however, in the technical seminar Reich did not place great emphasis on the genital func-
tioning of patients. By contrast, in his first papers on genitality, he emphasized the deleteri-
ous consequences of blocked libidinal discharge, but did not deal with the analysis of resist-
ances. In both contexts, Reich was concerned with the liberation of emotion. In one setting,
he was focusing on the characterological obstacles to liberation. In the other, he was stress-
ing the emotional—or more specifically the genital—wave of excitation and its discharge.
In the interrelation between actual neuroses and psychoneuroses, Reich believed he
had found some way of short-cutting the long, involved process of resistance analysis he
had elaborated in the technical seminar. This particular direction would lead him later into
very active social efforts, counseling of the young, birth control clinics, and mass meetings
dealing with the connections between politics and sexual suppression. But in the early 1920s,
this particular angle of his work had not yet crystalized. What we see during this period is
his movement in two theoretical directions: through character analysis into an ever deeper
elucidation ofinnerobstacles to psychological health; and through his development of the
concept of actual neuroses into an emphasis on more superficial conflicts and reality frus-
trations, the elimination of which might reverse the neurotic process.
Over the years, Freud himself paid less and less attention to actual neuroses,
although he never abandoned this separate category of emotional illness, while most other
analysts had little use for it. Among major analytic theorists, Reich alone maintained a strong
interest in actual neuroses and the related concept of anxiety as transformed sexuality. In a
study generally critical of Reich, Charles Rycroft has commented:
[Reich’s] view of the relationship between actual and psychoneuroses has not been
absorbed into psychoanalytic thinking but it has two great merits. It retains a con-
nection between psychopathology and physiology in the last resort the neuroses are
not purely mental formations but arise from and affect the body and it provides an
explanation ofwhy neuroses do not disappear spontaneously. So far as I know
Reich is the only analyst to offer any sort of explanation as to why the childhood
pathogenic experiences that according to psychoanalysis cause neuroses do not
gradually lose their impact when neurotics move away from their childhood envi-
ronment^6.What Reich did not do in this first paper on genitality was to define what in fact he
meant by effectivegenital satisfaction. He still accepted the prevailing psychoanalytic defini-
tions—erective and ejaculative potency in men, a vaginal orgasm in women. Reich’s scanty
description ofgenital health left him open to criticism that was quick in coming. He himself
described the reception to his first paper on genitality, which he presented at a meeting of
the Vienna Psychoanalytic Association in November 1923, as follows:
While I was talking,I became increasingly aware of a chilling of the atmosphere. I
used to speak well, and thus far had always found my audience attentive. When I7 : Reich’s Work on Orgastic Potency: 1922-1926 91