Tuesday, March 11, 2014

Ellsworth Baker

A large part of the problems with orgone therapy can be laid at the door of Ellsworth Baker. He was incompetent. He allowed Blasband to continue training and become an orgonomist after Reich had instructed him not to. Reich considered Blasband characterlogically unfit to become an orgonomist, but Baker ignored Reich's opinion and let him continue training. Blasband later became a devotee of a psychic healer, tried to import mysticism into orgonomy, and ignored Constable's killing numerous people by intentionally creating wild storms as a demonstration to impress Blasband. 

Baker also lied about qualifications for training therapists, allowing several non-M.D.s to practice with his blessing despite his often-proclaimed insistance on a medical degree for training. 

Baker was so incompetent as a medical doctor that when Jerome Greenfield hads a heart attack in his office he failed to diagnose it and instead of sending for an abulance, spent an hour trying to figure out the psychological "meaning" of the chest pains. 

And as is now being admited even by some orgonomists, Dr. Albert Duvall was a child-abuser, and actually was TORTURING children sent to him. And Baker had been in charge of the training program that trained him and certified him to practice. What does that say about how well Baker did his job? Could he not see that one of his trainees was unsuited to become a therapist?

To say nothing of the blatant disregard of medical ethics in soliciting donations from psychiatric patients for a cause their therapist was involved in. That should have been enough to get every member of the ACO banned from practicing medicine. 

And then, after the ACO building fund campaign had raised more than $5,000,000, the new building was never built. What happened to the money? Blasband and Barbara Koopman, another of Baker's trainees who also later became a follower of the same psychic guru as Blasband took up with, both served as president of the ACO in the time-frame in which the money went missing. Baker seems to have been a rather poor judge of the character of his trainees. 

Baker, his son, Courtney, who is also an orgonomist, and his prize trainee, Blasband, all became members of the Shickshinny, Pennsylvania-based Knights of Malta, a fake order of nobility headed by Charles Pitchel, who had at one time been personal representative in America of Adolph Hitler. The editorial in the Journal of Orgonomy in which Baker announced this honor could hardly find words enough in the English language to sufficiently praise this neo-fascist organization headed by a former Nazi. 

Baker is the one who brought about the shift from liberal social democracy to far-right neo-conservative in the faction of orgonomy that became his followers. Despite his later anti-Stalinism, Reich never abandoned his early social ideas, only criticized the S.U. for abandoning them. But under the direction of Baker, the ACO went all the way over to the very far right and called protesters against the Viet Nam war, racism, and police brutality  "psychopaths" and " dupes" and "red fascists" and lost all the potential suport orgonomy could have gained if it had sought to join forces with it's natural allies in the movement for social justice that existed in the 60s. 

And DeMeo, having begun his career in orgonomy as an honorary member of the ACO, and having had therapy himself from Robert Morris, one of the non-M.D.s trained and certified by Baker to practice therapy, and having been trained by Blasband in the cloudbusting field, is a direct inheritor of this defective tradition in orgonomy. Both his incompetence in cloudbusting and his radical conservatism in politics can be considered to derive at least partly from this faulty start. 


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