What is Emotional Health?

Because people are essentially clueless about what constitutes emotional health, a clarification is necessary. The following characterization of emotions and of emotional health is provided from a medical-psychiatric point of view:

What are emotions?
Emotions are the perception of bio-energy excitation moving radially (in and out) in the organism. There are five basic emotions: Love, Fear, Rage, Sadness and Longing.

What is emotional health?
In an healthy individual, emotional energy moves freely in the organism. The build-up of energy beyond a certain point (the lumination point) gives rise to sexual excitation and a drive for discharge of excess energy in the genital orgasm. This capacity is the criterion of emotional health.

What is emotional sickness?
In an unhealthy individual the movement of bio-energy is impeded by emotional blocks or armor. Since the capacity for complete orgastic discharge is disturbed, the residual, undischarged energy leads to the symptoms of emotional illness.

What are emotional blocks/ armor?
Emotional blocks are the immobilization (stasis) of bio-energy in various organs of the body. It is mostly held in the musculature (muscular armor) and the person’s character (character armor).

How are emotional blocks/armor recognized?
Some common manifestations are disturbances in thinking and emotions and symptoms such as anxiety, depression etc. well-known in psychiatry.

What are the effects of these emotional blocks?
Emotional blocks result in sexual disturbances and other psychiatric symptoms as well as every kind of pathological social behavior and thinking.

Are these emotional blocks responsible for the political conflicts between the political left and the right?
Yes. They are responsible for both individual problems and socially based problems.

What is the origin of these emotional blocks?
Emotional blocks (armor) are formed during the individual’s developmental period from birth to around the age of five or later.

How do these emotional blocks happen?
They are the result of life-negative, socially destructive influences on a young child’s emotional development.

Can people’s emotional blocks be removed?
This can be performed by medical orgonomists who are physicians trained in the practice of medical orgone therapy. It can also be performed by social orgonomists who are social workers trained in the field of social orgonomy.

Can these emotional blocks be removed by anyone?
It takes many years of experience in the training programs given by the American College of Orgonomy for a physician or social worker to become qualified to work responsibly in these disciplines.

How is medical and social orgonomy different from other therapies?
They are based on the three psychiatric discoveries of Wilhelm Reich, M.D.: 1. The biological energy that is at the basis of living functions which he called orgone; 2.The armor that interferes with it’s movement; 3. The orgasm function that regulates it. In addition, therapy is based on the ability of the therapist to think functionally, not mechanistically or mystically.

June 28, 2016
Categories: American College of Orgonomy, emotional health, Social Sciences, Wilhelm Reich . Tags: , , . Author: Charles Konia, M.D. . Comments: 2 Comments

The Rise In People’s Cluelessness

Around 1960, a fundamental transformation in Western Society took place from authoritarian to anti-authoritarian. With the transformation, there was a change in the pattern of armor in young people. Ocular armor largely replaced muscular armor and this had destructive personal and social consequences. Emotional energy was no longer able to be bound and held back in muscular armor. As a result of the weakening of muscular armor and the increase in ocular armor, destructive emotions were expressed through intellectualized rationalizations, hatred and contempt of authority. Blame and resentment were directed at traditional authority figures in all areas of society.
Young people became more irrational and out of touch with themselves and with the world. They became more contactless. The word clueless that is in common usage today accurately describes this mental state.
Accompanying the anti-authoritarian transformation, there appeared for the first time a syndrome of symptoms in children characterized by disturbances in focusing, restlessness and hyperactivity. This condition was called Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD).
Today, the number of young American adults taking medication for ADHD has nearly doubled from 2008 to 20012. One in ten adolescent boys were taking a drug for the disorder.
Today’s adult population represents the children of the baby boomers that were growing up in the 60’s. From a bio-psychiatric perspective, a primary manifestation of the disorder that first appeared at that time, ADHD, are a result of ocular pathology. It is possible to treat this disorder without the use of medication by a qualified therapist.

March 15, 2014
Categories: accurate diagnosis, character structure, emotional plague, Medical Sciences . Tags: , , , , , . Author: Charles Konia, M.D. . Comments: 12 Comments

Why Is Swaddling Becoming Popular?

In the last few decades there has been a revival in the practice of swaddling babies. An example is a recent article in The Wall Street Journal, (May 14, 2013) A Better Night’s Sleep for All that provides the latest information about baby swaddling to prospective parents.  The subject of swaddling is juxtaposed with the subject of infant death syndrome (SIDS).  A correlation is then made between SIDS cases to unsafe sleep environments.  From there, the article goes on to discuss better methods of swaddling.  The reason given for swaddling is that it provides “a better night’s sleep for all.”

The article is a typical manifestation of the emotional plague in operation in everyday life.  The association of  swaddling with SIDS has the effect of frightening people into swaddling their infants.  The reason to swaddle, to insure a good night’s sleep for all, is given to justify the practice with a “good intention”and to provide the parents with a clear conscience.  Nothing is said about the importance of the child’s spontaneous movements for it’s emotional health and natural development.  Nothing is said about the harm that restricting these movements does to the infant.

