mistic view of people’s readiness for rapid change, whether individually or socially.
A different set of motives, related to his family tragedy, was operative in the late
1930s and 1940s. As Reich’s sense of his own work developed, as it became clear that he was
not simply continuing psychoanalysis or Marxism, that he was no longer the “son” but now
the “father” of new disciplines, he became quite concerned with the priority of his therapy,
his sex-economy, his bio-electrical and bion experiments. Others might somehow run off
with his discoveries, and “wear them in the world’s eyes as though they’d wrought them,” to
borrow from Yeats. Not only would they steal his discoveries. They might dilute them, and,
in diluting them, defile them. They would steal and defile, but not suffer, truly suffer for
them, as he had suffered.
In the 1930s and after, his accusations became ever harsher against those he
believed were stealing his work. However much someone like Fenichel may have deserved
reprimand, Reich’s ferocity was undoubtedly excessive. His accusations were clearly directed
to someone else, another person who had been close to Reich—in other words, the tutor
who slept with his mother, who had “stolen” the mother from Willy and his father, who had
(in Willy’s mind) defiled his mother. The tutor had also gotten off easily, compared to the
suffering of Willy and his father.
As Reich became a father,the father of a new therapy and a new science, he became
more like his own father, especially under stress. And, in particular, the negative aspects of
his father—the jealousy, possessiveness, demandingness, the high expectations of “sons”
and the difficulty in accepting their independence—now came to the fore.
How much of psychoanalysis was in fact retained in what Reich termed “character-
analytic vegetotherapy”?
In the 1930s, at least, Reich still paid attention to one cardinal goal of psycho-
analysls—the resurrection and making conscious of unconscious memories. As with char-
acter analysis,he claimed that vegetotherapy brought back these memories with more vivid-
ness than classical analysis. To quote from his 1937 monograph again:
The dissolution ofa muscular rigidity not only liberates vegetative energy,
but,in addition,also brings back into memory the very infantile situation in which
the repression had taken place We can say: everymuscular rigidity contains the histo-
ry and the meaning of its origine. It is thus not necessary to deduce from dreams or
associations [patient productions Reich was never especially interested in] the way in
which the muscular armor developed; rather, the armor itself is the form in which
the infantile experience continues to exist as a harmful agent^10.Reich claimed even more. Work on the muscular armor brought up memories with
more affect and immediate significant insight by the patient than was the case in psycho-
analysis.In the same monograph he cites a patient who suffered a severe anxiety attack dur-
ing a session. The man suddenly sat up with a painfully distorted mouth, his forehead cov-
228 Myron SharafFury On Earth