The following sections are dedicated to some personalities of the psychoanalytic world who are generally quoted as having been the precursors of body psychotherapy.
“The Wednesday group,” established in Vienna in 1902, was the first psychoanalytical association. It was composed of medical generalists, neurologists, and sympathetic intellectuals without any psychotherapeutic ambitions, who came to hold discussions with Freud. In 1906, the group was expanded to form the Psychoanalytical Society of Vienna, under the presidency of Alfred Adler (18701973).
Adler was a medical generalist who thought that a few of his patients could benefit from the psychoanalytic vision, even if they did not need to follow a formal psychotherapy like the one proposed by Freud. When he met Freud to discuss this subject, he already had the desire to widen the spectrum of the interventions inspired by the psychoanalytic approach. Like Freud, Adler thought that the soul1 influences not only behavior but also, sometimes, the physiological mechanisms that create the symptoms that are treated by general medical practitioners. Adler even went so far as to propose that if the thoughts have the power to influence the physiological dynamics, these can also influence the thoughts. He wanted to develop a psychoanalysis in which work on the physiological dimension sometimes permits the treatment of the psyche, and a work on the psyche that can treat somatic problems. Through his consideration of the evolution of biological organisms, he noted that a plant cannot displace itself; that the more an organism is mobile, the more its psyche is complex: “The result is that, in the development of the life of the soul, everything that pertains to movement and everything that can be linked to the difficulties of a simple displacement must be included” (Adler, 1927, 1.1, p. 19; translated by Marcel Duclos).
Alfred Adler pushed the identity body-mind to such an extent that he believed a person who was psychically immature necessarily had immature organs. He deduced from that analysis that only by treating psyche and soma could a physician help a patient become stronger.2
Wilhelm Reich would also describe the individual as a biosystem that influences the psychological (treated in psychotherapy) and somatic (treated in medicine) mechanisms.3 He therefore had to clarify the differences between his approach and that of Adler. During his psychoanalytic period, Reich understood the body and the psyche as two subsystems of the organism that have a mutual dialectic4 rapport that he identifies as antithetic.5 The body and the psyche necessarily mutually influence each other because they are part of the same organism; this does not mean that they function in identical ways. On the other hand, there would be functional identity between physiological and psychological dimensions that are spontaneously related to one another in a healthy organism: the two dimensions collaborate to achieve a common goal. Reich’s commentary on Adler summarizes the position that is the most widespread in body psychotherapy: “While we do take the same problem as our point of departure, namely the purposeful mode of operation of what one calls the ‘total personality and character,’ we nonetheless make use of a fundamentally different theory and method” (Reich, 1949a, VIII. 1, p. 169)
During his psychoanalytic period, Reich did not accept the idea that the dynamics of the psyche and the soma are two faces of the same coin that function in the same way. We have seen how Freud had reflected extensively on the connection between psyche and soma. Like other thinkers, he discovered that it was extremely difficult to define what linked these systems together and what differentiated them. This difficulty, distressing to the specialist, still exists today. This explains why so many thinkers,6 including medical practitioners like Adler and Groddeck, have a problem stopping themselves from using gross simplifications. At the end of his life, Reich returned to his critique of Adler and Groddeck; conceded that there is a “unity of psychic and somatic function” (Reich, 1949a, XIII. 9, p. 340). It is mostly this point of view that was then adopted by the neo-Reichian schools; such is not retained in the options defended in this manual.
Another aspect of Adler’s thought that influenced some movements in body psychotherapy is the idea that the needs of the organism are necessarily in conflict with the social demands, because these two systems defend incompatible interests and procedures. For Adler, this conflict alone sufficed to explain the strong prevalence of neuroses in the human species.7
Sabina Spielrein (1885-1942) was a Russian who studied medicine in Zurich, Switzerland.8 There, she became a psychiatrist after having met Jung. In 1911, she became a psychoanalyst under Freud’s tutelage. She traveled to Germany and then Russia, where she got married. In 1920, she returned to Switzerland, where she founded the Geneva Society of Psychoanalysis. She became a psychologist while working at the Rousseau Institute of Geneva, founded by Édouard Claparède. This institute was renowned for its studies on the psychological development of children. Claparède married Helen Spir, daughter of a Russian philosopher. He was therefore particularly hospitable to Russian psychologists in exile from the new Soviet Union.9
Spielrein psychoanalyzed several members of this institute: not only Claparède but also the young Jean Piaget, who then published articles relating psychoanalysis and the psychology of the child.10 Spielrein’s most representative article of this period shows that the spoken language is composed of verbal and nonverbal signs that frame and nuance the meaning of phrases:
When we adults speak of language, we only think of the content of the word and we do not see the role that the resources drawn from the rhythmic and melodic domain of language can play, even in written texts, such as exclamation points, interrogation marks, etc. These melodic modes of expression are even more at play in conversation. One can add to this a third factor which one could call a visual language, which consists of phenomena such as mimics and gestures. These, as images, can also play a preeminent role in dreams. We should therefore distinguish verbal language from other aspects of language: the melodic language, the visual language (image), the language of actions, etc. (Spielrein, 1920; translated by Marcel Duclos)
Spielrein thus created a bridge between psychoanalysis and nonverbal communication and between the beginnings of the psychoanalysis of children and developmental cognitive psychotherapy. The contacts between child psychoanalysts and cognitive psychologists that she established continued without her. A manifestation of this influence is seen in the way the notion of regulation systems proposed by developmental psychology influenced child psychoanalysis. Only later did the notion of regulation enter the general theory of psychoanalysis. Child psychoanalysis was then in its infancy with the explorations of Hermine Hug von Hugenstein and Anna Freud (daughter of Sigmund Freud).
Spielrein did not do any psychotherapeutic work with children. She studied children at the Jean-Jacques Rousseau Institute with the methods of experimental psychology; she psychoanalyzed adults in her home. Unlike Anna Freud, she did not fall in the trap of reducing nonverbal language to a kind of mechanism of communication that the human inherited from the monkey and which would be more archaic than language. On the contrary, her contact with the psychologists showed her that intelligence needs to pass through gestures to interact with objects and form itself.11
Spielrein returned to Russia in 1923. Vygotsky and Luria, who were part of an eminent school of developmental cognitive psychology in the Soviet Union,12 were on the verge of founding the Russian School of Psychoanalysis.13 Like her, they were synthesizing cognitive psychology, affective psychology, and psychoanalysis in their studies of child development. She brought them much information on the recent development of psychoanalysis and of child psychology in Geneva. Both thinkers played an important role in Vygotsky’s thinking.14
In a 1931 article mentioned by Richebächer (2005), Spielrein describes the following study:
Spielrein asks a hundred children and twenty adults to draw an object. Half of the subjects are able to see what it is that they are creating; while the others draw blind-folded.
Over all, the drawings, made with open eyes, are certainly more precise. But as pertains to the details, Spielrein observes that certain aspects of the object drawn blind-folded are better drawn; as if sight interfered with the memory and the knowledge contained in the gestures.
According to Richebächer,15 Spielrein concluded that there existed a particular link between gesture and speech. She was so impressed by this observation that she recommended that work with blindfolds be integrated into the new pedagogical methods that soviet psychologists such as Vygotsky were trying to establish in Russia. She was convinced that such methods could enhance the development of the mind.
Spielrein’s publications are seldom mentioned. She did not know how to mobilize the means that allow for intellectual success. The value of her ideas did not become evident until a half-century later. Passionate as she was, she nonetheless played the role of a muse for a number of great psychologists and psychoanalysts because she had the knack of finding herself at the intersections crucial to her discipline and she felt the importance of the connections in which she involved herself. She set into motion ideas that psychoanalysts like Jung, Freud, Fenichel, Reich, Vygotsky, and Luria integrated into their thinking.
