Definition of "orgone" []

• A universal life force hypothesized by Wilhelm Reich, supposed to emanate from all organic material that purportedly can be captured with a boothlike device and used to restore psychological well-being. (noun)

American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright (c) 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

• "At that time faddists of various persuasions proliferated up and down the Village: anarchists who dutifully went home every night to their mothers’ kitchens, a Hungarian monarchist with his own following, free-verse poets who eschewed capital letters, cultists who sat rapturously for hours in orgone boxes, cloudy Swedenborgians, and all the rest."
• "They had retained their credulity, however—they saw little suspicious in Reich's claim to have explained everything with his discovery of the very ur-stuff of the universe, called "orgone," in a pot of beef stew, among other places."
• "Wikipedia has an entry on somatic psychologyand another on body psychotherapy, but not a specific entry for somatic psychotherapy; a website calledGoodtherapy, however, defines it as the brainchild of Wilhelm Reich, a German psychologist who believed, among other things, in a cosmic, primordial energy called orgone and who was known to try and increase the ‘orgiastic potency’ of patients by treating them in their underwear."