Freud excepted. In an interview with Kurt Eissler, Secretary of the Freud Archives, Reich
described the atmosphere of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society as very boring, and stated
that I acted “like a shark in a pond of carps.”^2
When Reich had questions, he tended to go directly to Freud for help. However,
Reich felt that while Freud had a marvelous capacity for solving complicated situations the-
oretically, he was not of great technical assistance^3. Freud, too, advised Reich to be patient.
He warned against “therapeutic ambitiousness.” Reich later wrote that it took some years
before he understood Freud’s point that “premature therapeutic ambitiousness is not con-
ducive to the discovery of new facts.”^4
With Freud’s approval, Reich took his first practical step toward systematizing the
therapeutic technique. In 1922 he suggested the establishment of a technical seminar, to be
led by a senior analyst but designed to meet the explicit needs of young analysts. The main
method of the seminar would be the systematic study of individual cases in analytic treat-
ment. Eduard Hitschmann was the first leader of the seminar, Hermann Nunberg the sec-
ond. In 1924, at the age of twenty-seven, Reich took over the leadership, which he main-
tained until 1930, when he left for Berlin.
To establish an atmosphere of candor and productivity within the seminar, Reich
took several steps. From the first, he proposed that, with the exception of the leader, the
seminar should be confined strictly to younger members of the Psychoanalytic Society. In
this way the more inexperienced analysts could vent their doubts and troubles without wor-
rying about the opinion of the more senior members. When Reich became leader, he estab-
lished the requirement that participants present only treatment failures, so that there would
be no glib smoothing over of difficulties to impress one’s colleagues with successes. Reich
also set an example by initially presenting some ofhis own treatment failures.
Reich was dissatisfied with the way cases were presented during the first two years
of the technical seminar. The procedure had been for the presenter to fill most of the allot-
ted time with the patient’s life history;then, in the ensuing discussion, some rather hit-or-
miss suggestions for future treatment would be made. As leader, Reich developed the pro-
cedure ofhaving the presenter give only as much of the case history as was necessary for
clarification of the technical problems.
Here we see Reich as teacher and organizer, insisting on a system in the rather
inchoate field ofpsychoanalysis. He focused directly on the problem of the choice points
for the therapist, his options at any given moment. It is interesting that Reich’s method of
running the seminar was very similar to the case method of teaching favored today by the
Harvard Business School. Their approach is sharply focused on the question: Given such
and such a situation, what decision do you make and why? Anyone who has tried to use this
approach quickly realizes how much effort is needed by the leader to keep the discussion on
the question at hand.
During his first year as seminar leader, Reich focused on “resistances.” Freud had
already stressed the importance of analyzing resistances after he moved beyond hypnosis,
and after he found that direct interpretation of the unconscious (as it emerged in deriva-
76 Myron SharafFury On Earth