She was persecuted by Stalinism, which wanted to destroy the Jews, the psychoanalysts, and all “nonconformists.” The Spielreins were related to all three of these categories. It is possible that many of her writings were lost during the chaos caused by the terror that dominated the Soviet Union at that time. Finally, she died, executed by a German army firing squad in 1942.16
Nothing happens to you, and you can do nothing unless a multitude of cells work for you, communicate to you joy or sorrow or every other impression, thinks your thoughts, feels your sensations, regulates your heartbeats, make you breathe, make you live. The mouth that you love is formed of living cells; the hand that you seek or seek to avoid is entirely made up of living cells. Everything that you do, everything that you experience is broken down into an infinite number, a countless number of existences and lives. You have felt it yourself: the contact with another has penetrated out of its flux into your soul and body, this presence, this glance provokes a revolution in your entire being, the sound of but one word has repelled you or brought you peace. But it is not you that this contact, this glance, this sound has touched, but some cells that do not obey your reason, that do with you as it pleased them, that pass a thousand impressions before you, before choosing from among them the one that will affect you. (Georg Groddeck, 1913, Nasamecu, p. 9; translated by Marcel Duclos)
Walter Georg Groddeck (1866-1934) was a practitioner of general medicine who, like Adler, wanted to use the psychoanalytical conceptual framework to create an approach adapted to the needs of his patients. Almost the same age as Freud, Groddeck comes in contact with Freud in the 1920s. It is probably Groddeck who most directly confronted Freud relative to the difficulty of integrating the activity of the body into the dynamics of the psyche. Groddeck admired Freud’s work. He was particularly impressed by the theory of the unconscious in the Second Topography. But as a physician, he maintained the common sense of a generalise For many students of body psychotherapy, he is the gentle grandfather of their discipline.
Groddeck (1923) proposed a “psychosomatic” psychotherapy that approaches the patient in his organismic whole. Humans cannot be divided into separate parts and treated, as often happened in the medical disciplines. He explored many ways to take the needs of the patient into account: considered under the angle of both body and psyche, which Marulla Hauswirth summarizes in this way:
Groddeck allies massage and verbal work. He has developed the notion of body defenses, considering that the tensions at the level of the musculature and the reduction of respiration are the means to repress the psychic content susceptible to act as well at the level of the affects and of the drives than of the thoughts. Moreover, Groddeck laid the bases in favor of a systematic work with the negative transference, and he insisted on the importance of paying attention not only to the explicit content, but also to the form of the expression, of the attitudes and to the body postures as carriers of unconscious messages. (Hauswirth, 2002, 1, p. 180; translated by Marcel Duclos)
Even though Groddeck’s propositions remain inspiring, they did not evolve into a psychotherapeutic technique. On the other hand, they influenced the explorations of Ferenczi, Fenichel, Braatoy, and Reich. Ferenczi and Freud regularly corresponded with him. A discussion of his work is always part of training in body psychotherapy. His first work, Nasamecu or “Nature Heals,” published in 1913, is a title that easily relates to the themes developed by the Idealistic methods of body psychotherapy, in spite of a few eugenistic developments.17 Wilhelm Reich always acknowledged Groddeck’s contribution to his thinking. He associates Groddeck’s formulations with Adler’s, that is, with one of a generalist who does not sufficiently differentiate the functioning of the body and the psyche. Reich thought that the Groddeck’s formulations reinforced a psychoanalytical tendency toward the “psychologizing of the somatic”:18
It culminated in unscientific psychologistic interpretations of bodily processes with the aid of the theory of the unconscious. If, e.g., a woman skipped her menstrual period without being pregnant, this was taken as expressing her aversion for her husband or child. According to this concept, practically all physical diseases were due to unconscious wishes or fears. Thus, one acquired cancer, “in order to . . .;” one perished from tuberculosis because one unconsciously wished to, etc. Peculiarly enough, psychoanalytical experience provided a multitude of observations which seems to confirm this view. The observations were undeniable but critical considerations warned against such conclusions. (Reich, 1940, III.3, p. 33)
Georg Groddeck can be recognized as the first person to have developed an approach that regularly combines bodywork and a psychotherapeutic approach in the same session.19 He especially used different forms of deep massage to influence the system of muscular defense that repressed the expression of emotions. At that time, this way to integrate body and psychotherapy was more widespread than we might think:
In 1931, the 6th congress of the “Common Medical Society for Psychotherapy” met in the German town of Dresden. Its general topic was “treating the soul from the body.” The famous Psychiatrist, Ernst Kretschmer, was the chair of this congress. Psychoanalysts Gustav R. Heyer20 spoke on “Treating the Psyche starting from the Body” and suggested to include gymnastics, sports, breath work and massage into the psychotherapeutic treatment. Other speakers claimed to see psychic as well as somatic phenomena as functions of the entire organism.21 One speaker went so far as to state that a combined body-mind-therapy would be the future of psychotherapy. Georg Groddeck gave a presentation on “Massage and Psychotherapy,”22 which is, according to George Downing, one of his finest papers.23(Geuter etal., 2010)
Since then, some body psychotherapists use deep massage in a more systematic way, like those who use the massages of Aadel Bulow-Hansen, Gerda Boyesen, or Ida Rolf.24
Ferenczi’s scientific achievement is impressive above all from its many-sidedness. (Sigmund Freud, 1923b, Dr. Sandor Ferenczi, p. 268)
Sándor Ferenczi (1873-1933) was, at the same time, one of Freud’s close associates and a person who never ceased seeking ways to improve psychoanalysis.25 His research was as much due to an insatiable imagination and curiosity than a difficulty in tolerating constraints and limits. Ferenczi still inspires a number of psychotherapists, but his difficulty in respecting boundaries sometimes renders his arguments questionable. He had as patients a mother and her daughter, and he fell in love with both of them. Freud was never able to have confidence in him on boundary issues (Haynal, 1987; Haynal-Reymond et al., 2005). Nonetheless, up to the end of his life, Ferenczi considered Freud his therapist, his friend, and his colleague. His fluid ethics was also what allowed him to become a sort of microscope of the functioning of the psychotherapist and the way he can use his feelings to capture the intimate workings of his patients. Thanks to this capacity to feel what is at play between him and his patients, he became the first prominent expert on transferential dynamics.26
Irritated by the limits of psychoanalysis, Ferenczi explored, in the 1920s, the possibility of using an active psychoanalytic technique.27 Ferenczi did not have enough internal discipline for his project to succeed; others took up his formulations, which became the basis of most psychotherapeutic approaches (the psychotherapy of psychoanalytical inspiration established by Otto Kernberg, Gestalt therapy, Transactional analysis, body psychotherapy, family therapy, etc.). Ferenczi included in his research the considerations of Adler, Spielrein, and Groddeck on the importance of including the body in a more explicit fashion in a psychotherapeutic process. Ferenczi was at the front of the exploration of techniques undertaken by psychoanalysts after World War I.
