Download or read book Wilhelm Reich Biologist written by James E. Strick and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2015-04-01 with total page 476 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Psychoanalyst, political theorist, pioneer of body therapies, prophet of the sexual revolution—all fitting titles, but Wilhelm Reich has never been recognized as a serious laboratory scientist, despite his experimentation with bioelectricity and unicellular organisms. Wilhelm Reich, Biologist is an eye-opening reappraisal of one of twentieth-century science’s most controversial figures—perhaps the only writer whose scientific works were burned by both the Nazis and the U.S. government. Refuting allegations of “pseudoscience” that have long dogged Reich’s research, James Strick argues that Reich’s lab experiments in the mid-1930s represented the cutting edge of light microscopy and time-lapse micro-cinematography and deserve to be taken seriously as legitimate scientific contributions. Trained in medicine and a student of Sigmund Freud, Reich took to the laboratory to determine if Freud’s concept of libido was quantitatively measurable. His electrophysiological experiments led to his “discovery” of microscopic vesicles (he called them “bions”), which Reich hypothesized were instrumental in originating life from nonliving matter. Studying Reich’s laboratory notes from recently opened archives, Strick presents a detailed account of the bion experiments, tracing how Reich eventually concluded he had discovered an unknown type of biological radiation he called “orgone.” The bion experiments were foundational to Reich’s theory of cancer and later investigations of orgone energy. Reich’s experimental findings and interpretations were considered discredited, but not because of shoddy lab technique, as has often been claimed. Scientific opposition to Reich’s experiments, Strick contends, grew out of resistance to his unorthodox sexual theories and his Marxist political leanings.
Download or read book Wilhelm Reich Biologist written by James E. Strick and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2015-04-06 with total page 476 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Refuting allegations of "pseudoscience" that have long dogged Reich's research, the author argues that Reich's lab experiments in the mid-1930s represented the cutting edge of light microscopy and time-lapse micro-cinematography and deserve to be taken seriously as legitimate scientific contributions.--Publisher's description.
Download or read book Where s the Truth written by Wilhelm Reich and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2012-08-07 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Where's the Truth? is the fourth and final volume of Wilhelm Reich's autobiographical writings, drawn from his diaries, letters, and laboratory notebooks. These writings reveal the details of the outrider scientist's life—his joys and sorrows, his hopes and insecurities—and chronicle his experiments with what he called "orgone energy." A student of Freud's and a prominent research physician in the early psychoanalytic movement, Reich immigrated to America in 1939 in flight from Nazism, and pursued research about orgone energy functions in the living organism and the atmosphere. Where's the Truth? begins in January 1948, shortly after Reich became a target of the Federal Food and Drug Administration. He had already faced persecution by the U.S. government, having been mistaken by the State Department and the FBI for both a Communist and a Nazi. Starting in 1947, Reich was hounded by the FDA, which, in 1954, obtained an injunction by default against him that enabled it to burn six tons of his published books and research journals, and to ban the use of one of his most important experimental research tools—the orgone energy accumulator. Challenging the right of a court to judge basic scientific research, Reich was imprisoned in March 1957 and died in the U.S. Penitentiary in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, eight months later. The text gathered here shows Reich's steadfast determination to protect his work. "Where's the truth?" he asked a lawyer, and that question animates this volume and rounds out our understanding of a unique, irrepressible modern figure.
Download or read book In Defense of Wilhelm Reich written by James DeMeo and published by . This book was released on 2012-08 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Wilhelm Reich has been chronically slandered and misrepresented in the popular media, and in "scientific" circles, beyond all rationality. His controversial research findings have been replicated by other scholars and scientists, but the entire subject of his work has been a serious Taboo for decades. Natural Scientist DeMeo corrects the record.
