blocked respiration. Much of his therapeutic work now centered upon dealing with such
blocks. Forced breathing (“No Yoga exercises, please!”), shallow breathing, closing the
throat against the breath all—such expressions of inhibited respiration drew his lightning-
like attention.
Just as Reich organized the therapeutic process around the orderly dissolution of
segments, so he also organized therapy toward the orderly expression of emotions. One of
his crucial diagnostic questions was: Which emotion is closest to the surface? Is the patient
more afraid of crying than of being angry, or vice versa? It was a cardinal mistake for the
therapist to press for crying if anger was in fact closer to the surface. Thus Reich’s concern
for an orderly therapeutic process sharply distinguishes his work from some of the
neoReichian, encounter-type methods, which press for “letting feelings out” in a chaotic way.
Some syntactical confusion arose around 1945, when Reich changed the name of
his psychiatric treatment from “character-analytic vegetotherapy” to “psychiatric orgone
therapy.” In the public’s mind the latter term became confused with accumulator treatment,
which Reich termed “physical orgone therapy,” It was extremely characteristic of Reich to
make this change in terminology even though he thereby contributed to the common mis-
conception that the accumulator could, like psychiatric orgone therapy, promote “orgastic
potency”and the associated misconception that the use ofthe accumulator was part of
“psychiatric orgone therapy.” Although Reich had become convinced that he was dealing
with one and the same energy whether he was releasingorganismic orgone energy from
armor segments in psychiatric treatment or confiningatmospheric orgone energy within the
accumulator, the commonality and differences between the two treatments were not always
clear to the reader. As always, the clarity of concepts and terminology in his rapidly integrat-
ing mind meant more to him than carefully fostering clarity in everyone else’s mind.
By the mid-1940s, then, we see Reich studying the psychiatric interplay between two
forces: streamings of energy, on the one hand, and segmental amor rings, on the other. Reich
never failed to pay considerable attention to character traits, but the linking of these with
early family history and unconscious memories was often done in a cursory fashion. He was
tired ofpsychoanalysis, even though he once said to me after making a fewinterpretations:
“You see, this work involves more than ‘squeezing the muscles/ We are not against good
psychoanalysis.”^7
In my view, Reich’s impatience with verbal techniques hurt his efficacy as a practic-
ing therapist.Patients need to talk a good deal about their past and present lives as well as
work through armor segments. The most harmful aspect of his movement away from analy-
sis was his tendency, at times, to veer too far from the wise aspects of the analytic principle
of“neutrality “:for example, the therapist should not meet the patient’s hate with hate, but
rather should help the patient to understand the infantile sources of his or her transferred
rage. Reich could a time be blind to the shortcomings of patients who stirred his own infan-
tile positive feelings and he could be unduly angry at others who evoked his old insecurities
and rages.This weakness of Reich’s was very apparent in Norway (as we saw in Chapter 18),
but it was more pronounced than ever in America and it provided ammunition for his oppo-
23 : Psychiatric, Sociological, and Educational Developments: 1940-1950 293