Which student of Wilhelm Reich went on to develop a pseudo-scientific and spiritual concept called orgone, whose energy was present in the atmosphere and could be used to produce rain?
Orgone Orgone is a pseudo-scientific and spiritual concept described as an esoteric energy or hypothetical universal life force, originally proposed in the 1930s by Wilhelm Reich. As developed by Reich's student Charles Kelley after Reich's death in 1957, orgone was conceived as the anti-entropic principle of the universe, a creative substratum in all of nature comparable to Mesmer's animal magnetism (1779), to the Odic force (1845) of Carl Reichenbach and to Henri Bergson's "élan vital" (1907). Orgone was seen as a massless, omnipresent substance, similar to luminiferous aether, but more closely associated with living energy than with inert matter. It could allegedly coalesce to create organization on all scales, from the smallest microscopic units—called "bions" in orgone theory—to macroscopic structures like organisms, clouds, or even galaxies.
Psyche (book) Psyche (German: "Psyche, zur Entwicklungsgeschichte der Seele" ) is an 1846 book by Carl Gustav Carus, a physician and painter noted for his work on animal psychology and physiognomy. In his "The Discovery of the Unconscious" (1970), Henri Ellenberger calls "Psyche" "the life-work of a physician and keen observer of the human mind" and "the first attempt to give a complete and objective theory on unconscious psychological life", adding that "It shows the shape reached by the theory of the unconscious at the end of the Romantic period, before the positivistic trend became dominant." He notes that Carus influenced Eduard von Hartmann and later Carl Jung. According to him, Carus defines psychology as "the science of the soul's development from the unconscious to the conscious" and believes that "human life is divided into three periods: (1) A pre-embryonic period in which the individual merely exists as a tiny cell within the mother's ovary. (2) the embryonic period; through fecundation, in which the individual is suddenly wakened from his long sleep, and the formative unconscious develops. (3) After birth, in which the formative unconscious continues to direct the individual's growth and the function of his organs. Consciousness arises gradually, but it always remains under the influence of the unconscious and the individual periodically returns to it in his sleep."