Reich’s energy-block paradigm yielded great therapeutic hope, at least in the case
history described above. If the patient had not yet become “orgastically potent,” Reich
implied that with further therapeutic work she would eventually do so. Yet at the same time,
the more Reich was in touch with the power of streamings, of organismic orgone energy,
the more he also appredated the “obstacles in the way”—the armor segments, the intense
fear, indeed terror—in the face of surrender to the flow of orgastic excitation. However,
Reich was so committed to the principle of orgastic potency that he never made clear pub-
licly, though he sometimes did privately, that very few patients actually achieved orgastic
potency. In his own way he contributed to the “cult” of the orgasm through his rather opti-
mistic case history vignettes and this detailed case history of the schizophrenic patient.
Apart from the question of results, Reich continued to deplore the social inadequa-
cy of therapy. Indeed, he resented the fact that the therapists he had trained were, largely,
interested only in private practice and devoted little effort to education or to research. Once
when an educator contemplated becoming a therapist, Reich said sharply: “No, if you do
that, you will just make a lot of money and do no work.”^13
An intensely social animal, Reich never wanted to limit himself to the treatment of
a relatively few privileged people. He was genuinely concerned with social and educational
change, and with public policy.
Sociological DevelopmentsThis same period marked a turning point in Reich’s social thought, a period in
which we see the idiosyncratic quality of his thought emerge. It was as though his own
thinking itself had to emerge from a kind of armor—the armor of wrong, culturally inher-
ited ideas or the armor that reflected his own problems.
Here, too, the social environment played its role. Just as Marxism and apparent
progress in the Soviet Union had spurred on his sex-political concepts in the 1920s, so the
failure of the Russian Revolution in the 1930s, culminating in the Nazi-Soviet pact of
August 1939,led him to revise many of his ideas, such as the readiness of people for a rev-
olution and the capacity of leaders to help them. As with his move away from classical psy-
choanalysis,the movement of his social thought was gradual. Although he left the
Communist Party in 1933, it took the rest of the 1930s before he broke clearly with Marxist
political theory.
Reich’s movement away from radical politics and Marxism was also encouraged by
his American experience. He found in the United States a greater openness compared to
Europe,less concern with hierarchy, and more willingness to experiment. The trend toward
a more permissive upbringing of children, which Spock both reflected and promoted in his
1946 publication Baby and Child Care, was already manifest in the early 1940s. It deeply
impressed Reich, especially in its contrast to what was occurring in the Soviet Union. There,
even co-education had been abolished.Nothing in Marxist theory could explain the progres-
sive, evolutionary movement toward freedom within capitalist America, while “socialist”
23 : Psychiatric, Sociological, and Educational Developments: 1940-1950 297