Ferenczi tried to create methods that permitted him to help people for whom a “classical” psychoanalytical treatment was not sufficiently adapted to the patient’s needs. He set about searching for an active method that permits the analysis not only of the thoughts but also the behaviors. One of the basic ideas of the active technique was that the affects (especially sexual) are situated somewhere between behavior and thoughts. Therefore, they can be influenced by psychological and behavioral exercises.28 This introduces the notion that behaviors and thoughts are distinct systems that interact through intermediary systems (e.g., emotions). The details of the interaction between acts and representations are poorly understood; the psychotherapist notices that they can influence each other in various ways. A person can laugh when she is sad or cry when she is angry. In that example, we observe not only that the connections between behavior and thoughts are multiple but also that there can be a sort of “resonating” effect between these two dimensions of the organism. Consequently, a person is able to dissociate from her sadness by trying to amuse herself without being aware that the expression on her face conveys sadness to others, even when she laughs. If the therapist becomes a mirror that reflects this image of sadness to the patient, he can then promote an awareness that modifies the way the thoughts of the patient approaches this sadness. The active technique is therefore an attempt to analyze the triangle of thought-affect-behavior that structures a therapeutic interaction.29 In the example just given, if the patient becomes aware that she often dissociates from a sad mood by trying to behave as if she were a happy person, the whole of the triangle restructures itself. Thoughts, affects, and behavior then coordinate together differently; other working modes of the organism become possible.
In Freud’s method of analyzing dreams, the patient tell his dream and free associates with the therapist. In the active technique, the therapist extracts from the patient’s preconscious behavior a trait in which he is interested and draws the attention of the patient to this behavior. Then the therapist decides to make of this behavior a central theme of exploration in the course of subsequent sessions. This manifest creativity of the psychotherapist in interaction with the patient characterizes Ferenczi’s active technique. If his basic argumentation always remains pertinent, his way of justifying his technique is less so. He proposes to give the subject certain “permissions,” like the right to extend the session and get up from the divan, and so on. He also gave “prohibitions,” like proposing to one of his patients that she explore what might happen when she prevents herself from crossing her legs during the sessions when it has been her habit to do so.30 This language allowed Ferenczi to act as if his technique were but a variation of the classic psychoanalytic frame.
The following example shows how a memory can be explored using the active technique:
A vignette showing how to self-explore through singing. Ferenczi31 describes a patient with whom he made little progress until the moment when he asked her to sing a melody that she had mentioned in her associations. It took him two sessions before she dares to sing the song while lounging on the divan. At first she was very shy; but Ferenczi persisted in urging her to self-explore while singing the song. Her voice became progressively more at ease. He suggested that she stand and to sing with her body. The patient then remembered that she sang this song with her sister who made gestures that conveyed daring sexually suggestive undertones. During several sessions, Ferenczi invited her to explore what it was that inhibited her from singing this song with her sister’s gestures. The patient eventually sang with delight. In this process, Ferenczi and the patient together became conscious of a whole series of inhibitions that inhibited her capacity to lead a pleasant life. Ferenczi thinks that this content would probably have never appeared if he had followed a classical psychoanalytical approach.
Ferenczi does not explain why he decided to spend so much time on this song. Today, this type of intervention is often used in body psychotherapy. It implies that the therapist has confidence in his non-conscious know-how which permits him to develop “something more than the interpretation” (Haynal, 2001, 9.5, p. 135). The principal justification for what happened with this patient is that this choice facilitated useful discoveries; and that it made the therapeutic sessions more enjoyable, which is never a bad thing. This is a “post-facto” justification. The technical problem is that in acting in this way, the therapist does not have a rational argument to support his intervention. This line of action is not consistent with Ferenczi’s requirement that a therapist should be able to situate his intervention in an explicit technical context.32
In this example, as in many others, we see that Ferenczi’s active method focuses on behavior rather than what I call the body. Here is another example of an active technique that will be developed when psychotherapists are able to use film and videos in psychotherapy.33
A vignette on the beginnings of video analysis. Ferenczi (1921b) discusses a work on the subject of tics written by psychiatrists who do not practice psychoanalysis. He nonetheless cites this example because it illustrates a technique that could be included in his active method. The physicians place the patient in front of a mirror and have him observe his tic while asking him to recount its history. At the same time, they teach the patient exercises that allow for the exploration of different ways of moving the muscles mobilized by the tic. They also ask what is going on when he forces himself to immobilize the particular region of the body under question. Ferenczi used this behavioral method to help his patients become aware of their behavior and of how it interacts with thoughts and affects.
In addition to these behavioral techniques, Ferenczi (1930) takes up the cathartic methods used by Breuer and Freud in the 1890s. He induces intense states of relaxation34 and regression that arouse such powerful emotional discharges that they are also able to carry repressed memories. This emotional experience is profound. It mobilizes the whole organism. The remembering is particularly alive and detailed. The patient gets up feeling healed. From my experience, this result lasts for two or three years at best, and sometimes only a few days. These cathartic experiences are regularly observed in psychotherapy groups. They especially allow a patient to feel that it is possible to transform oneself: to transform one’s habitual mode of functioning.
Ferenczi in the 1920s thought that such experiences could be usefully reintegrated in the psychoanalytical toolbox if they were well framed. He thought especially of certain patients who have already had extensive psychoanalysis but whose treatment is now stagnant. In that case, the cathartic method might make it possible to shed light into the shadowy zones that classical analysis has not been able to illuminate. To induce a catharsis, he suggests that patients relax and let movements come up the same way that they let thoughts emerge. Ferenczi35 therefore speaks of relaxation, but the term is taken very loosely, because he does not use any relaxation techniques. He proposes a form of laissez-faire, of letting come what needs to come. Body psychotherapists know this type of session very well. It unfolds in three stages:
Here are a few examples of what Ferenczi observes by using this technique:
Hysterical body symptoms: paresthesias36 and clearly localized cramps, violent expressive movements evoking small hysterical crises, sudden variations of the state of consciousness, slight vertigo and even loss of consciousness often followed by a retroactive amnesia. In certain cases, these hysterical accesses take on the proportions of a veritable trance state, in which fragments of the past were relived; and therefore, the person of the physician remained the only bridge between the patient and reality. It became possible to ask the patient questions in order to obtain important information concerning the dissociated parts of the patient’s personality. (Ferenczi, 1930, pp. 89–92)
Ferenczi thinks that these states emerge spontaneously, simply because he had authorized such a bodily laissez-faire to exist in a therapeutic frame. He relates this permission with what happens when a physician administers a hypnotic tranquilizer, like sodium pentothal, to a soldier traumatized by combat. The soldier goes through an emotional phase that mobilizes the dimensions of the organism. The patient cries, screams, and feels the need to retell the traumatizing situation, over and over again. During this phase, we often observe intense body reactions, like a muscular tension that takes over the entire body, an arrested breathing, or an opisthotonus crisis (see the Glossary). The psychotherapist sometimes observes the same series of phenomena when a patient relives a childhood trauma. With his neo-cathartic method, Ferenczi evokes these states. This requires that the therapist is able to accept what is happening in those circumstances, explore the material that appears, and avoid the dangers that can arise by mobilizing the intensity of these emotional eruptions.37
Henceforth, this type of observation became current in the framework of different forms of body psychotherapy. Gerda Boyesen38 observed a similar technique when she was having psychotherapy with Ola Raknes, one of Reich’s students. He obtained similar results by saying: “Here, you can do whatever you want. Simply, if you break a window, you will have to pay to have it replaced!” As a therapist she used the following formula: “You can say or do what you want. But you are not obliged to do or say anything at all. Simply, do not withhold any speech or any movement. Tell me if there is something that you want me to do or to say.”391 have often observed how Gerda Boyesen worked, and I have seen her work many times. She knew how to create an atmosphere that permitted the apparently spontaneous emergence of phenomena close to those described by Ferenczi. But I also observed that this type of permission does not have the same impact when it is proposed by a less charismatic psychotherapist. It seems to me that this type of effect is sustained by the rumors that transform some psychotherapists into stars. For example, I achieve such effects when I am presented in a prestigious manner to a training group. On the other hand, I do not have this impact on my regular patients, who have often selected me from a listing in a phone book or from the Internet without knowing anything of my reputation. We are therefore in a situation close to that of hypnosis, where the specific intervention depends on the quality of the general ambience to acquire its effectiveness.
