Respiration came to play a role in Reich’s therapy, which he now termed “charac-
ter-analytic vegetotherapy,” * comparable to the role of free association in psychoanalysis.
In psychoanalysis, one is told to “say everything that comes into one’s mind,” with the ana-
lyst pointing out the ways that one “resists” this “fundamental rule.” Correspondingly, in
Reich’s therapy, the patient is asked to lie down and to breathe. Then attention is called to a
variety of ways in which he or she “resists” natural inspiration and expiration. He may be
told that he breathes in fully, but lets little air out; or that the chest does not move; or that
he huffs and puffs unnaturally.
When the patient’s breathing was shallow or forced, Reich would make use of
touch to stimulate an emotional flow and, with it, fuller respiration. After deep sobbing,
especially, the patient would breathe more freely. During the Norwegian period, the patient
was also urged to talk a good deal about his current problems, his feelings toward Reich, and
his childhood experiences. Just as Reich had always noted whether the patient spoke with
appropriate emotion, now he noted, too, changes in respiration with particular topics.
While Reich was dealing with blocked respiration, he was noting—and helping the
patient to experience—a variety of other distorted emotional expressions. Thus in his 1937
monograph,Reich mentioned a female patient whose face had a striking expression of
“indifference.” Reich called this expression to her attention; the patient experienced it more
keenly and connected it with other aspects of her personality. Then another expression in
the lower part of her face emerged. “It became clear that the mouth and chin were ‘angry’
while the eyes and forehead were ‘dead.’ ”^5 With attention called to the mouth and chin,
the patient developed strong impulses to bite—impulses she once felt toward her father and
now felt toward her husband. After expressing the biting impulses, the mouth and chin soft-
ened and the patient experienced a flow of sensation through her body. However, genital
excitation was still inhibited.
Reich noted that, with the increase of sensation, the expression in her eyes changed
from one ofindifference to an angry, critical gaze. In their investigation, Reich and the
patient detected that her eyes and forehead “watched closely what the genital was doing.”
Moreover, exploration of the patient’s past yielded the finding that
the severe expression of eyes and forehead derived from an identification
with her father who was a very ascetic person. ... He had again and again impressed
on her the danger of giving in to sexual desires. Thus, the attitude of the forehead224 Myron SharafFury On Earth
*The “character-analytic”part ofthis term denotes the continuity of Reich’s evolving treatment with psycho-
analysis and his contributions to it. “Vegetotherapy” stems from “vegetative nervous system,” a commonly used
term for the “autonomic nervous system.” As we saw in Chapter 16, Reich was ever more impressed with the role
of sympathetic innervation in neuroses and the importance of parasympathetic activation during therapy. Overall,
the term “vegetotherapeutic” reflected his increasing interest in the bodily expression of emotions and energetic
changes in the patient. In America, however, he abandoned the term because of its unfortunate associations with
“vegetables” and “vegetate.”