The reason for this upswing is twofold: First, mothers today are in less emotional touch with themselves and are in need of good advice.  (More and more “experts” are in the market  to give it.)  Second, in today’s anti-authoritarian, overly permissive society,  people have less muscular armor and therefore are generally more anxious than they were in the past.  For many, having a baby is fraught with anxiety and prospective parents  need to have their anxieties brought under control.  Armoring their babies by swaddling them  gives parents comfort and a sense of security.

Until mothers and fathers are in better emotional contact with their own and their children’s emotional needs, there is no hope that there will be any genuine improvement with the way newborns and babies are brought up.

May 16, 2013
Categories: emotional plague, Medical Sciences, Politics, Social Sciences . Tags: , , , . Author: Charles Konia, M.D. . Comments: 9 Comments

Evasions And Distractions Contain The Most Superficial Layer Of Social Armor

We know from the treatment of individual patients that people go to enormous lengths to not face the problems that first bring them into therapy.  The same situation exists in our treatment of society’s social problems. The contents of newspapers are full of articles that are considered “newsworthy” as covering important social and political issues.  But from a functional perspective these articles actually are  evasions and distractions.  Analysis of the problems contained in them whether they are economic, social , political or whatever come down to the same source: they are the result of the  emotionally based sickness of the human race.  In fact, the more people seem to be addressing the so-called key issues as, for example, when scientists look for the secrets of life in the genetic code, the more they are actually running away from this central problem.

Why is this so? It is emotionally too painful for individuals both singly and collectively to look and feel what is going on within themselves and so they  focus exclusively on and blame the external manifestations.  This is why whenever there is a massacre such as a school shooting people are up in arms for gun control.  But it’s not guns that kill people.  Murderous impulses in people are responsible for killing people.  Until people are first capable of looking inwardly at what is happening within themselves they are not emotionally healthy enough to be in a position to really understand anything constructive about the world they are living in.  They are unable to recognize that the same murderous impulses that resulted in the massacre are there hidden in everyone.  Looking inwardly (introspectively) indicates a certain capacity to be in contact with what all people have in common, their own personal armored structures.  Therefore, a deep appreciation of the universality and function of armor in people is a prerequisite for any constructive understanding of what is going on in the world.

The therapy of individuals consists in starting on the bio-physical surface before attempting to proceed to deeper layers of their armored structure.  The same principle holds true for the therapy of social groups.  The social orgonomist starts his intervention at the social surface by  addressing people’s resistances which are expressed in their evasiveness and distractibility.  Until this defensive layer of ocular armor is successfully eliminated and people are able to feel the emotions that they they defending against there can be no progress expected in getting at the deeper impulses contained in the social armor.

This formulation is given as a preliminary attempt to begin addressing some of the social problems that society is faced with.

December 28, 2012
Categories: emotional plague, Politics, Social Sciences, socio-political character . Tags: , , , , , . Author: Charles Konia, M.D. . Comments: 6 Comments

From The History Of The Emotional Plague: The Solution Of Christianity

The core functions of all religions are twofold: First, it provides a way of understanding the relation of humans to the cosmos from which they originate and second, it provides a way of coming to grips with people’s armored condition and it’s destructive social consequence, the emotional plague of mankind.  Because human armor is omnipresent, practically the entire human race is caught in the world-wide web of the emotional plague.  This trap includes religions movements themselves.

Christianity has had a powerful influence on Western life in it’s attempt to address  these  functions, particularly in understanding and dealing with the problem of human evil which is how the emotional plague is currently recognized in a distorted form.  Christianity  began to flourish around the fourth century A.D.  when the Roman Empire was disintegrating. People’s secondary destructive drives were responsible for this collapse and   Christianity’s primary  function was to preserve whatever remained intact of  Roman social order.

In order to do this, Christianity combined the two basic functions of religion, the cosmic element and the emotional plague element, into one comprehensive  mystical dogma: Christ, the son of God, came to earth to save humanity from it’s sins by sacrificing his life for man.  The function of this belief was to restore social order by anchoring Christian mysticism into the structure of  the armored populace.

Christianity attempted to get to the universality of human armor and the emotional plague through the irrational idea of original sin: all men and woman are sinners.  It also attempted to bring about social cohesion by converting all non-believers into Christianity since only by believing in Christ as the true savior of souls could one be saved from eternal damnation.

The act of mystical belief in Christ the savior was expected to keep impulses from the destructive secondary layer of armored humans in check.  Since Christ died for people’s sins, the responsibility for sinning (human social destructiveness) and the guilt that is associated with it is taken over in the body of Christ.  People can temporarily be relieved of the feeling of guilt that is contained in the destructive impulses in their armor by believing in Christ.

The Catholic church has incorporated into its religion the function of providing relief in the practice of confession.  The priest as the representative of Christ on earth functions in the role of confessor.  What is essential for obtaining relief from guilt is the sinner’s absolute conviction that  Christ is the true savior.