Like Rousseau, Beethoven, and Tolstoy, Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957) was an immense humanist, a charismatic teacher, a virtuoso in his profession, with an inspiring intelligence and a powerful imagination; simultaneously, he could be highly selfish and obnoxious with those that were closest to him. Reich reinforced this image by presenting himself as a solitary genius at war against the stupidity of others. He is generally recognized as the father of body psychotherapy.40 In the following sections, I show that this title is justified if we admit that a father is part of a family and that he does not always agree to have the children that the social dynamics impose on him. We will see, in effect, that after having had a dazzling career as a psychoanalyst, he turned his back on all forms of psychotherapy to develop a new form of therapy that aims not at the psyche but at the organism. If his organismic therapy has nonetheless favored the advent of body psychotherapy such as we know it today, it is because Reich was part of a large and tumultuous family capable of allying itself to his creativity, and then to create different forms of body psychotherapy that emerged during the 1950s. To understand this process, it is also useful to present Otto Fenichel (1897-1946), who is somewhat of a secret and unappreciated uncle of this domain.
When I began to write this book, I had a specific plan in mind. Fenichel was not part of it.41 For me, he was a boring orthodox Freudian who had been one of the principal references on the psychoanalytical techniques for many generations of psychoanalysts.42 He would have done everything possible to have Reich expelled from the International Association of Psychoanalysis by spreading the word that he was psychotic. Such was his reputation in the Reichian literature. Yet the more that I read the writings of those who were part of Reich’s entourage, the more I encountered Fenichel’s name without knowing why. I therefore set about to inform myself more precisely about him. After some research, I discovered that he had played a central role in the birth of body psychotherapy. This function of uncle was obscured by the Reichians and Freudians for reasons that will gradually become evident.
Fenichel was born in 1897 of a Jewish family of lawyers in Vienna.43 His health prohibited him from becoming a soldier. He enrolled in the school of medicine in 1915.
Like many students of his generation, Fenichel regularly frequented the youth movements. It must be said that the communist propaganda of the period attracted numerous people who had been disillusioned by the war. Ever since the Jugendstil and the Wandervogel (the migrating birds) at the start of the century,44 these movements had multiplied. All of the political parties (from the extreme left to the extreme right), the religious groups (Catholics, Jews, and Protestants), and the ideological movements had their youth movements. Fenichel was close to the Jewish youth movement of the left. Certain directors of this movement, like Siegfried Bernfeld, became psychoanalysts and created bridges between these movements, especially in the matter of sexual education. Probably because of this influence, Fenichel began to attend seminars given by Freud as early as 1916. He participated regularly in the sessions of the Psychoanalytical Society at the beginning of 1918, during the key period when Freud was creating his Second Topography.
The youth from the left denounced an antisexual morality that prohibited adolescents from obtaining a responsible attitude in sexual matters. These movements wanted an education that integrated their need to be sexually informed, supported their right to be sexual human beings, and protected them from perversions in which some forces close to prostitution wanted them to succumb. In this context, the young Fenichel approached the theme of sexual education, especially in Max Hodann’s journal,45 which also enthusiastically welcomed (10 years later) Reich’s Sex-Pol initiative. Fenichel frequented the animated gatherings by Alfred Kurella,46 who related communist thinking, heterosexual Platonic Idealism, and sexual revolution. Kurella defended “a sexual mysticism or Korperseele [the enfleshed spirit] in Vienna and Berlin” (Russel Jacoby, 1983, 2, p. 71f; translated from the French by Marcel Duclos). This branch of the youth movement defended a moral brand of free love and sexual emancipation. The sexual contact of the “new man” necessarily implies the union of souls as well as that of bodies.
In the momentum inspired by his discovery of the youth movements and psychoanalytic thought, between 1919 and 1921 Fenichel proposed a seminar on sexuality, which he opened in the Faculty of Medicine. At the same time, he underwent analysis with Paul Federn, who was a socialist psychoanalyst close to Freud.
Wilhelm Reich was born in 1897 of a Jewish family of landowners in Galicia, in Ukraine, which was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire before World War I. When he was 13, his mother committed suicide. This event affected him profoundly.47 After completing school in 1915, he became a soldier in the Austrian army during World War I. Lenin’s takeover of power is considered by many Europeans the triumph of liberty over tyranny. The Treaty of Versailles dismantled the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Hungary and Czechoslovakia became independent, and Galicia was annexed by Poland. Henceforth, Vienna was but the immense capital of a small country. Former combatants were allowed to try to pass their medical exams in four years. Reich brilliantly undertook this accelerated formation after he completed his military service. The Reich family had lost all of its possessions. In coming to Vienna with his brother, Reich maintained his Austrian nationality, but he had the status of an Austrian of the old colonies. It seems to me, given the choices that he made in his lifetime, that he identified mostly with antebellum Vienna. He felt close to the critical artistic movements like the Jugendstil and the Secession.48 When he later lived in the United States, he gave to his theory of cosmic energy an aesthetic that makes one think of the apparently natural beauty, such as represented by Gustav Klimt, and to a notion of the natural spontaneity of the gesture incarnated by the dance of Isadora Duncan.
At the end of the war, Reich paid little attention to politics because, above all, he had to fight to provide for his and his brother’s needs. He heard about Fenichel’s seminar on sexology and registered for it in 1919.
In this seminar, Fenichel helped him discover the following topics:
In taking this seminar, Reich discovered, with reticence at first, the idea that “sexuality is the center around which gravitates all of social life as well as the spiritual world of the individual” (Reich, 1937, 1.3.1919, p. 109; translated by Marcel Duclos). What Reich discovered in this seminar touched him so deeply that the themes Fenichel conjured up inspired him for the rest of his life.
Reich followed the example of his mentor and became his friend. He started to attend the sessions of the Psychoanalytical Society of Vienna with a passion. Fenichel and Reich became members of the association together in 1920. They were 23 years old. Reich was in two brief psychoanalyses: one with Isodor Isaak Sadger,50 and then with Paul Federn, who had already analyzed Fenichel.51 At that time, Freud did not require that the psychoanalysts had to have been psychoanalyzed before practicing.52 Fenichel often felt like Reich’s protective big brother. He helped Reich integrate himself into the Viennese intelligentsia. After 10 difficult years, Reich entered into the happiest period of his life. Each step became a discovery, a new friendship, a new battle, a new theory. With Fenichel, he joined the group of Marxist psychoanalysts, where they met a large number of individuals who were glad to work with them. In this intellectual breeding ground, they finalized a synthesis relating Marxism, the theses of the youth movement, and psychoanalysis. Always together, they are passionately involved in the promotion of Ferenczi’s active method. Through the intermediary of Fenichel, Reich met Annie Pink, who became his patient, his spouse, and an eminent psychoanalyst of the left.
Annie was the second patient with whom Reich had an affair.53 The set-up was always the same. The two young adults fell in love during the psychotherapy sessions. By mutual consent, they ended their therapeutic contract, and the woman continued her therapy with another analyst. Having behaved in an “ethical and responsible manner,” they can meet as lovers. If this behavior is considered ethical when this way of acting is accidental, it is no longer considered ethical when it occurs regularly, as was the case for Reich. His first relationship of this type occurred with a friend of Annie who died tragically after a botched abortion, probably after having been impregnated by Reich.54 Freud scolded Reich for his recurring affairs with former patients.55 Even so, many analysts of the period had affairs with their patients, like Jung, Gross, and Ferenczi. As if to reassure himself, Reich agreed to marry Annie when she demanded it; he regretted it a few years later. They had two daughters, Eva and Lore. Wilhelm and Annie both had several extramarital affairs but stayed together to care for the children.
