tic results. As he put it: “Gradually it became clear that although a thorough dissolution of
the modes of behavior led to deep-reaching breakthroughs of vegetative energy, neverthe-
less it was incomplete in a way difficult to define. One had the feeling that the patient did
not relinquish some outposts of his ‘narcissistic position.’ ”^36
Reich gave several common subjective perceptions of contactlessness. One was the
frequent feeling many people have of “inner loneliness” in spite of the presence of others.
There was also the feeling of “inner deadness” that appears in spite of a seemingly active
and interesting existence. The phenomenon of “inner deadness” especially concerned
Reich. It is not an unfamiliar one to patients and to “normal” people. (More recently, the
movies of Antonioni, Fellini, and Bergman, the plays of Harold Pinter and Samuel Beckett
have focused on this state of nonbeing or “contactlessness.”)
Certain phenomena of contactlessness appeared most vividly near the end of ther-
apy. Reich distinguished here between elimination of “individual layers” of the armor and
the final breakdown of the total armor. The latter phase is often characterized by an alter-
nation of what he called “streaming” (Stromung) and emotional contactlessness. By
“streaming,” Reich was referring to the subjective perception of a feeling of aliveness, of a
current flowing through the body, although he does not elaborate at this point. He went on
to state as a goal oftherapy “the reestablishment of vegetative streaming The transition
from the streaming condition to the frozen condition is one of the most important thera-
peutic and theoretical problems.”^37
Reich illustrated the combination of feelings of “contactlessness” and the “frozen
condition” through a case example. We meet a man who is “exaggeratedly polite and
reserved and somewhat dignified,” but who has a secret wish to “feel the world,” to be able
to “stream” freely with it. The patient suffered from an intense fear of object loss. He would
react with acute disappointment if he did not immediately have an erection when he kissed
a woman. The slightest disappointment would lead him to retreat from heterosexuality.
With this patient,Reich used for the first time the phrase “penis anesthesia.” By this
he meant that touching the penis resulted only in tactile but not pleasurable sensations.
“Penis anesthesia” can and often does occur in the presence of erective potency. It is a vivid
bodily counterpart to the psychological feeling of “contactlessness.” Reich speculates that
“genital anesthesia is not merely a psychic process but a disturbance of the electrophysio-
logical function at the penis surface.”^38 *
In this paper, Reich was more concerned with how the contactlessness and dead-
ness came about than with how to overcome them. As he came to grips with the subject, he
was more able to acknowledge his uncertainty:
How is it possible that a withdrawal of sexual excitation and outgoingness is imme-182 Myron SharafFury On Earth
*Around this time Reich was planning experimental work on measuring sensations of pleasure and anxiety. A
description of this work follows in Chapter 16. I note it here to stress once again the interactions between Reich’s
clinical work and his other concerns.