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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