Download or read book Sparks of Life written by James E. Strick and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-01 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How, asks James E. Strick, could spontaneous generation--the idea that living things can suddenly arise from nonliving materials--come to take root for a time (even a brief one) in so thoroughly unsuitable a field as British natural theology? No less an authority than Aristotle claimed that cases of spontaneous generation were to be observed in nature, and the idea held sway for centuries. Beginning around the time of the Scientific Revolution, however, the doctrine was increasingly challenged; attempts to prove or disprove it led to important breakthroughs in experimental design and laboratory techniques, most notably sterilization methods, that became the cornerstones of modern microbiology and sped the ascendancy of the germ theory of disease. The Victorian debates, Strick shows, were entwined with the public controversy over Darwin's theory of evolution. While other histories of the debates between 1860 and 1880 have focused largely on the experiments of John Tyndall, Henry Charlton Bastian, and others, Sparks of Life emphasizes previously understudied changes in the theories that underlay the debates. Strick argues that the disputes cannot be understood without full knowledge of the factional infighting among Darwinians themselves, as they struggled to create a socially and scientifically viable form of Darwinian science. He shows that even the terms of the debate, such as biogenesis, usually but incorrectly attributed to Huxley, were intensely contested.
Download or read book The Bion Experiments on the Origins of Life written by Wilhelm Reich and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2013-07-02 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Bion Experiments, published in a limited German edition in 1938 and now available in English for the first time, represents a cornerstone in Reich's scientific development. The work documents a series of experiments conducted in Oslo in 1936-37 in which Reich applied the formula of tension?charge?discharge?relaxation, derived from his research on the function of the orgasm, to the microscopic biological world, thereby opening a route to an understanding of the origin of life. This work is divided into two parts: the first, a detailed report on the experiments; the second, Reich's conclusions and an exposition of his research method. The Bion Experiments provides a unique insight into Reich's scientific method, and makes available the experimental material essential to understanding his later work with cancer and orgone biophysics.
Download or read book Exploring the Origin Extent and Future of Life written by Constance M. Bertka and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2009-09-03 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Philosophers, historians, ethicists, and theologians provide the perspectives of their fields on astrobiology for graduate students and researchers.
Download or read book Adventures in the Orgasmatron written by Christopher Turner and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2011-06-07 with total page 836 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of The Economist's 2011 Books of the Year A Boston Globe Best Nonfiction Book of 2011 Well before the 1960s, a sexual revolution was under way in America, led by expatriated European thinkers who saw a vast country ripe for liberation. In Adventures in the Orgasmatron, Christopher Turner tells the revolution's story—an illuminating, thrilling, often bizarre story of sex and science, ecstasy and repression. Central to the narrative is the orgone box—a tall, slender construction of wood, metal, and steel wool. A person who sat in the box, it was thought, could elevate his or her "orgastic potential." The box was the invention of Wilhelm Reich, an outrider psychoanalyst who faced a federal ban on the orgone box, an FBI investigation, a fraught encounter with Einstein, and bouts of paranoia. In Turner's vivid account, Reich's efforts anticipated those of Alfred Kinsey, Herbert Marcuse, and other prominent thinkers—efforts that brought about a transformation of Western views of sexuality in ways even the thinkers themselves could not have imagined.
Download or read book Fury On Earth written by Myron Sharaf and published by Da Capo Press. This book was released on 1994-03-22 with total page 584 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Genesis In The Beginning written by Joseph Seckbach and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-03-19 with total page 911 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Genesis – In The Beginning deals with the origin and diversity of Life and early biological evolution and discusses the question of where (hot or cold sources) and when the beginning of Life took place. Among the sections are chapters dealing with prebiotic chemical processes and considering self-replication of polymers in mineral habitats. One chapter is dedicated to the photobiological regime on early Earth and the emergence of Life. This volume covers the role of symmetry, information and order (homochrial biomolecules) in the beginning of Life. The models of protocells and the genetic code with gene transfer are important topics in this volume. Three chapters discuss the Panspermia hypothesis (to answer “Are we from outer Space?”). Other chapters cover the Astrobiological aspects of Life in the Universe in extraterrestrial Planets of the Solar System and deal with cometary hydrosphere (and its connection to Earth). We conclude with the history and frontiers of Astrobiogy.
Download or read book Biologists Under Hitler written by Ute Deichmann and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Her book also provides overwhelming evidence of German scientists' conscious misrepresentation after the war of their wartime activities. In this regard, Deichmann's capsule biography of Konrad Lorenz is particularly telling.
