mination of their relationship after his passionate letters during the fall of 1939. She spoke
of Reich with a mixture of tenderness, passion, humor, and criticalness that revealed a deep,
genuine, and unsentimental love. No other woman whom I interviewed talked about Reich
with that same kind of love—not Lia with her affectionate sarcasm, Ottilie with her marked
ambivalence, or Ilse with her detachment. After Reich, Elsa never had another serious rela-
tionship with a man, although she was only in her early thirties when they parted.
Although Elsa truly loved Reich, she did not especially love his work and could not
follow the natural-scientific research. For a few years after World War II, she taught a form
of dance therapy that was much influenced by his psychiatric concepts. Today, she is a
respected teacher of the Gindler method in Oslo.*
Yet another irony emerges in Reich’s life. For all his efforts to get his mates to
appreciate and follow his work, none did so after he and they parted, not even the woman
who understood him best and loved him most.
258 Myron SharafFury On Earth
*Elsa Gindler was a German woman who taught body techniques similar to the Alexander method and radically
different from Reich’s.