Even if both Fenichel and Reich claimed to be communists, they took part in different brands of communism. Reich was mostly interested in the social transformations undertaken by Lenin in the Soviet Union. Fenichel and his colleagues were more sympathetic toward Marxist socialism. Fenichel and Reich spoke very little about communism. Their interest in Marxism was more a hope for change than an understanding of the thinking of Marx and Engel. It appears that they did not read their writings attentively. When Reich became a member of the Communist Party, he started to use all sorts of terms that are part of the jargon of militant communists, without ever giving the impression that he really understood the meaning and implications of the language. However, as we will see, Reich needed the power that can be acquired through the support of a party for his sexual revolution.
In 1922, Fenichel asked Reich to take over the direction of the seminar on sexology and leaves for Berlin.56
WITH ABRAHAM: THE CLUB OF THE YOUNG PSYCHOANALYSTS OF TOMORROW
Karl Abraham was first trained by Bleuer and Jung at the Burghölzli psychiatric hospital in Zurich. His unconditional admiration for Freud created sparks that accentuated the tensions between Freud and Jung. He established a psychoanalytical society in Berlin in 1908. After the war, this society grew rapidly. It was joined by personalities such as Ernst Simmel and Max Eitingon. Simmel had developed, during World War I, interventions of psychoanalytic inspiration for traumatized soldiers. Eitingon was a Russian millionaire who had trained in Psychoanalysis with Freud in Vienna, Ferenczi in Budapest, and Jung in Zurich. Eitingon decided to sponsor a psychoanalytical clinic with the support of Simmel and the protective sympathy of Abraham. It was asked of each practitioner to contribute to the existence of the clinic, either by seeing a patient free for a year, or by giving 4 percent of the income from one’s practice.57 The treatments in the clinic were often free. Patients were asked to pay what they could if they were not poor. A section of this clinic, directed by Melanie Klein, treated children.58
The project worked so well that Abraham and his colleagues were overwhelmed by the demand for training others in analysis. “Many came to Berlin because the Berlin Poliklinik offered the most rigorous and structured education in psychoanalysis in the world” (Makari, 2008, p. 372). In 1923, the Berlin society and clinic decided to establish “a formal teaching institute with clear requirements” (ibid.). The structure of this first training institute has remained, from then on, the reference for other such training programs around the world. Each individual who wanted to become a psychoanalyst in Berlin was required to have taken courses in psychoanalysis, had personal psychoanalysis with a training analyst, and also individual supervision—something that had not been formally required.59 This structured formation quickly attracted candidates, not only from Germany (Erich Fromm, Karen Horney, Edith Jacobson) but also from Austria (Melanie Klein and Helen Deutsch), England (Edward and James Glover), Hungary (Michael Balint, Sandor Rado, and Franz Gabriel Alexander), Norway (Nic Waal and Olga Raknes60), and even the United States (Trygve Braatoy61). All these therapists are discussed today.
The important point here is that Freudians wanted to keep control of their training procedures and refused all advice (from Bleuler, for example) that encouraged them to include their discipline in an academic curriculum.62 This choice was one of the most explosive positions defended by Freud: creating a liberal profession, based on intellectual skills that cannot be acquired in a university.
When Karl Abraham died in 1925, Eitingon and Simmel ensured the continuation of the institute and the outpatient clinic by recruiting the help of some young colleagues, such as Franz Alexander, Sandor Rado, and Karen Horney.63 This movement in psychoanalysis, which then developed in the United States, neglected the First Topography (the conscious/unconscious opposition) and focused on the Second Topography.
OTTO FENICHEL ENCOUNTERS CLARE NATHANSON AND DISCOVERS THE GYMNASTICS OF GINDLER
In 1922, Otto Fenichel left Vienna for this Psychoanalytic Institute.64 He entered into analysis with Sandor Rado. From 1924 onward, he became one of the trainers of the institute.65
Otto Fenichel met a pupil of Elsa Gindler named Clare Nathanson.66 She used Gindler’s method with children who suffered from tuberculosis. According to Clare, a mutual friend introduced them to each other: “I thought, ‘Poor guy, he does not know it is the body!’ And he, of course, thought ‘She does not know it is the mind!’” (C. Fenichel, 1981, p. 6). They fell in love and married. Financially, Otto was doing well. He was able to find an apartment sufficiently large for Clare to be able to conduct Gindler gymnastics classes. They had one daughter, whom they named Hanna.67 During this period, Fenichel began to follow regularly Gindler’s course for men to try to rid himself of the terrible migraines that no physician had been able to cure. The Psychoanalytic Institute and Gindler’s school were only a 10-minute walk from each other.68 Gindler’s courses treated Fenichel’s migraines so well that he became even more interested in her method. He asked Clare to come to the Psychoanalytical Institute to present Gindler’s work. These presentations were followed with open discussions. In 1927, Otto gave a presentation at the institute on the way to integrate certain aspects of Gindler’s work into psychoanalytical thought.69
One of the impacts of these discussions was to further differentiate psyche, physiology, and body. In Vienna, from Freud to Reich, the psychoanalysts did not dare abandon the notion that the psyche is structured by the way it is grounded in the biological dynamics of the drives. This remains true in Berlin, but the discussions concerning Gindler’s work and psychoanalysis made it clearer for the two camps that the work on the body mobilizes different organismic resources than the work on the psyche. From the psyche’s point of view, the world of thoughts is not the same as the one we perceive starting from the body; reciprocally, the world of body sensations is not the same when we start from the psyche or from real movements. It is as if the psyche imposes a view of the body to function well; the body also imposes a view of the psyche to function well. The same goes for the drives. Different aspects of a drive are mobilized when they are coordinated with the psyche, behavior, or the body. This understanding has clear implications in a practice. According to Fenichel and Gindler, the two approaches can help a person through different means that have a different type of impact. However, each approach has limits and areas of fuzziness. Using both approaches in a single session could increase the area of confusion and diminish the impact each discipline can provide. This practical point of view became clear for Fenichel and for Gindler, who, it seems, never changed their minds thereafter.
On the theoretical plane, these considerations are more difficult to define because clearly the same psyche perceives everything that happens. We had to wait for the modular models to understand that the psyche is a subentity of the organism, and that, like the organism, the psyche is composed of millions of modules that can relate in thousands of ways, in function of the dynamics mobilized in the organism. It is therefore possible that it is not the same organization of the psyche’s modules that emerges at the occasion of an introspection that aims at thoughts or at the occasion of an introspection that aims at the coordination between movements and respiration. If this is true, then the mind does not function in exactly the same way during a gymnastic course or during a psychotherapy session.
“The ego is first and foremost a body-ego,” says Freud in The Ego and the Id. And he means by this that the distinction between ego and non-ego is first learned by the infant in the discovery of its body in such a way that in its world of ideas its own body begins to be set off from the rest of the environment. (Fenichel, 1938, The Drive to Amass Wealth, p. 97)
The epigraph indicates the intellectual environment Fenichel entered when he arrived in Berlin: a refined psychoanalysis about which he was passionate and a gymnast who obliged him to reflect on the contributions of body techniques and their impact on the psyche.
