Me and the Orgone: The True Story of One Man’s Sexual Awakening, by Orson Bean

Me and the Orgone: The True Story of One Man’s Sexual Awakening, by Orson Bean. 1972 paperback. 160 pages, nice condition.

American actor Orson Bean has a long list of accomplishments, including guest-hosting and appearing on the Tonight show over a hundred times, a major role on Dr. Quinn-- Medicine Woman, Broadway hits, and founding the 15th Street School. This is his autobiographical account about his life-changing experience with the controversial orgone therapy developed by Austrian psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich, one of the most radical figures in the history of psychiatry.

Beginning in 1924, Reich published a series of papers on the idea of "orgastic potency," the ability to release the emotions from the muscles and lose the self in an uninhibited orgasm. Reich argued that psychic health and the ability to love depended on orgastic potency, the full discharge of the libido: "Sexual release in the sex act must correspond to the excitement which leads up to it." He wrote: "It is not just to fuck ... not the embrace in itself, not the intercourse. It is the real emotional experience of the loss of your ego, of your whole spiritual self." He argued that orgastic potency was the goal of character analysis, and came to be known as the "prophet of the better orgasm" and the "founder of a genital utopia.”

Reich had coined the term "orgone energy"—from "orgasm" and "organism"—for the notion of life energy. In 1940 he started building orgone accumulators, modified Faraday cages that he claimed were beneficial for cancer patients. He claimed that his laboratory cancer mice had had remarkable positive effects from being kept in a Faraday cage, so he built human-size versions, where one could sit inside. This led to newspaper stories about "sex boxes" that cured cancer.

The book tells how, after ten years of unsuccessful psychotherapy, Orson Bean discovers medical orgone therapy, a therapeutic intervention that focuses on renewing what it describes as "energy flows" within the patient, orgone being Wilhelm Reich's name for the "life energy". It is a strongly personal account of a man who gets a second chance at a personal sexual revolution, feeling his body beginning to change, feeling freer and more alive, and also seeing his relationships transformed.