However, the Christian solution to the problem of the emotional plague was only partially successful and lasted for about a thousand years in Europe.  Consider the rampant debauchery and corruption of the  Church’s leaders during the middle ages that resulted in the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century.  The importance of the Reformation movement was to deal with the emotional plague within the Catholic Church itself.  The Reformation under Luther returned to  the earlier Christian belief that faith in Christ alone without any human intervention was sufficient for salvation.

But Protestantism also was not able to contain the build-up of energy in the destructive secondary layer since it soon was apparent that Protestants could be as cruel and as fanatical as Catholics.  Furthermore, people were growing dissatisfied with Catholicism’s rigid mystical interpretation of the natural world.  From a biophysical perspective, people’s mystical form of ocular armor was loosening.

The only other solution that armored humans had to deal with the problem of human destructiveness was to pull energy up from the body into the head and rely on the objective, not subjective,  aspects of human life.  This led to the age of enlightenment and the liberal thinkers in 18h century England.  On the one hand, liberalism was a rational attempt to deal with the  Catholic Church’s mystical view of the world and on the other, it was a hopelessly desperate attempt to deal with and control impulses from people’s secondary destructive layer  (the emotional plague) by pulling energy from muscular armor into the brain.  With liberalism, brain (ocular) armor intensified through the development of defensive intellectualism at the expense of muscular armor.  One form of ocular armor (mysticism) was replaced by another equally destructive form (defensive intellectualism). From a characterological perspective, conservative thinking was replaced by liberal thinking.

However, eliminating mystical religion created another, more serious problem in today’s anti-authoritarian society.  There was no longer a mechanism for people who had given up their faith in religion to obtain relief from their guilt resulting from the socially destructive impulses contained in their middle layer.  Since people had chronic armor they also had a chronic sense of guilt that they had to live with on a daily basis.  As a result, people developed free floating guilt feelings.  To obtain relief, it was readily acted out through advocating leftist social and political causes of every kind.

The development of free floating guilt in people who have given up their mystical faith in religion and in religious leaders is the reason for liberalism’s instability as a political movement and why it can quickly degenerate into socialism and communism.  It is also the reason  for how quickly psuedo-liberal leaders on the political left can appear on the social scene to assume the role of a secular savior of the masses who need to be led into subjugation.

Wilhelm Reich found that human beings are not born evil,  but that evilness is instilled in infants and children through a process of armoring and  that this causes them to behave destructively toward other humans.   Armoring in humans is the source of the emotional plague.  Therefore, if humans are not born evil but are made so, sinfulness can be prevented in the human race through natural child rearing practices and through the process of armor elimination of medical orgone therapy.  The emotional plague is a medical disorder and must be treated like any other infectious medical disease.

May 9, 2012
Categories: emotional plague, Social Sciences, socio-political character . Tags: , , , , , , , , , . Author: Charles Konia, M.D. . Comments: 6 Comments

The Role Of Armor In Speech Impediments

Mechanistic neurology incorrectly ascribes the speech function exclusively to certain local areas in the brain, the so-called speech centers on the cerebral cortex.  From a functional perspective, however, we understand that these speech centers function only to integrate impulses entering and leaving the brain from and to the tissues and organs contained in the thoracic, cervical and oral segments that are involved with the speech function.

Sigmund Freud, who was a highly skilled and respected neurologist before launching into psychoanalysis, came to the same conclusion as a result of his investigations into brain pathophysiology in patients suffering from aphasia.  Contrary to what was popularly believed by neurologists at that time, he demonstrated that individual words were not localized in the brain.  In the conclusion to his monograph, On Aphasia written in 1891 he writes, “the significance of the factor of [speech] localization for aphasia has been overrated, and that we should be well advised once again to concern ourselves with the functional states  of the apparatus of speech.”  Freud had first to scientifically satisfy himself of the inadequacies of the mechanistic approach to the psychology of speech before introducing psychoanalysis and free association to the world. The significance of this important contribution by Freud to the history of science is overlooked by everyone.

The next important step in understanding disturbances in the speech function also came from the realm of pathology.  Clinical experience with patients in medical orgone therapy  who have certain speech impediments such as spastic dysphonia and stuttering revealed that when muscular armor is removed from the segments involved in speech by expressing the anger in therapy that was being held in those muscles, the speech disturbance was permanently eliminated.  Thus, the presence of  body armor was found to be an important factor in producing these symptoms.

Therefore, the integration of organ sensations of the speech apparatus from the thoracic (respiration), cervical (vocalization), oral (articulation)  and ocular (comprehension) segments by the brain must be the the sources of the speech function.  Armor results in a disturbance in the integration of these organ sensations.

One is reminded of the motion picture, The Kings Speech, which accurately depicts a stutterer who is clearly portrayed as having severe oral and cervical armor. When he is provoked to anger, his stuttering temporarily disappears.  The discharge of emotional energy accompanying the expression of  anger that is bound up in the armored organs of articulation (vocal cords, facial  muscles, tongue etc.) momentarily eliminates the speech problem.

April 28, 2012
Categories: Biological Sciences, Medical Sciences . Tags: , , , . Author: Charles Konia, M.D. . Comments: 1 Comment

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