Download or read book Science Set Free written by Rupert Sheldrake and published by Deepak Chopra. This book was released on 2013-09-03 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The bestselling author of Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home offers an intriguing new assessment of modern day science that will radically change the way we view what is possible. In Science Set Free (originally published to acclaim in the UK as The Science Delusion), Dr. Rupert Sheldrake, one of the world's most innovative scientists, shows the ways in which science is being constricted by assumptions that have, over the years, hardened into dogmas. Such dogmas are not only limiting, but dangerous for the future of humanity. According to these principles, all of reality is material or physical; the world is a machine, made up of inanimate matter; nature is purposeless; consciousness is nothing but the physical activity of the brain; free will is an illusion; God exists only as an idea in human minds, imprisoned within our skulls. But should science be a belief-system, or a method of enquiry? Sheldrake shows that the materialist ideology is moribund; under its sway, increasingly expensive research is reaping diminishing returns while societies around the world are paying the price. In the skeptical spirit of true science, Sheldrake turns the ten fundamental dogmas of materialism into exciting questions, and shows how all of them open up startling new possibilities for discovery. Science Set Free will radically change your view of what is real and what is possible.
Download or read book The Mass Psychology of Fascism written by Wilhelm Reich and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 1970 with total page 435 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this classic study, Reich repudiates the concept that fascism is the ideology or action of a single individual or nationality, or of any ethnic or political group. Instead he sees fascism as the expression of the irrational character structure of the average human being whose whose primary biological needs and impulses have been suppressed for thousands of years.
Download or read book The Invasion of Compulsory Sex Morality written by Wilhelm Reich and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2013-07-02 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study of the invasion of compulsory sexual morality into human society was written in 1931 and now appears for the first time in the English language. It preceded "The Mass Psyhchology of Fascism" and "The Sexual Revolution" and was Reich's first step in approaching the answer to the problem of human mass neuroses. Growing out of his involvement with the crucial question of the origin of sexual suppression, this attempt to explain historically the problem of sexual disturbances and neuroses draws upon the ethnological works of Morgan, Engels and, in particular, Malinowski, whose remarkable studies of the sexual life and customs of the primitive people of the Trobriand Islands confirmed Reich's clinical discoveries.
Download or read book People In Trouble written by Wilhelm Reich and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 1978-04 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published by Reich in 1953, People in Trouble is an autobiographical work in which Reich describes the development of his sociological thinking from 1927 to 1937. In simple narrative form he recounts his personal experiences with major social and political events and ideas, and reveals how these experiences gradually led him to an awareness of the deep significance of the human character structure in shaping and responding to the social process. The importance of Karl Marx's work and its distortion by communist politicians plays an important role in Reich's account, as does the political activity in the International Psychoanalytic Association which led to his expulsion from that organization in 1934. The Norwegian press campaign against his biological experiments is also discussed. People in Trouble is the story of one man's courageous struggle to understand the political activity of his fellow men.
Download or read book In Whom We Live and Move and Have Our Being written by Philip Clayton and published by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. This book was released on 2004 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A series of essays examining panentheism, a philosophy that considers God to be inter-related with the world and the world to be inter-related with God.
Download or read book November written by Gerhard Richter and published by Heni Publishers. This book was released on 2015 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Following the limited edition hardback November title published in 2013 by HENI Publishing, the paperback edition has been released in both English and German languages to the trade. November presents German artist Gerhard Richter s series of the same name comprised of 54 ink drawings so called due to their creation throughout the month of November in 2008. Richter assumed this method after accidentally dripping ink on to a sheet of highly absorbent paper and realising that two related images formed on the front and back. He then began to manipulate the ink in various ways changing its consistency and applying lacquer or pencil to add further detail. Reworking this method on 27 sheets of paper, he was able to create 54 images in total, presented here as facsimiles, so that both sides of each piece of paper can be viewed at the same time. These are labelled with the date that they were produced and arranged in order. The book also contains an overview of the series, featuring thumbnail