In an unpublished manuscript dating from 1926,70 Fenichel takes up the possibility of relating gymnastics and psychoanalysis. In 1927, he revealed his thoughts on the subject at the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute. He proposed a first synthesis of his thoughts on the body and psyche in an article published in 1928, titled “The Libidinization of the Organs.” Fenichel preferred this wording, used by Freud,71 to that of psychosomatic or body-mind. According to this article, the psychological defense system also regulates the way the libido is connected to the physiological regulations. Like almost all of the male physicians of that generation, he mentions neither the nonacademics nor the women who inspired and influenced him (Clare Fenichel and Gindler are not even mentioned in a footnote). He wrote the article as if his thought was a personal discovery, established on academic and psychoanalytic literature. Clearly, well before Reich’s arrival in Berlin, the future founders of psychosomatic psychoanalysis, like Rado and Alexander, began to think about the coordination of psychoanalysis, the body, and physiology. I emphasize this because at the end of his life, Reich claimed that all of his Berlin colleagues would have learned everything in this domain from him.
Already at this time, Fenichel intuitively distinguished the physiological dimension from the body of the physical therapists. This body, close to that of Gindler, is a coordination of muscle tone, breathing patterns, postural regulations, and the loops of the sensorimotor nervous system. In this sense, it is possible to say that Fenichel initiated a systematic reflection on the way the body dimension participates in the mechanisms that structure the regulatory system of the psyche. Fenichel (1945a, XIII) did not systematically distinguishing body and physiology, as I do in the System of Dimensions of the Organism. For him, body and physiology both make up the world of the organs. However, on the level of technical interventions, each domain is approached differently, and the body dimension is explicitly discussed.
CORPORALITY AND PSYCHODYNAMICS
When in their everyday life they have not focused attention on the condition of their musculature, the latter exists in a state of hypertonus, the degree of which varies with the muscle group and with the individual, and which may occasionally reach complete rigidity. Movements may involve not only unnecessary muscle groups (associated movements), but innervations which are unsuitable and of unnecessary intensity. When in a state of rest, we are sometimes inclined to let certain groups become hypotonic, that is, to have an excessively lowered tension, so that their readiness to function is impeded or weakened. ... In brief, we are dealing here with a defect of varying degree of their “economization and rationalization” of the motor apparatus which is described by Homburger as characteristic of adults. (Fenichel, 1928, “Organ libidinization,” I, p. 128f)72
For Fenichel, once we admit that the psychological resistances simultaneously influence mind and behavior, it becomes necessary to be able to describe how these resistances structure the gestures and postures mobilized by a behavioral style. The association that Ferenczi and Reich made between behavioral style and defense system had a clinical basis. This observation allowed for an explanation by supposing that this connection had a neurological basis, like Pavlov’s conditioned reflexes. But Fenichel was not satisfied with this hypothesis. A behavioral style is often visibly and manifestly influenced by permanent muscular rigidities and sometimes with comical ways of breathing. Specialists in body development show how many children grow up with different forms of scoliosis and lordosis and also respiratory patterns that all gymnastics teachers try to correct. All of this maintains itself “alone” (without permanent interventions by the nervous system) by muscular “dystonia” (hyper- and hypotonus) that have become permanent. Clearly, the neurological and physiological inhibition of movement is based on different mechanisms from those postulated by psychoanalysts for the psychological forms of inhibition.
Muscle tone is influenced not only by the nervous system but also by the quality of the irrigation of the tissues by blood. In becoming rigid, the muscle tissues acquire a particular metabolic quality that will afterward influence the vegetative dynamics and the functioning of the sensorimotor system. It then becomes possible to conceptualize that the defense system which structures the ego is in connection with the systems that structure and inhibit the behavioral repertoire. Fenichel notices that an organism’s dystonia cannot be entirely explained by physiologists who try to explain it according to the quality of nutrition, the quantity of athletic activity, and so on. There are clearly, behind all of this, bodily factors interacting with some mental dynamics that psychoanalysts could study. A polite person uses his muscles and joints differently than a quicktempered person. Fenichel believes that these traits are principally from the character, linked to an individual’s psychic structure. The character, such as defined by Abraham and Reich,73 would then be produced by the interaction between socially constructed bodily practices and the dynamics activated by an organism’s drives.
This is how Fenichel arrived at the proposition that analyzing the dynamics of the body and behavior allows a privileged access to the emotional dynamics that regulate thoughts and behavior. He takes up the thesis well known by all body practitioners—that chronic anxiety influences the muscle tone in a lasting way and lifestyle can generate chronic hyper- and hypotension that can last a lifetime.74 These tensions can also considerably reduce the respiratory repertoire. Thus, many people can only breathe by moving their belly, while others breathe mostly by moving the thorax. These limitations evidently influence the dynamics of the metabolism, which diminishes the energetic resources available to the organism as a whole: motor and behavioral activity, the intensity of experienced affect, and attention.
Fenichel describes patients who tense every muscle in their body to repress an affect that attempts to emerge when the psychological defenses that repress it are dissolving. An example is a patient who complains of feeling nothing but a great void within: her inside was so cramped, her chest and limbs so tense, that they “did not let anything come out” (Fenichel, 1928, p. 131).
THE BODY REGULATORS OF THE PSYCHE
Fenichel’s key idea was that the poorly developed bodies the gymnasts attempted to correct and reeducate were probably full of symptoms that psychoanalysts called neuroses.75 There may be social mechanisms that educate the masses to become easier to handle by creating chronic defense systems that simultaneously structure themselves in the mental and body dimensions of the organism. Around this foundation, the repression of the affects, the reduction of the physiological vitality, and the reduction of the mental imagination can help create behaviors that are compatible with the ideology in power. This key idea for the history of body psychotherapy was set forth by Fenichel as a possibility and then developed by Reich.76
Here is a summary of the arguments expressed by Fenichel in 1928.
PSYCHOANALYSIS AND GYMNASTICS
In the following example, Fenichel describes a psychoanalytic intervention with a patient engaged in gymnastics. The gymnastics teacher83 detects a chronic muscular tension, which is taken up by Fenichel as if it were a symptom produced by Freud’s psychological defense system. He shows that in this case, the psychoanalyst resolves a problem that the gymnastics teacher was not able to resolve. In his article, he does not mention that there were also some problems for which the psychoanalysts had no resolution but teachers of gymnastics could treat. We have already seen such an example: Fenichel’s headaches, which were successfully treated by Gindler, whereas Fenichel had already followed an analysis with one of Freud’s close associates (Federn).
Vignette of a patient who takes gymnastic courses and undergoes psychoanalysis. A patient reported that her gymnastics teacher continually called her attention to the intensity with which she kept her neck and throat musculature in a constant spastic tension. Attempts to loosen this tension only increased it. The analysis showed that as a child the patient saw a pigeon’s head being torn off and the headless pigeon still moving its wings a few feet away. This experience lent her castration complex a lasting form: she had an unconscious fear of being beheaded, and this fear also manifested itself in numerous other symptoms, modes of behavior, and directions of interest. (Fenichel, 1928, I, p. 133)
In this example, the gymnastics teacher detects a bodily manifestation of an unconscious fear with sufficient clarity that this manifestation could become a center around which it is possible to organize the associations of the patient. Because the psychoanalyst respects the observation of the gymnast, he succeeds in following an associative chain that leads her to the repressed traumatic memory. This is a first example of how a gymnast and a psychoanalyst are able to collaborate. In this case, the transferential relationship from the patient to her gymnastics teacher made it impossible to treat her via the body, for the teacher was perceived as the equivalent of the forces that had cut off the head of the pigeon, and the patient identified with the pigeon. Probably in the course of the analysis of this patient, Fenichel discovered that the relation between these forces and the pigeon had been taken as a metaphor of an older problem connected to the relationship between this patient and a member of her family.
