and trained many teachers. One of his students, Lucille Denison, ran a nursery school based
on Reich’s principles for about a year. Various controversies with educational officials and
internal difficulties led to its demise. It was the kind of undertaking Reich yearned for, but
few of his students were able to carry through on their own as Neill had done. It was not
until December 1949 that Reich developed an organizational plan for studying infants and
children. At the time, he was deeply immersed in studying orgone energy in the atmosphere.
As he wrote to Neill in January 1950:
As I pondered over the problem whether to stay in Maine or return to
New York, I felt that I would not be able to produce a single orgonometric thought
[mathematics of orgone energy] if I were to discontinue my work on the human
structure. And I returned to New York at the end of November and swiftly chose
from a list of about
120 physicians, educators, nurses, social workers, psychologists, etc., about
40 people of the best suited and began to establish an Orgonomic Infant Research
Center for the study of health and not of sickness. We must finally get away from
pathology and start our work with the healthy child^33.Much as Reich often deplored the distraction from natural-scientific work which
therapy represented, he also felt a strong need to continue therapy to maintain his scientif-
ic zest. The plan to work with infants and children kept the human connection at the same
time that it allowed him to focus on the study of energy in its natural state.
Most of the observations sketched in Reich’s brief but packed comments on Peter’s
infancy were contained in the design for the new Orgonomic Infant Research Center, or
OIRC. Special focus was to be put on the prenatal care of mothers; supervision of the deliv-
ery and the first few days of the newborn’s life; and prevention of armoring during the first
five or six years oflife^34.
Reich’s way of studying infants more systematically was characteristic of his entire
approach to research. He started with very strongly held hypotheses, hypotheses that were
in fact stated as findings.For example, he believed, on the basis of little evidence, that
infants of emotionally healthy mothers had a better intrauterine environment than infants
of less healthy mothers.
When it came to a more detailed study of prenatal and postnatal development,
Reich allowed for the possibility that he might be wrong. Thus, he included in his research
design children from two groups of mothers: relatively healthy mothers (group A) and basi-
cally sound but somewhat more problematic mothers (group B). He was interested in not-
ing the differences, if any, in the children from the two groups.
This scientific procedure created certain unanticipated problems. Some group A
mothers went around boasting that they were “healthy”; some group B mothers felt that
they had been labeled defective. Reich blamed others for these misperceptions, for making
an ideal of the “perfect” mother. But his own writings, as mentioned earlier, contributed to
308 Myron SharafFury On Earth