There were of course difficulties involved for the patient, such as very strong bod-
ily reactions, which could sometimes even be dangerous. This was one of the factors that
led Reich to believe his therapy should only be practiced by physicians. He was willing to
make exceptions—Ola Raknes, for example—but in general he held to the medical practice
of his therapy.
These difficulties, together with the kind of rigor Reich advocated for the total
treatment, made him uneasy about the popularization of such therapy. He feared that
untrained persons might pick up his techniques and then commit irresponsible blunders
with patients or simply dilute them and so render them “superficial” As he wrote in the pref-
ace to his 1937 monograph, he had not solved an old dilemma. His social self, his Marxist
self, demanded the popularization of scientific knowledge. But at the same time, “I would
like to prevent the expression ‘vegetotherapy’ from becoming a fashionable slogan among
other fashionable causes. ... The more generally a scientific formulation is valid, the stricter
one must be in the demand for serious and deep-going popularization.”^9
Reich never found the means to achieve a “serious and deep-going popularization”
of his therapeutic work. Indeed, in Norway and even more when he got to America, he
moved in the opposite direction. He tried to keep a tight rein on those who utilized his tech-
niques,for he was terribly afraid that his concepts and techniques would be misused to the
detriment not only of patients but of his own work and his person.
In today’s climate, it is easy to forget how radical Reich’s approaches were for the
1930s and 1940s. At that time, traditional psychiatry used organic treatments such as elec-
troshock therapy. Psychoanalysts—Freudians, Adlerians, or Jungians—limited themselves
strictly to talking with patients. Now the already controversial Reich was seeing patients nude
or semi-nude, touching them, reporting about all kinds of sexual excitations, including the
orgasm reflex, during therapy. It was a volatile atmosphere, and Reich did not want a spark
lit by the suicide or mistreatment of a patient allegedly treated by a “Reichian” therapist
whose work he himself had not approved.
There were also other, less rational, motives behind the control Reich attempted to
keep on his therapy (as well as on other aspects of his work), behind his avoidance of super-
ficial “popularization.”In the late 1920s and early 1930s, he had moved toward the widest
possible distribution of his sex-political concepts. He had printed brochures in simple, clear
language and distributed them by the thousands to the Communist Party and other organi-
zations. He had worked also to train nonprofessional “youth leaders” on sexual issues. Now
he was limiting himself to writing in his small, obscure JournalMoreover, he never described
his therapeutic techniques in great detail, partly out of the fear that the untrained might use
such a “cookbook” to conduct “wild” therapy.
I would suggest that in his early deep concern for helping humanity, Reich was not
motivated solely by his genuine compassion for “people in trouble.” In Freudian terms, he
also had a rescue fantasy,a desire to save the world, with a concomitant overestimation of
the world’s desire and capacity to be saved. With this went his often quite unrealistically opti-
18 : Psychiatric Developments: 1934-1939 227