Wilhelm Reich noticed that unresolved emotional energy lodged in the body as chronic muscle tension. He called this armoring.

He developed a technique to release it. When the tension broke, the neurosis broke with it.

This led him to a question: what exactly was the energy being released?

Freud called it libido. Jung called it life force. Reich decided to find out what it actually was.

He named it orgone, a biological energy most dramatically expressed at the moment of orgasm. He believed neurosis was simply this energy dammed up.

Forced out of Europe by the Nazis, he landed in Norway and later the United States, and crossed a threshold from psychoanalyst to biophysicist.

Looking for the boundary between living and nonliving matter, he turned a microscope on ordinary substances. At high magnification, after heat and chemical treatment, something unexpected appeared:

Tiny glowing blue vesicles, shimmering, moving, merging, behaving as if alive.

He called them bions. They seemed to emerge from both organic and inorganic matter. Heat not only didn't destroy them; it multiplied them.

The bions destroyed bacteria. They destroyed cancer cells. And they appeared to emit real radiation: Reich developed eye irritation, an unexplained tan in winter, and a strange surge of personal energy.

He became convinced he wasn't just observing a curiosity. He believed he had found the life energy itself, the physical substrate behind everything he had theorized about the body, the orgasm, and the mind.

The psychoanalyst had become a physicist of the invisible.