Educational DevelopmentsIn addition to the connection between Reich’s psychiatric and social thinking, there
was a close linkage between his psychiatric and educational work. In his preventive efforts
during the late 1920s and early 1930s, Reich had tried to find ways to affirm genitality in chil-
dren and adolescents, thereby helping to prevent neuroses. As his psychiatric work focused
on pregenital issues, so his educational interest was drawn to problems of infancy and early
childhood. Just as in therapy Reich was now concentrating on release of emotions and not
on ideas, fantasies, or the content of experiences, so in education his attention now became
riveted by how the flow of feeling had come to be blocked in the first place and how this
blockage might be prevented.
Reich’s observations and concepts regarding the infant’s emotional life can best be
seen through his experiences with his own son, Peter, who was born in 1944. Reich wrote
up his observations of Peter’s infancy in an article stimulated by an attack of “falling anxi-
ety” Peter experienced at three weeks of age. Before dealing with the specific symptom of
falling anxiety, Reich discussed some general characteristics of neonatal life. During Peter’s
first days, Reich was impressed by how baffling the infant’s emotional expression was: “[The
infant] possesses only one form ofexpressing needs, that is, crying. This one form covers
innumerable small and great needs, from the pressure of a diaper crease to colic.”^25
He noted that in the infant, “the pre-eminent place of contact is the bio-energeti-
cally highly charged mouth and throat. If, now, the mother’s nipple reacts to the sucking
movements in the proper biophysical manner with pleasurable sensations, it becomes vigor-
ously erect, and the orgonotic excitation of the nipple combines into a unit with that of the
infant’s mouth.”^26
One of the most striking early observations Reich made of Peter was that of his
“oral orgasm”: “At the age of two weeks, the infant had his first orgastic excitation of the
mouth region.This occurred while he was nursing; the eyeballs turned upwards and side-
ways,the mouth began to tremble as did the tongue; the contractions spread over the whole
face;they took about ten seconds,after which the musculature of the face relaxed,”^27
Reich’s attention was drawn precisely to the energetic features of infancy. The
fusion or energetic contact he detected between the erect nipple of the healthy mother and
the bio-energetically,highly charged mouth of the infant was the same kind effusion he had
already noted in the adult heterosexual act and in the lumination of two bions between
which a “radiating bridge” is formed.
Reich noticed no particular disturbance in Peter until his first oral orgasm. Then the
infant began to cry a great deal, and the people around him were unable to understand the
crying. “I often had the impression that the child wanted something definitebut I did not know
what.Only two weeks later did I understand that what he wanted was bodily contact”^28
The increased crying of the second week foreshadowed a more specific symptom:
an acute “falling anxiety” at the end of the third week. It occurred when the baby was taken
out ofthe bath and put on his back on the table. It was not immediately clear whether the
304 Myron SharafFury On Earth