Fury on Earth: A Biography of Wilhelm Reich

of strong genital sensations, emerge more graphically. He also stressed more carefully than
ever the importance of the gradualrelease of emotion and energy flow so that the patient
was not overwhelmed.
The most notable advance, however, was the attention Reich paid to the eyes, for
he viewed schizophrenia as involving a split between sensation and perception. Whereas the
neurotic person shut off his or her deeper sensations completely by means of heavy armor,
the less armored schizophrenic was in touch with these sensations but distorted them. The
schizophrenic suffered from a specific disturbance in eye contact—contact with his or her
own inner processes and with the external world. One expression of this eye block was the
typical “far-away” look of schizophrenic patients. As he worked with his patient, Reich
found that the eye block intensified whenever she experienced an increase in pleasurable
streamings in her body. “I ventured the preliminary assumption,” Reich wrote, “that the
‘going off in the eyes was due to a local contraction of the nerve system at the base of the
brain. According to this assumption this contraction had the same function as all other bio-
pathic contractions: to prevent too strong bodily streamings and sensations.”^10
The patient made considerable gains during the three months of orgone therapy.
However, the treatment was broken off at one phase when her anxiety mounted with the
increase in pleasurable feelings and her self-destructive acts reached dangerous proportions.
Reich, the patient, and the patient’s family believed treatment could continue on an outpa-
tient basis in spite of the dangers involved. The hospital psychiatrist felt differently. After
some months in the hospital, the patient was discharged and subsequently maintained the
improvement she had achieved with Reich. She was able to work and function, although
problems remained in her love life. Her clinical picture was much more neurotic than psy-
chotic at this point. The essential experiment over, Reich referred the patient for continuing
treatment to an orgone therapist he himself had trained.
Our immediate concern is not really with the improvement of this patient—for
many schizophrenics do improve from diverse treatments and with no treatment at all—but
rather with Reich’s conceptualization of schizophrenia and with the techniques he formulat-
ed for treating it. Let us look at the scientific issues and also what it meant for Reich person-
ally.
First,significantly, he spoke of schizophrenia as a disease of the brain. As a psy-
choanalyst he had long opposed traditional organic explanations of mental illness, as being
due to some genetic defect,for example. Reich opposed such physical explanations partly
because schizophrenics had been stored away for so many years in mental hospitals in the
belief that they suffered from “brain damage,” and no brain pathology was ever found.
However, now that an emotionalfactor in the form of armoring emerged as a “local contrac-
tion of the brain due to severe anxiety,” he was much more disposed to consider schizophre-
nia a “brain disease.”
The significance of this formulation lies in what Reich did with it. The task was not
to operate on the brain (or give electric shock treatment, both treatments Reich opposed)
but to help the patient tolerate intense sensations without “going off” in the eyes—rolling

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