earlier figures but because he threatens the patient’s precarious peace, the patient comes to
dislike the analyst. True, this peace is unsatisfying, otherwise there would be no need for
therapy. But that does not mean the patient will not “resist” in all kinds of ways the re-expe-
riencing of tangled emotions painfully endured during childhood.
A way of dealing and at the same time not dealing with this situation is to discuss
all kinds of things without really feeling them. What Reich did was to begin to focus inten-
sively on these “inner reservations.” However they might be expressed, they all served the
function of preventing one from experiencing the whole truth. To shift images, Reich tried
to separate out from the muddied palette of the patient’s feelings the stronger, purer, more
primary colors.
In his stress on strong emotional experience, Reich emphasized an early concept of
Freud’s. When Freud first studied hysterical patients with Josef Breuer in the 1880s, he used
hypnosis. He found that unless a traumatic event was re-experienced, not simply remem-
bered, under hypnosis in all its emotional vividness, there was no alleviation of symptoms.
Freud came to place less emphasis on the particular issue of remembering with
affect. Yet while Reich returned to this stress on the emotional reexperiencing of infantile
events, he also retained the later Freudian focus on analyzing resistances to the welling up
of infantile memories and feelings.He did not attempt to by-pass the defensive process
through hypnosis, drugs, and the like.
Indeed, in the face of criticism from different analysts during this period, Reich
steadily argued that his own contributions were nothing but a consistent application and
extension of Freud’s concepts. Only later was he to claim (in my opinion, correctly) that
from the very beginning his approach contained some radical differences from that of
Freud.
Some of Reich’s own personality characteristics may have influenced his choosing
to emphasize and develop certain lines of Freud’s thought rather than others.
One possible connection between Reich’s personality and his theoretical concerns
was raised by Richard Sterba,a student of Reich’s in the 1920s and currently a well-known
analyst in Detroit. Writing some twenty-five years afterward, Sterba acknowledged that “hav-
ing lived through the era ofhis [Reich’s] impact on the therapeutic thinking of his time and
having struggled out of it, I am not altogether in a position to make a completely objective
appraisal of their significance for present-day analysis.” But he spoke of Reich’s brilliance as
a clinician,ofhow impressed he and other students of the technical seminar were, and of
how the seminar “led to considerable clarification and provided for me the first orientation
in the difficult field ofpsychoanalysis.” Sterba criticized, however, what he believed to be
Reich’s undue emphasis on latent negative transference, an emphasis which he attributed to
Reich’s “own suspicious character and the belligerent attitude that stems from it.”^9
There is some truth to this statement, but it is one-sided. In my view, Reich was not
initially inclined to emphasize negative transference. It was clinical experience that impressed
upon him the importance of latent negative transference. A case in his Character Analysis, not
80 Myron SharafFury On Earth