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Books by Wilhelm Reich
   American Odyssey
   Beyond Psychology
   The Bioelectrical Investigation
      of Sexuality and Anxiety
   The Bion Experiments
   The Cancer Biopathy
   Character Analysis
   Children of the Future
   Contact With Space
   Early Writings
   Ether, God, and Devil / Cosmic
      Superimposition
   The Function of the Orgasm
   Genitality in the Theory and
      Therapy of Neurosis
   The Invasion of Compulsory
      Sex-Morality
   Listen, Little Man!
   The Mass Psychology of
      Fascism
   The Murder of Christ
   Passion of Youth
   People in Trouble
   Record of a Friendship
   Reich Speaks of Freud
   Selected Writings
   The Sexual Revolution
   Where's the Truth?
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The Cancer Biopathy
The Discovery of the Orgone - Vol. 2

Paperback $28.00

Original Publication: Orgone Institute Press – 1948

Banned from circulation by U.S. Federal Court order – 1954

Burned under FDA supervision – 1956 and 1960

Re-published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux – 1973

"I hope and believe this volume will be accessible to the scientifically untrained reader who has familiarized himself with the principles of scientific research in general and orgonomy in particular. Sections that are too technical can be passed over by such readers without undermining their understanding of the whole. The present volume comprises the results of work done over a period of seventeen years, between 1930 and 1947...I do not publish this book without serious concern, mainly that many readers of our literature will now assume that a cure for cancer has been found. This is not at all the case. It is true that the riddle of cancer has become fully accessible through the discovery of orgone energy. But it is incorrect to believe that every cancer victim can now be saved."

       Wilhelm Reich, M.D.
       (from the Preface)

What is cancer? Traditionally, medical science has thought of it as an invasive tumor arising spontaneously in an otherwise healthy organism. Consequently, it has naïvely devised increasingly intricate techniques to eradicate the tumor and treat its complications. These techniques have had varying degrees of success.

In contrast, Reich defines cancer not as a tumor--the tumor is merely a late manifestation of the disease--but as a systemic disease due to chronic thwarting of natural sexual functioning. The ensuing biopathic shrinking of the organism is revealed initially in emotional despair and resignation, which leads eventually to a disturbance of cellular metabolism, with the tumor as its most visible manifestation.

In this radically different scientific investigation of a process that ends, literally, in the putrefaction of the living body due to chronic suffocation of the tissues, Reich has arrived at the conclusion that "cancer is the most significant somatic expression of the biophysiological effect of sexual stasis." If this is so, there is a far greater possibility for the prophylaxis of cancer than for its treatment.

Reich's contribution to an understanding of cancer is based on his years of clinical, social, and laboratory study of human emotions and his discovery of the specific energy processes manifested in them. A detailed account of this discovery forms the opening chapters of the book, providing the experimental and theoretical basis for the later chapters in which he presents his findings on the emotional background of the disease, the crucial role played by inadequate sexual functioning that causes a general devitalization and shrinking, the origin of the cancer cell, experimental therapy with laboratory animals and human beings, and, finally, the problems and possibilities of prevention.

Read an excerpt [PDF]