Later, Charlotte Selver summarized how a “Gindlerian” therapist would tackle a neurotic trait. As you will see, it is complementary to what Fenichel did with his patient:
The sensory cortex in our brain no only registers sensations as they occur, but is also the storeroom of past impressions, which can be reactivated. The consequence is that a new sensation can be charged with a relation to something perhaps altogether remote. This is the basis of neurotic behavior, and so we sometimes see persons protect themselves from a friendly touch or we see a dog recoil from a friendly greeting. This is a reaction, not to the actual sensation, but to the memory of a cruel experience in the past. So in our work, the mere invitation to quiet is often not enough, and we must devise simple means of inviting sensations in a context of peace and security so that the actual perception may be recognized and distinguished from the irrelevant or neurotic component. (Selver and Brooks, 1980, p. 120)
Fenichel used actual body sensations to find repressed associations, whereas Selver and Gindler taught their pupils to differentiate actual sensations from old associations, and then focus on actual sensations.
After Fenichel’s departure, Reich conducted the seminar on sexuality for one year. After his studies, he launched a career as a psychoanalyst that was as brilliant as that of Fenichel.
To help you understand how Reich’s character was problematic, I propose an imaginary anecdote in which Reich would have become Freud’s housekeeper.
The Freuds look for a new housekeeper for their family apartment and for the apartment above in which Sigmund works. They accept, for a three-month trial period, a Mrs. Reich, who appears competent. The first month, the Freuds are impressed by the meticulous manner with which each corner, each angle, each object in the apartment are impeccably cleaned. They congratulate Mrs. Reich, who begins to grow more confident. While always appreciating the meticulous work of their housekeeper, the Freuds notice that she permits herself to move objects from their original place. Mrs. Reich explains to them that she has taken the liberty to propose certain rearrangements that she finds useful. Certain changes are effectively an improvement with regard to their usual habit of doing things; but the Freuds, without discussing it with her, return some objects to their original places when they do not appreciate Mrs. Reich’s propositions. At the start of the third month, the Freuds leave on vacation. They confide the apartment to Mrs. Reich and ask her to profit from their absence and do a thorough cleaning.
On their return, the Freuds try to imagine what new changes their housekeeper will have made; they chatter pleasantly about it. Upon opening the door, they discover, with fright, what happens when Mrs. Reich’s meticulous creativity is not contained. Everything is impeccably clean and in order, but everything has been changed place. Where there had been a kitchen, there is now a bathroom. The Freuds’ bedroom has become the children’s bedroom, and so on. Mrs. Reich feels proud for having totally rethought the apartment, and to have found a solution for all the inconsistencies she had detected. The Freuds dismiss her on the spot and refuse to pay her for the self-appointed work. They call movers to put everything back in their place but retain, in spite of everything, a few of Mrs. Reich’s propositions.
This anecdote illustrates many of Reich’s striking personality traits. First, there is the rapidity with which he engages himself in a mission and the intensity of his engagement. In his clinical writings, Reich (1927a) identified this type of behavior as impulsive compulsivity. The object of attachment is chosen impulsively, and then totally invested (or overinvested) with all the resources of his genius. Each time Reich focused on an issue, he took on a personal contractual obligation to organize everything his colleagues say and do and create a solution for every existing problem. He did not understand that his colleagues did not always appreciate his propositions. He explained to them what they ought to think and do, but he never negotiated or collaborated with them. He soon discerned resistance, which he always attributed to the defense of questionable personal interests; he was stunned to be finally rejected by the community for whom he had worked so much. The advantage of this strategy has been that of being able to move forward creatively, without being continually held back by the fears and the disagreements of one and all. The disadvantage was to have avoided the collegial discussions necessary for scientific endeavors. This strategy84 led Reich to a dead end on the personal and theoretical plane. His propositions also contained inconsistencies that almost everyone noticed at first glance; he was incapable of integrating these criticisms.
BIOLOGY AND PANTHEISM
There was a domain in medicine about which Reich was passionate and which had nothing to do with what he discovered with Fenichel: the biology that seeks to describe the functioning of the organism.85 Reich was passionate about a theory of evolution that wants to understand the secret forces that animate nature and its creatures. Cellular biology creates the energy of the individual organism: it is a manifestation of the profound forces that animate the universe at the core of the individual. This thinking allowed Reich to shape a deep and imperative need to feel what links him to the forces of nature. He always refused to associate this need to spiritual needs.86 The difficulty for Reich, who was then influenced by a form of diffused Platonism, was to differentiate this profound impression of being animated by nature from the notion of a spiritual quest. The difference between what can be experienced during a meditation session and the impression of being animated by a spirit is always a current topic. Several body psychotherapists influenced by Reich (David Boadella, Gerda Boyesen, Malcolm Brown, or John Pierrakos) took a step in the direction of thinking that Reich’s impression was in fact a spiritual quest that he did not dare name. Personally, I agree with Lowen and Reich that it is not necessary to believe in the existence of a spirit to experience the impression of wholeness that can be felt in meditation. It perhaps consists in a necessary illusion, but not an experiential proof that a spiritual force exists. For Reich and Lowen, the capacity to experience being in communion with the forces of nature is a human capacity that ought to be able to be described in a framework of scientific thought someday.
At the age of 20, Reich did not have the intellectual means to differentiate what he felt from that of a spiritual quest. Wanting to be more Freudian and more Marxist than Fenichel, he could not be anything other than a profound atheist. In the psychotherapeutic milieu, Jung integrates spirituality and the theories of vitalism. However, Jung was the great dissident. The positions that he advocated during the 1930s, close to those of the Nazi Party in some cases, rendered any appearance of sympathy for Jung even more difficult for a member of the leftist group of psychoanalysts. Reich could not express his need of an internal communion with the forces of nature without accepting becoming the worst student in Fenichel’s seminar. On the other hand, biology and the theory of the Freudian libido were, in this context, eminently respectable and legitimate passions.
To try to situate his intimate questions on this issue, Reich published (in 1922) an article in which he renounced his temptation to think like Jung or to adopt the vitalism of Forel and Bergson. This article indicates that he has read these authors with passion, even if he finishes by separating himself from them for the time being. At the same time, he defended the necessity to anchor the libido in the biological thinking of the period. When, in 1934, Reich abandoned psychoanalysis and Marxism, the forces he had built within himself to distinguish his need to unite science and pantheism diminished. Slowly but surely, he began to want to demonstrate that the forces of nature animate each one of us. He then found a thought, near to that of Spinoza, attributing to nature the forces that others associate with a spiritual force, all while remaining resolutely an atheist.
To understand the relationship that Reich establishes with the forces of nature during his studies, it is useful to recall the dominant view in medicine and biology at the time. I summarize a few notions (described in greater detail in the sections devoted to the biologists) to show which aspects of this thinking influenced the young Reich.
THE NOTION OF ORGANISM AMONG THE VIENNESE BIOLOGISTS
During evolution, approach and withdrawal emerged from the general capacity to move. The different emotions then differentiated out from approach and withdrawal. Bodily concepts and then, progressively, language evolved from this movement base (Daniel Stern, 2010, Forms of Vitality, 1.2, p. 20)
It is useful to recall that genetics was founded in the Austro-Hungarian Empire by Johann Gregor Mendel (1822-1884). He was a Catholic monk. Like Darwin, who was an Anglican priest, Mendel became a genius of an amateur biologist. He conducted research on the reproduction of small peas, which led him to think that there existed, in every organism, genes capable of mutation that permitted the transmission of the basic characteristics of an organism from one generation to another. He published a first series of the laws of genetics in 1865 in Vienna, during the period when the English were discovering the thought of Darwin and Wallace. As I have already indicated, only after World War I did biologists began to create a synthesis of the two movements, which became the modern Darwinism. If the English integrated genetics with Darwinism, the Austrians of the time integrated Darwinism to the research inspired by Mendel. There was, therefore, in the Vienna of the day, an important and lively movement in biological research that also had a great influence in the German universities. These discussions fascinated the students of the time, notably Reich.
