Medical orgone therapy is the result of a progressive evolution of the discoveries made by Wilhelm Reich, a student of Freud’s who was interested in improving psychoanalytic techniques. Reich discovered that a person’s character provides the main resistance to the unmasking of emotions, memories, and unconscious impulses which in their turn are vehicles for nervous disorders (anxiety, depression, panic attacks, etc.). As an automatic and chronic means of reacting toward the external world, character armor is a true wall of defense against the unconscious.

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Psychoanalytic technique therefore had to adjust to this discovery by paying more attention to the character of patients and therefore their behavior (exaggeratedly polite, exaggeratedly rude, rigid, obsequious, arrogant, etc.). Reich called this new form of psychoanalysis character analysis, centered on the display of character traits of patients who reacted with intense emotional response such as anger, anxiety, or crying.

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These reactions permitted Reich to glimpse the role of the body in nervous disorders, especially the role of muscular armor (the neck rigid, the chest swollen in inspiration, the throat tight, the back arched), which correlated inevitably with character armor. By that time his technique involved the patient’s musculature and entire vegetative system (that part of the nervous system not controlled by the conscious that regulates breathing, heartbeat, sexuality, emotions, and dreams) through the incentive of respiration and work directed at the individual’s muscular armor. The character analysis became vegetotherapy.

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The discovery of the role of sexuality and orgasm as regulators of psychic energy of the organism (only patients with a satisfactory sexual life maintained the wellbeing acquired in therapy) and subsequently the real experimental objectification of this energy that he called orgone energy constrained Reich again to change the name of his technique
to medical orgone therapy.

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This therapy involves the “Psyche” (perceptions, emotions, sensations, dreams, memory, and conscious) and the “Soma” (musculature, vegetative system, vascular system, hormonal and immunological system) and is therefore a prerogative of doctors specialized in internal medicine and or psychiatry who enroll in a specific orgonomic training as prescribed by the American College of Orgonomy.