noted that with armor in the throat, the voice is “usually low, monotonous, ‘thin’ ... In this
condition, one will try in vain to talk with a loud and resonant voice. Children acquire such
conditions at a very early age, when they are forced to suppress violent emotions to cry.”^5
The third segment centered on the deep neck musculature and the upper back. In
working with the second and third segments, Reich was confronted with a problem: the ther-
apist cannot put his or her hands on the larynx as he can on the superficial neck muscles.
Here Reich used a very simple technique but one that carried great force. He simply asked
the patient to put his finger down his throat and gag. This technique was used to combat the
patient’s tendency, learned in childhood, to “swallow down” feelings of anger and sorrow.
With successful gagging, or what Reich called “eliciting the gag reflex,” the swallowed emo-
tions were “thrown up,” often with literal vomiting. (A bucket became part of Reich’s ther-
apeutic equipment.)
Reich was a superb teacher, a kind of conductor, of gagging. He taught his patients
not to force the gagging by rapidly sticking their fingers down their throats, all the while
holding their breath and bracing against the gag reflex. Rather, he would have them do it
slowly, gently tickling the back of the throat; he would urge them not to swallow, to keep
breathing, to make a wha-a-asound as they gagged. At such moments he became a kind of
exorcist fighting the devil of swallowing and blocking the gag reflex.
The fourth segment is the chest; the fifth comprises essentially the diaphragm, the
stomach, the solar plexus, pancreas, liver, and two always plainly evident muscle bundles
alongside the lower thoracic vertebrae; the sixth segment includes the spasm of the large
abdominal muscles, a specific contraction of the lateral muscles that run from the lower ribs
to the upper margin of the pelvis, and, in the back, armoring of the lower sections of the
muscles; and the seventh segment is the pelvic segment.
The reader is referred to Chapter XV ofCharacter Analysisfor a more complete
description of the armor segments. Here I shall limit myself to some general comments.
In his discussion of the armor rings, Reich was not concerned with a mechanical
softening ofthe musculature.He constantly sought to correct the false impression that psy-
chiatric orgone therapy consisted of some kind of massage because it involved the “laying
on of hands/’ Again and again he would say that “therapy does not consist of working on
‘tensions’or ‘muscles’ as such, but of working on emotions—on the expressionofemo-
tions.”^6
In working with each segment, Reich studied the extent to which a patient could
experience an emotion throughout his or her body. Thus, working on the throat block might
elicit crying.Reich would then be concerned with the depth and extent of the crying. He
would pay careful attention to whatever part of the body was not entering the total emo-
tional experience. If the patient was angry, were the eyes, the voice, the arms, the legs
expressing anger? If one part held back, Reich would then focus his attention on the non-
participating segment.
Reich’s interest in the function of respiration, sharply evident in Norway, became
even stronger in America. His eye was especially tuned to seeing subtle manifestations of
292 Myron SharafFury On Earth