One of the odder things I know about Sean Connery was that he was one of the most auspicious owners of an Orgone Box which he bought for this wife. These were eventually banned by the FDA,but were meant to help women to reabsorb lost “orgone”, a sort of orgasmic life force.

These were sold by Wilhelm Reich, an Austrian national who fled to the US in 1939 after abusing countless women in the name of psychology across Europe. Some credit him as the Father of the sexual revolution he never lived to see.

He had dealings with Freud, but Freud ultimately disagreed with Reich’s belief that all a woman’s psychological issues were rooted in her inability to experience good orgasms. Later he sent an orgone box to Einstein who tested it but concluded that it was not effective.

Men would buy these boxes for their wives, who would then sit in them for long periods, sometimes hours, to accumulate their lost orgone, which would help them to have better orgasms and thus better physical and mental health in general. Sean Connery bought one for his wife.

The FDA eventually banned their sale, because they believed (correctly) that they were fraudulent. Reich continued selling them, and was eventually arrested for so doing. He was sentenced to 2 years imprisonment. He died from heart failure days before he was up for parole in ‘57.

Reich had many other exploits, including inventing a “cloudbuster” to manipulate orgone radiation that he believed controlled the weather. He claimed it could successfully make it rain, and allegedly was paid to do so by some farmers in Maine.

His son Peter was only 13 at the time of his father’s death, and he wrote about his father in a biography called “A book of dreams”. Kate Bush the singer found a copy and was so moved by the story that she wrote a song about it.

It was called “Cloudbusting”, and she played the son in the video, while Donald Sutherland played Reich himself,chronicling his arrest and cloudbusting activities. Donald Sutherland couldn’t get a work visa to film in the UK so did it for free.

It is for none of the above that Reich is best remembered in psychology today. He came up with the concept of Reichian body types: the theory that the shape of someone’s body and facial characteristics actually define their personality and sociability.

It is still used in pop psychology today, notably in some leadership training and teamwork seminars. Despite having evolved from the work of a conspiracy theorist fraudster. I recommend his Wikipedia entry if you want to read more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Reich