The chin was immobile; the patient talked through her teeth, as if hissing.
The jaw muscles were rigid.... The patient held her head somewhat pulled in and
thrust forward, as if she were afraid that something would happen to her neck if
she were to move her head. ...Respirationwas severely disturbed. The lips were
drawn in and the nostrils somewhat distended, as if she had to draw in air through
the nose When asked to breathe out deeply, the patient was unable to do so; more
than that, she did not seem to understand what she was asked to do. The attempt
to get the thorax into the expiratory position, that is, to push it down, met with a
vivid active muscular resistance. It was found that head, neck and shoulders formed
a rigid unit, as if any movement in the respective joints was impossible. ...^11 Reich
was also concerned about her sexual life.
She had been married unhappily for two years when her husband died. She
initially suffered from her sexual frustration caused by her husband’s impotence,
but later “got used to it.” After her husband’s death, she refused any contact with
men. Gradually her sexual excitation subsided. In its place, she developed anxiety
states; these she combated by way of various phobic mechanisms. At the time when
I first saw her, she no longer suffered from anxiety states; she appeared emotional-
ly balanced and somehow reconciled to her sexual abstinence and her personal fate
in general^12.Far from abandoning his psychiatric lens, Reich was looking at his patients from a
great diversity of analytic viewpoints.
Reich came to certain clinical generalizations about the “cancer biopathy” or the
underlying illness behind the tumor, which were later to be presented in The Cancer Biopathy
(1948).
Characterologically,cancer patients showed predominantly mild emotionsand resigna-
tion.In this respect they could be distinguished from patients suffering from cardiovascular
biopathy, who were more emotionally labile, anxious, explosive. Both groups suffered from
sexual stasis,but in the cardiovascular cases the sexual excitation remained alive—biological-
ly, physiologically, and psychologically. Cancer patients seemed to be affected in the core of
the organism. “Chronic emotional calm ... must correspond to a depletion of energy in the
cell and plasma system.”^13
Reich made the following comparison:
In a running brook, the water changes constantly. This makes possible the
so-called self-purification of the water. ... In stagnant water, on the other hand,
processes ofputrefaction are not only not eliminated, but furthered. Amoebae and
other protozoa grow poorly or not at all in running water but copiously in stagnant
water. We still do not know what this suffocation in stagnant water, or in the stag-
nant energy ofthe organism, consists in; but we have every reason to assume the280 Myron SharafFury On Earth