of “training analysis” in order to learn his technique. With justification, Otto Fenichel has
criticized Reich for abusing the transference situation—the patient’s dependence upon and
devotion to his therapist—by getting such people to help him through working or giving
money or both. The fact that many were also students, eager for his stamp of approval, for
referrals from him, heightened this situation. Often when for one reason or another they
became disappointed in Reich, and when he was under attack from more scientifically
trained professionals, they could regret their earlier enthusiasm. Sometimes they would ask
for their money back, which led to ugly scenes. Reich’s reminder that he had expressly
warned them before they gave money or other help seems somewhat self-serving in the face
of the blinding power of transference. The rage Reich felt toward those who went back on
their original loyalty was the kind of rage one may feel when one also has guilt feelings.
Reich faced a predicament. He had appealed to the Rockefeller Foundation in Paris
to support the bion project, but his request was turned down. Ever since his medical school
days, Reich had been convinced that his life and work were a heroic mission and that they
therefore “deserved” support. Given the world’s opposition, he could not afford to be fas-
tidious about where that help came from. Once when he was analyzing certain dishonest
mechanisms in a patient who was also working for him, he said: “I can see the scoundrel in
you because there is a scoundrel in me.I recognized that many of your motives for work-
ing had nothing to do with the work itself but stemmed from a desire to please me. And still
I used you because I needed your help.”^14
A further complication of this period and one that was to continue through the rest
of Reich’s life was that most of his colleagues were trained in medicine, clinical psychology,
literature, sociology, or philosophy. To my knowledge, not one was a trained natural scien-
tist. Nor were they able or willing to make the long investment to become one. Among his
close associates in Oslo were Odd Havrevold, a psychiatrist; Ola Raknes, who had received
his Ph.D. in linguistics and then trained as a psychoanalyst in the early 1930s; Harold
Schjelderup, who was academically the most prominent of Reich’s associates but still not a
trained scientist;and Nic Hoel,the psychiatrist whose husband Sigurd, the well-known nov-
elist,served as editor of Reich’s Journal.
These people took a variety of stances toward Reich’s experimental work.
Schjelderup,who was skeptical even of his sociological endeavors, was distinctly cool, claim-
ing that he lacked the competence to judge the experiments but was nonetheless dubious.
Indeed,when the public attacks started against the bion research, Schjelderup severed
Reich’s connection with the Psychological Institute because it had become an embarrass-
ment to him^15 .At the time,Nic Hoel criticized the attitude of those who waited for the
verdict of others as intellectual laziness and cowardice. Later she, too, withdrew her support
from Reich’s experimental work, arguing that before she could intelligently respond to it, she
would have to undergo a completely new training in physics and biology; after seven years
of training in medicine, seven in psychiatry, and four in child psychiatry, she was not pre-
pared for a whole new education^16 .Only Raknes felt prepared to defend Reich’s work quite
fully,in Norway as later in America, on the basis of his own laboratory observations and the
17 : The Bions: 1936-1939 213