THE psychoanalysts who are assembled in New York this week for the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association have reason to congratulate themselves on the flourishing state of their profession. But they are faced with some problems, too, and the most pressing of these is the responsibility of their profession to discipline itself if it is not be be dis­ciplined by the state.

The fact that there are still no legal controls over the practice of psycho­analysis is one that is rarely mentioned in the huge literature dealing with this fascinating field of medicine. Meanwhile, a flood of uncritical popu­larizations of psychoanalytic concepts has been sweeping over the public via books, magazines, movies and radio. And the readiness of laymen to accept almost any doctrine claiming to be based on psychoanalysis is illus­trated by the story of Wilhelm Reich, around whose theories there has al­ready begun to collect a cult of no little influence. Born in Austria and now a resident of Forest Hills, Long Island, Reich is the framer of the theory of “orgastic potency.” He claims as his greatest scientific achievement the discovery of “orgone.”

Orgone, named after the sexual orgasm, is, according to Reich, a cosmic energy. It is, in fact, the cosmic energy. Reich has not only discovered it; he has seen it, demonstrated it and named a town--Orgonon, Maine­ after it. Here he builds accumulators of it which are rented out to patients, who presumably derive “orgastic potency” from it.

Most psychoanalysts look askance at Reich’s teachings, yet many of his writings have been discussed in such high places as the Journal of the Ameri­can Medical Association and the American Journal of Psychiatry, where his standing in the field of psychoanalytical theory is granted, though his or­gone is not. You will also find him listed in American Men of Science, and you will find his orgone there, too. Only one scientific journal, Psychoso­matic Medicine, has so far come out strongly against Reich; it character­ized his writings about orgone as “a surrealistic creation.”

In the lay press, meanwhile, Reich has received almost entirely uncritical attention. The magazine Politics has carried enthusiastic accounts of his social and sexual theories. The Nation reviewed his latest book with praise. Even that stern journal of dialectical materialism, Science and Society, has recommended him in its pages. Popularized psychoanalytical books like Modern Woman: The Lost Sex have quoted generously from him. Avant garde publications like Pacifica Views (San Francisco), Now (London) and Hermes (Sydney, Australia) have taken up his theories in earnest. The growing group of anarchistically inclined literati on both sides of the Atlan­tic read him with fervor. Reich’s books have been assigned in university seminars for serious consideration and his orgone cult has spread so far that at a camp in New York State last summer it took the doctor’s strict orders to keep the camp director from furnishing orgone accumulators for the boys.

Today Reich runs a considerable establishment in his two-story brick house in Forest Hills, and he has more patients than he can take care of. As you climb the stairs to his second-floor office, you find pictures of stellar nebulae along the walls. You find Reich to be a heavy-set, ruddy, brown­haired man of 50, wearing a long white coat and sitting at a huge desk. Between periods of training students in his theories and putting patients into orgone accumulators, he will tell you how unutterably rotten is the underlying character of the average individual walking the streets, and how, in the room across the hall where he works on his patients, he peels back their presentable surfaces to expose the corrupted “second layer” of human personality. For the masses of the people, says Reich, “are endemically neurotic and sexually sick.”

Reich has come a long way since his early days in Vienna. In the early nineteen twenties, when he himself was also in his twenties, he was a mem­ber of a group of psychoanalysts who met monthly with Freud, and he was for six years the director of the Vienna Seminar for Psychoanalytic Therapy.

In those years he was known as a courageous pioneer in therapeutic tech­niques.

Two things about psychoanalysis and psychoanalysts bothered him. In the first place, it seemed to him that psychoanalysts were not facing up to their social responsibilities--responsibilities all too clearly implied in their theories, particularly those dealing with the sexual etiology of neuroses and infantile sexuality. And second, he did not feel that they were really shouldering their scientific responsibilities. Freud had said that psycho­analysis would one day have to be rooted in biology, yet here were the analysts spinning a gigantic web of explanations and giving very little time to an objectively demonstrable basis for their assumptions.

So Wilhelm Reich dedicated his energies to filling these two gaps--the social and the scientific. As step number one in the first, he joined the Socialist Party of Austria and began to organize “sex-political” units within that organization. The program for these units, which he described as “sex-economics,” was based on his own chief contribution to psychoanalyti­cal theory up to that time.

That contribution is known in the literature as the orgasm theory.

Briefly, the orgasm theory is this:

Until Reich, says Reich, it had been naively assumed by nearly everybody that the sexual orgasm was nothing more than a tricky bit of sugar coating devised by Mother Nature to make sure that the race survived. Even the analysts, for all their probing into sexual behavior, had strangely overlooked this most significant sexual experience. But Reich centered his attention precisely here and came out with what he terms an answer to a big and bothersome theoretical question: to wit, where did the emotional energy come from which was abortively expressed in neurotic behavior? It had already been assumed that it was sexual energy. But how did it happen to seek non-sexual channels for expression? The orgasm gave the clue. The function of the orgasm, said Reich, was far more important than a lure to procreation. That was simply a sideline use. The real function was to release sexual tension built up by sexual energy. And since, according to accepted psychoanalytical theory, sexual energy was basic energy, the orgasm hence became the body’s emotional-energy regulator. Sex econom­ics is the economy of instinctual urges.

When some analysts pointed out that they had dealt with neurotics who did experience the orgasm but stayed neurotic all the same, Reich’s come­back was: What kind? For he also stipulated that unless the orgasm was adequate to the tension, obviously some energy was not released, and this unspent energy provided the emotional fuel for anxiety, which he defined as the reVerse side of the coin--sexuality. The capacity to experience a release in the orgasm equal to the sexual tension, Reich called orgastic potency.

According to Reich, though, only a very few individuals were blessed with orgastic potency. Society’s general anti-sexual attitude, compulsive morality, legally enforced monogamy and family pressures on behalf of pre­marital chastity had so inhibited man’s natural sexuality that most of the world was now peopled, said Reich, with orgastic cripples.

The burden of reshaping society toward sexuality and the promotion of orgastic potency he placed, at that time, on the Socialist Party of Austria.

But the party was unequal to the task. Reich’s sex-political units were, needless to say, quite popular. So popular, in fact, that the party fathers began to feel that sex economics was sabotaging Marxian economics and draining off enthusiasm from such problems as the relationship between capital investment and the rate of wages.