and others. However, the cause of orgonomy has been handsomely served by Baker and the
college. They have kept Reich’s central concepts clearly in focus and have developed many
of them. Some orgonomists have done important original research which expands Reich’s
ideas.
Reich’s impact on the professional and intellectual community beyond his close
adherents can be clearly seen in a number of fields. The growth of psychoanalytic ego psy-
chology since the 1950s owes much to Character Analysis. Reich’s advice to proceed always
from the most superficial layer of the personality and to penetrate gradually to the uncon-
scious, his urgings not to overlook a latent negative transference that is masked by a super-
ficial positive transference—these and other aspects of his early contributions are an inte-
gral part of the present-day theory of analytically oriented treatment.
Reich’s later work on the muscular armor has been developed by two Neo-
Reichians in particular—Alexander Lowen and John Pierrakos. Both studied with Reich
before collaboration, under Lowen’s leadership in the late 1950s, in the development of
“bio-energetics,” or their amplifications of Reichian techniques. Pierrakos later made inde-
pendent modifications and started his own school of “core-energetics.” They have both
made many pioneering contributions, for example, Lowen’s use of the standing position
(“grounding”) in therapy, self-help techniques, and Pierrakos’ development of a communi-
ty setting to facilitate the liberation of the “core” self. Unlike the Baker group, however,
Lowen and Pierrakos have altered Reich’s therapeutic paradigm by de-emphasizing the con-
cept of orgastic potency and omitting the connections between Reich’s therapy and his stud-
ies of orgone energy.
Other popular, body-oriented approaches such as primal therapy and Gestalt ther-
apy borrow considerably from Reich with little acknowledgment of his contribution. We
have, then, the phenomenon of Reich’s therapeutic work spreading ever more widely but in
highly diluted forms and with its source unacknowledged.
The particular conceptual thrust of Reich’s research on infants and children has not
entered the social scene. Yet some aspects of his emphases can be found in many medical
and educational developments we see today:the Leboyer method of delivery, the growing
opposition to circumcision,the stress on mother-infant “bonding,” and increased affirma-
tion ofchildhood and adolescent genitality.
There remains a profound silence about Reich’s experimental work, broken every
now and then by a call for serious appraisal of scientific orgonomy. Thus, Philip Rieff wrote
in 1960:“Competent scientific opinion has yet seriously to confront [Reich’s] work.... The
brilliance of his vision is such that he can no longer be dismissed as a figure of fun....
Leaving Freud at the edge ofthe last desert, littered, as [Reich] saw it, with dying gods and
murder machines, Reich stepped across, as few men do, into the very heaven of an idea.”^5
In a review ofThe Mass Psychology of Fascism, the critic Christopher Lehmann-Haupt
wrote in The New York Timesfor January 4, 1971: “Perhaps it is time to reconsider all of
Wilhelm Reich...and to reopen the question of cosmic orgone energy, its effect on cancer,
and the other theories Reich died in Lewisburg Penitentiary defending.”^6
Epilogue 445