ered with perspiration, his whole musculature tense. He hallucinated an ape and emitted
sounds that seemed to come from the depth of his chest. This intense experience was imme-
diately connected with frightening childhood memories of his father, a figure he as a small
child had perceived as a terrible “gorilla” interfering with the little boy’s relation with his
mother^11.
Again and again, Reich stresses the vivid reenactment of early memories through
work on the musculature. At the same time, his thinking was moving away from ideational
memories and toward total concentration on the play of forces between tthe flow of ener-
gy and emotion, on the one hand, and the muscular rigidities and fear of pleasure, on the
other.
Several technical points also reflect the continuity with psychoanalysis, as well as the
growing divergencies. During the Norwegian period, Reich saw patients at least several times
a week. (Typical analysis involved five sessions each week.) Later, in America, he would see
many patients once a week, though he felt that two or three weekly sessions were optimal
Reich also always saw the patient lying down. Just as psychoanalysis assumed that
the supine position increased regression and the “relaxation” of controlled thought process-
es, so Reich thought this position heightened the flow of emotion.*
Reich maintained a very professional relationship with his patients; there was no
doubt who was the therapist, who the patient. However, he always believed in behaving as
humanly as possible:
Many psychoanalytic rules had the definite character of taboos, and thus
only reinforced the neurotic taboos of the patient. Thus, for example, the rule that
the analyst should not be seen, that he should be a blank screen, as it were, upon
which the patient would project his transferences. This, instead of eliminating, con-
firmed in the patient the feeling of dealing with an invisible, unapproachable,
superhuman, that is, according to infantile thinking, a sexless being. How could the
patient overcome his fear ofsex which made him ill? Treated thus, sexuality
remained forever something diabolical and forbidden, something which under all
circumstances was to be “condemned” or “sublimated” ... I attempted in every pos-
sible way to free them of their characterological rigidity. They should look at me in
an unauthoritative,humanway^12.In line with letting the patient see the therapist, and also permitting the therapist to
observe the patient,Reich sat next to him rather than behind him (the customary analytic
position). Sometimes, too, Reich would answer questions the patient asked about him, rather
than using the more standard analytic technique of querying: “Why do you ask?”
In contrast to the usual analytic mode, then, Reich could be revealing of himself.
18 : Psychiatric Developments: 1934-1939 229
*Ofthose working directly in the Reichian tradition, Alexander Lowen was the first (in the late 1950s) to make
use ofother patient positions,especially standing.