy functioning. This book is a kind of scientific autobiography in which the author traces his personal and professional development from his first interactions with Freud and psychoanalysis in 1919 through the approximately 20 tumultuous and highly productive years that followed.