The book "The Function of the Orgasm" is the first volume of the two-volume work titled "The Discovery of the Orgone", while the second volume that will follow, titled "The Biopathy of Cancer", contains the experiments in physics and biology that prove the existence of the orgone and its relationship to the disease of cancer.

This Greek edition is a faithful translation of the original German text (including Reich's corrections) and has been approved by the Wilhelm Reich Infant Trust, which has worldwide supervision of Reich's book publications. It is not selective, like the first Greek edition of the 1970s, which was accompanied by the translator's arbitrary comments reflecting his personal opinions and opposing the author. It is scientifically edited to correctly render the technical terms of orgonomy and in harmonious correspondence with their semantic content, in contrast to the second edition of the 1980s, which, although complete, lacked not only translation accuracy but also term rendering.

In this volume, Reich describes his scientific journey in psychoanalysis, the theoretical and practical differences of his own approach from the prevailing trends of that time, and the discovery of an innovative way of conducting psychotherapy. Abandoning the traditional way of the couch, he moved his chair facing the patient, observed the way in which the patient defended himself in therapy, and used it to mobilize repressed emotions.

Most importantly, he realized the crucial role that the discharge of psychic energy through orgasm plays in human health, making this observation the central axis of his approach. The reactions of his patients to the powerful emotions evoked by his method led Reich to correlate human psychological reactions with the physiology of the organism and to discover the close connection between emotions and the action of the autonomic nervous system, thus revealing a psychosomatic interaction that explains many of the common illnesses of modern humans.

At the beginning of the book, Reich describes the state of biology and sexology in Freud's time, refers to the gaps in the theory of sexuality and psychology in the interwar period, and then begins to unfold the thread of his research that led him first to formulate the theory of orgasm and then to establish a special psychotherapeutic technique which he named "character analysis". He connected the problem of sexual unhappiness of the masses with the major social issues of the time and discovered the social origin of sexual repression, delving into the issue of fascism that was spreading in Europe at that time. Further exploration of these problems led him to link human psyche with the autonomic nervous (neurovegetative) system, thus establishing the biological basis of psychology. The result of all this was the formulation of the rule of orgasm, the recognition of the role played by the reflexive nature of orgasm in human health, and the improvement of his technique, now called "character-analytic vegetotherapy".

The book is completed with the first bioelectrical experiments that demonstrate the psychosomatic relationship of emotions and bioelectrical currents