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238 Suppressed Inventions and Other Discoveries
analysts but they did not have the courage to present them in the frank
manner which he did. In 1934 the 13th International Congress of Psychoanalysis
expelled Reich, the man whom Sigmund Freud had titled "the
founder of the modern technique in psycho-analysis."
In the mid- and late 1930s Reich was a refugee in Norway, after accepting
the invitation of a professor he knew in Oslo. As a psychoanalyst Reich
continued to develop new techniques for releasing blocked emotions. The
human potential movement and today's bodywork therapies can be traced
back to Reich.
BIO-ELECTRIC ORGANISMS
While in Norway he first discovered what he called "bions," a microscopic
form of particles which Reicheans say are a transitional form
between non-living material and living organisms. The scientific community
refused to accept his reports of spontaneous generation of life, nor his
contention that as long as medical scientists study dead tissue, their understanding
of living organisms will remain limited.
His previous work led up to the discovery. His professor friend had
made facilities at the Psychological Institute of Oslo University available
to Reich, and Reich had turned to an assistant there for help on measuring
electrical charges of the skin. He wanted to confirm his bio-electric concepts.
Again he was a pioneer.
Out of his earnings from lectures, Reich paid for the building of sensitive
new apparatus with electrodes and vacuum tubes connected to an
oscillograph.* Mainly, Reich confirmed his tensions-charge theory and
the theory that the organism worked like an electrolytic system, and that
it has a continuous bio-electric field of excitation between nerve centers
in the middle of the body and the skin surface.
The holistic aspect of his work was important; for the first time in this
way a scientist showed the organism to be a whole in which disturbance
of one part affects it all. The bio-electric experiments showed the presence
of one bio-psychological energy. His earlier work had indicated the energy
being dammed up and then released in the body, and now his instruments
showed pleasure causing an increase of measurable charge and displeasure
causing decrease of bio-electric charge.
The prolific researcher was about to master yet another area of science.
He wanted to study processes of expansion and contraction and corresponding
bio-electric charges in protozoa—primitive forms of life. Did
currents of a biological force work the same in all living creatures
* A device for producing a geographical record of the variation of an oscillating quantity, such
as an electric current.