tional expression, eating disturbances, and fear of kissing” to the infant’s experiences with
his mother. Now he was able to begin to connect these adult phenomena with the in vivo
study of the mother-infant relationship, even though he had but one example.
Third, on the negative side, Reich’s emphasis on the importance of orgonotic con-
tact between mother and infant contributed to guilt feelings on the part of mothers who
subscribed to his concepts but who had difficulties establishing this kind of contact. There
is no easy answer to this dilemma. What Reich stressed about the mother-infant relationship
is of great significance even if the optimal experience is—like orgastic potency between
lovers—quite rare. At the same time, Reich can be faulted for his tendency to picture
“orgonotic contact” as an all-or-nothing phenomenon rather than one of degree, and for
insufficiently emphasizing that parental guilt feelings often make matters worse.
Fourth, in the oral orgasm Reich delineated once again the orgasm formula: ten-
sion-charge-discharge-relaxation. When we combine this observation with Reich’s noting, to
be described soon, the “orgasm reflex” in children starting with the genital phase, then we
can see how he connected one or another form of the orgasm with the entire life cycle. It
was Reich’s energetic-emotional paradigm which permitted him to assert that the phenom-
ena he observed, such as the turning upward and sideways of the eyes and the trembling of
the mouth,did indeed constitute a kind oforgasm.He could so easily have interpreted it as
an attack of gas, if not a minor epileptic seizure. *
Fifth, in the handling of Peter’s falling anxiety, Reich innovated a kind of “play ther-
apy,” one derived from his long work with the bodily and emotional expression of adults
and closely related to the energy functions he was studying in many different realms.
Moreover, the kind of therapy he evolved was ideally suited for working with infants. Unlike
the usual play therapy, it did not even require that the “patient” act out his fantasies in play
and activities. It did not require any understanding of interpretations. All that Reich did was
work directly with the emotional expression and the flow of energy through contact, body
“games,” and muscle movement.
The Orgonomic Infant Research Center (OIRC)Apart from his experiences with Peter, Reich did not work directly with infants and
children during most of the 1940s. However, he remained deeply concerned with education
23 : Psychiatric, Sociological, and Educational Developments: 1940-1950 307
*Indeed, in 1981 a mother who was interested in Reich’s work wrote an article on the upbringing of her children
and commented:“I believe both children had oral orgasms. ... At first, it was startling and we were afraid our son
might be ill,but otherwise he didn’t seem sick at all.After it had happened a few times, we thought it was proba-
bly nothing to worry about” Mary Vahkup, “Raising Two Children,”Offshoots ofOrgonomy,2,1981, 23.
Two mothers interested in Reich’s work told me of very similar reactions to oral orgasms in their infants. However,
apart from these three communications, I have read or heard nothing about the oral orgasm since Reich’s publica-
tion in 1945. If this relatively common phenomenon, however interpreted, has been so ignored, and, when noticed,
so disquieting even to those familiar with Reich’s work, his explanation of the fear-filled avoidance ofallmanifes-
tations of orgonotic pulsation becomes more plausible.