the eyeballs upward. It also influenced Reich’s formulations on early infancy, especially the
importance of eye contact between mother and infant, a subject to be discussed in the last
section of this chapter. Equally significant was Reich’s openness to ideas that permitted old,
previously rejected concepts to be reinterpreted. As he once put it: “Everybody is right in
some way; it is a question of finding out in what way.”^11
The very severity of the schizophrenic illness permitted Reich to be more daring in
his therapeutic concepts than hitherto. (The same quantum leap in therapy, we recall,
occurred when Reich treated a difficult case of masochism in the late 1920s.) For example,
the patient suffered a severe throat block, a block Reich related to her fear of being stran-
gled and her fear of strangling. As Reich put it:
Our patient had suffered several decades of cruel monstrosities on the part of her
nagging mother. She had developed the impulse to choke her mother in order to defend her-
self. Such impulses are very
strong and cannot be fought off in any other way than by armoring against the
welling up of the murderous hate in the throat.
Quite spontaneously, the patient asked me whether I would permit her to choke my
throat. I confess that I felt, not embarrassed, but a bit frightened; however, I told her to go
ahead and do it.The patient put her hands very cautiouslyaround my throat and exerted a
slight pressure; then her face cleared up and she sank back exhausted. Her respiration was
full now^12.
Another important aspect was the human situation between the patient and Reich.
In the early 1940s, as we have seen, Reich experienced little empathy not only from the world
but also from many of his colleagues. On the other hand, his schizophrenic patient had con-
siderable contact, albeit in a distorted fashion, with energetic processes within her organism.
At times she perceived her “forces” as being on the walls of the room; at other times, she
felt outside herself. Reich saw these distortions as projections of her own energy, not sim-
ply as projections ofideas and feelings.At various points the patient made references to the
sun as containing the same kind ofenergy as the forces. Reich was staggered to see how the
patient, even if in a confused way, could link up her own energy (the “forces”) with exter-
nal energies (the sun,the aurora borealis).
The poignancy of the encounter is enhanced if we keep in mind that during the
period Reich was treating the patient, he himself was frequently being described as schizo-
phrenic. Like his patient, Reich was seeing energy everywhere and describing “currents” in
his body. Characteristically, he turned around the whole accusation of being crazy by exam-
ining more closely what craziness was, and finding it in many ways superior to so-called nor-
mality.
Reich’s work on schizophrenia illustrates once again how the different aspects of
his research mutually enriched each other. His intensive investigations of physical orgone
energy alerted him more than ever to the disturbance in energy flow in patients, to the pro-
jections ofenergy in the schizophrenic, to the concrete reality his patient was referring to—
albeit in a distorted way—when she spoke of her “forces.”
296 Myron SharafFury On Earth