Reich was right, I believe, in his assertion that the best basis for solid, pleasurable
work was a fulfilled love life. However, I also believe that he underestimated the capacity of
many people to use work as an effective way of binding sexual energy in the absence of
direct genital gratification. His adamant position on this issue stemmed in part from the fact
that work, in the absence of love, was difficult for him.
Reich’s sexual concepts also related to his preferred mode of investigation. Reich
was fascinated by the concrete and the tangible. The phenomena described by Freud in con-
nection with actual neuroses, such as anxiety attacks, palpitations, and the like, had a direct
physiological quality that greatly appealed to him. As he put it some years later: “It is not
surprising that [Freud’s] theory of the actual neuroses, struck me as more in keeping with
natural science than the ‘interpretation’ of the meaning of ‘symptoms’ in the psychoneu-
roses.”^18
Again and again, Reich picks up on early Freudian notions that strike some special
resonance in him. Drawn to Freud’s early work on “catharsis,” he made it a central part of
his character-analytic endeavors. He was drawn also to actual neuroses, which, in the form
of stasis neuroses, were to become linchpins in his theory building and clinical work.
It is interesting that the concept of “sexual stasis,” like the concept of resistance,
facilitated a very direct clinical approach. In analytic sessions, Reich could note the rapid
alternation between feelings of anxiety and genital excitation:
It happens frequently that a patient becomes excited during the analytic therapy ses-
sion because of unconscious sexual fantasies regarding the transference situation.
If the sexual repression has not as yet been dissolved, one finds that they complain
about fatigue, weakness, faintness of the extremities, feelings of heat or cold, pal-
pitations of the heart, anxiety, etc. The symptoms of anxiety disappear and genital
pleasure sensations appear in their place, if one succeeds in liberating the patient’s
genital sensations, after the repressed fantasies have been made conscious. ... It is
an analytic triumph ifthe therapy succeeds in helping the patient to stop repress-
ing the perception ofthe newly emerging sexual excitement which causes power-
ful,growing sexual feelings which often are extremely hard to tolerate^19.Reich was unusual, if not unique, among analysts in working so directly with the
patient’s genital sensations. Undoubtedly, the directness of his therapeutic approach (even
before he moved to touching the patient’s body) strengthened the conviction of some older
analysts that Reich was an “immoral” therapist as well as an “immoral” man.
Indeed, Reich’s penchant for the concrete, the physical, the tangible is no more evi-
dent than in his description of orgastic potency. Reich, of course, did not directly see orgas-
tic potency in his patients. He had to rely on verbal reports from his patients of their own
sex lives. However, during analysis he made a point of eliciting and observing bodily phe-
nomena that were close to the experience of “real-life” sexuality.
Which brings us back to the original question: On what evidence did Reich base his
98 Myron SharafFury On Earth