What is "orgastic potency"

n. 1 The Full Body Orgasm () :w:Orgone energy experience. 2 The life force energy of unrestrained joy and :w:Alexander_Lowen; and :w:Alexander_Lowen. 3 The capacity to discharge an amount of energy in orgasm equivalent to that which has built up in the body, i.e., the capacity to maintain a balanced energy economy.

Within the work of the Austrian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich (1897–1957), orgastic potency is the ability to experience an orgasm with specific psychosomatic characteristics and, among others, requiring the ability to love."Reich's account of the ideal sexual act is remarkable both for its explicitness, which must have required courage in the pre-Kinsey, pre-Masters and Johnson era in which it was written, and for its omission of the word 'love'. And yet it is clear that it is love that he is talking about. Orgastic potency as formulated by Reich is the capacity to love body and soul, psychosomatically.": 33.

• Mah, Kenneth and Yitzchak M. Binik (2001) "The nature of human orgasm: a critical review of major trends," Clinical Psychology Review 21(6): 823-56: Reich's model takes a unisex, "integrated biopsychological perspective."
• Corrington, Robert S. (2003) Wilhelm Reich: Psychoanalyist and Radical Naturalist, New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, p. 88.: "The coda to the entire argument of Genitality was sounded in two striking sentences: 'Satisfied genital object love is thus [the justified aim] of our therapeutic efforts.'"

For Reich, "orgastic impotence," or failure to attain orgastic potency (not to be confused with anorgasmia, the inability to reach orgasm) always resulted in neurosis, because during orgasm that person could not discharge all libido (which Reich regarded as a biological energy). According to Reich, "not a single neurotic individual possesses orgastic potency."

Reich coined the term orgastic impotence in 1924 and described the concept in his 1927 book Die Funktion des Orgasmus, the manuscript of which he presented to Sigmund Freud on the latter's 70th birthday. Though Reich regarded his work as complementing Freud's original theory of anxiety neurosis, Freud was ambivalent in his reception. Freud's view was that there was no single cause of neurosis.

Reich continued to use the concept as an indicator of a person's health in his later therapeutic methods, such as vegetotherapy. During the period 1933–1937, he attempted to ground his orgasm theory in physiology, both theoretically and experimentally.