17 : The Bions: 1936-1939The first few years in Norway provided a peaceful period for Reich. Once again he
had a lively, talented group of people around him—psychotherapists, social scientists, and
writers. He was evolving new techniques in therapy based on muscular armor. He was busy
with the bio-electrical experiments in the laboratory. He was working on his manuscript
People in Trouble, in which he was beginning to chart his work-democratic concepts. And his
relationship with Elsa was a relatively happy one.
At this juncture Reich chose to begin research on the bions—vesicles which, Reich
asserted, represented transitional stages between nonliving and living substance. This
research was to seal the diagnosis of his psychosis for many contemporaries. Until now,
Reich had worked in psychoanalysis, sociology, and electrophysiology, all fields devoted to
the study of human beings. Still more specifically, his work had centered on human sexual-
ity and its various manifestations, clinically, socially, electrodermally. Even the bio-electric
experiments might have been charitably interpreted by his critics as a misguided effort on
the part of a zealous amateur who took Freud’s “metaphor” of the libido too seriously and
tried to measure it.
The bion research, however, was to take Reich outside the human realm —to the
study, he was to assert, of the development of pulsating minute particles from nonliving
matter, and of the development of protozoa (unicellular microorganisms, the most primi-
tive forms of animal life) from nonliving matter—to the problem, in short, of biogenesis.
Reich frankly acknowledged that he was not well trained in this particular domain^1.
I would like to anticipate, briefly, a question that is bound to surface: Why did Reich
choose to tackle a problem for which, according to his own admission, he was not “suffi-
ciently”prepared? And why at a time when he was still engrossed with another problem—
the bio-electric experiments—for which he was also insufficiently prepared? Two alternative
answers are possible.
The first, offered by many of his critics, was that Reich was in the grip of a mega-
lomanic passion that required ever greater achievements. Since there was no substance to his
fooling around in the laboratory, he had to move on from one “discovery” to the next. No
slow, careful, fruitful development could issue from any of his fantasies.
The second, offered by Reich and his students, was that he was following the logic
of his research. Like Thoreau, but for different ends, Reich wanted “to drive life into a cor-
ner and reduce it to its lowest terms.” In his therapeutic work, Reich had shifted from an
analytic focus on complex psychological processes to his own stress on relatively simple
206 Myron SharafFury On Earth