Darwin’s organism (1871) is more a pile of mechanisms than a coherent whole.87 The biologists of the 1920s preferred to represent the organism as a system that functions as a totality. One way to understand the function of the genes was to suppose that the information they transmit gives a meaning, direction, and coherence to biological evolution, even if their combination follows the laws of chance and necessity. Thus, the cells of the eyes provide for the sensation of seeing red due to the same electromagnetic waves in all of the animal species sensitive to color. This constant would be due to the fact that the same genes regulate the structure of the rods and cones of the retina. While reinforcing a certain coherence of the building that is an organism, the genes also create a kind of flexibility that permits the system to adapt as much as possible to its natural and social environment. Reich (1940, I, p. 77) remained faithful to this global view of the organism.
During his studies, Reich (1940, I, pp. 1–7) was passionately interested in different ways to exploit the notion of organism. With Werden des Organismen (The Becoming of Organisms) by Oscar Hertwig, Reich learned to situate diverse physiological systems and their coordination. Through his writings, Reich discovered a form of biological functionalism that supposes that all that survives has a function. The cell was supposed to have a membrane to better protect itself against external stimuli. The male animals were bigger and stronger than the females, or more beautifully colored, to be more attractive to the females, or they had horns to beat off their rivals. This kind of simplistic finalism, which he associated to certain forms of spirituality like Buddhism and the Anthroposophy of Rudolph Reiner, irritated Reich.88 In reading Philosophie des Organischen (Philosophy of the Organic) by Driesch, Reich became aware of the forces that animate the living world. He pursued this theme with enthusiasm for the theory of vitalism of French philosopher Henri Bergson on the relation between consciousness and the evolution of matter (Matter and Memory, 1896; Time and Free Will: Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, 1889; and Creative Evolution, 1907).
Another famous Viennese student of this period, Konrad Zacharias Lorenz (1903-1989), was inspired by this approach to understand the motivations of living organisms. He received the Nobel Prize in Medicine with Nikolaas Tinbergen and Karl von Frisch in 1973. All three were rewarded for having contributed to the founding of ethology. The goal of this science is the study of the innate behaviors of the species and the way those behaviors permitted the evolution of communication strategies. This research had begun with the study of animal behavior (communication among bees, graylag geese, and stickleback fish). It consisted of studying the innate behaviors of many species to then be able to discover the laws of the evolution of behaviors, starting with that of unicellular animals and ending up with humans.89 Lorenz was born in Vienna, but he studied medicine in New York and Konigsberg (Germany). Once again, politics made it impossible for Reich and Lorenz to appreciate each other’s discoveries.90 It is possible that Lorenz was not a convinced Nazi, but his biological views were compatible with certain Nazi theses.91
Nevertheless, Reich and Lorenz had common views on certain aspects of evolution theory. For example, they both thought that the amoeba already contained basic sensorimotor mechanisms that were developed by all of the species.92 This mechanism is a perfectly functional coordination of core metabolic requirements, the physiological dynamics of an organism, and the regulation of behavior in function of external variables. Reich and Lorenz thought that the social forces of their time destroyed this deep, natural coordination, because they wanted to use the resources of nature for economic ends. For both of them, this was an unacceptable corruption of natural dynamics. Reich’s Spinozian idealism could never admit that biological activity would be anything but good, coherent, and constructive. For Lorenz, natural selection was a cruel and merciless competition between organisms, but some routes were more humane than others.
BECOMING A SEXOLOGIST
After his studies, Reich established himself as a psychoanalytically oriented sexologist and psychiatrist. Being particularly attracted by the sexual dimension of psychoanalysis, he began by wanting to establish some order in the theory of the libido.93 The libido theory was also the only domain of psychoanalysis that had a deep resonance with his interests for the impact of biological dynamics on the psyche.
The Sexual Behavior of People. Reich had a private practice at the time. With Annie, he participated in the foundation of a clinic called the Psychoanalytic Dispensary. This dispensary, directed by the psychoanalyst Hitschmann, was created in the image of the Berlin Psychoanalytic Clinic.94 Most patients who frequented this dispensary were in need of psychological support, as Freud’s theory foresaw. They often did not have what it takes (not enough time, not enough money, or not the necessary intellectual curiosity) for psychoanalytical treatment.95 Gradually, Reich became the chief of this dispensary. Patients often came to resolve problems tied to sexuality (sexual problems, methods of contraception, etc.). These were the patients who made it possible for Reich to discover the great variety of sexual behaviors among the Viennese, and this was in a time when he was having his first sexual experiences. He observed that most of the individuals he saw had a sexual behavior incompatible with the morality they were attempting to follow. He was no exception. Reich had difficulty reconciling his visits to prostitutes with what he called “the (idealizing) platonic side of my sexuality” (Reich, 1937, p. 61).
With his psychoanalytic patients, he explored, in great detail, how intimate thoughts and sexual behavior are related. For example, he published an article on the way people masturbate and on their fantasies during masturbation. He is astonished to discover the immense variety of practices. His male patients do not necessarily have an erection when they masturbate. Even those who have a regular heterosexual relationship have difficulty representing, in their dreams, a situation in which they are having vaginal intercourse with their fantasized partner.96 In another study on coitus and the sexes, Reich (1922b) (a) noticed that the sexual arousal of men often follows a profile a bit different than that of women, and (b) discerned more problems of impotence in men than frigidity in women.97
The Curve of an Orgasm.
The orgastic excitation takes hold of the whole body and results in lively contractions of the whole body musculature. Self-observations of healthy individuals of both sexes, as well as the analysis of certain disturbances of orgasm, show that we call the release of tension and experience as a motor discharge (descending portion of the orgasm curve) is predominantly the result of a flowing back of the excitation from the genital to the body. This flowing back is experienced as a sudden decrease of the tension. (Reich, 1940, The Function of the Orgasm, IV.3, p.62)
According to Freud, neurosis is nourished by the mobilized sexual energy which the organism fails to express and which is not reabsorbed. Reich attempted to further explain this formula. He asked himself how he might describe what the sexual arousal mobilizes in the organism and how this arousal can express itself in a sufficiently satisfying manner so that there would not be a build-up of a neurosis. The term orgasm therefore designates a sexual behavior that does not leave any sexual stasis.98 For Reich, genital sexuality always includes a capacity to have an orgasm. He distinguished between an organic impotence (frigidity or erectile dysfunction) from an orgastic impotence (the impossibility of achieving a vegetative and affective satisfaction). He ends up with the formula of the orgasm which is composed of three main phases:99
During his Viennese period, it is only when he describes sexual behavior that Reich talks of the body. This body is mostly the visible surface of physiological arousal. It is not yet a distinct dimension of the organism. The interruption of the last two phases of the orgastic reaction can bring about a variety of disagreeable psychophysiological events: palpitations, cardiac irregularities, sweating, back pain, headaches, acute anxiety attacks, general irritability, problems with attention, and so on.103 There is a circular relation between the intensification and the evanescence.
Reich represents the intensity of the sexual charge by a curve that was used by sexologists at the beginning of the twentieth century (see Figure 16.1). He reconstructed with his patients the profile of the curve of a real sexual encounter. The entirety of the curve designates a propension that becomes pleasant in its realization. For Reich, there is no pleasure “that exists here and seeks pleasure there”; but there is a pleasure brought about by the sensorimotor act and that animates this act (Reich, 1940, III.I, p. 24).
FIGURE 16.1. The curve of the orgasm. F: foreplay, P: penetration, I: Voluntary increase of excitation, II: phase of involuntary increase of excitation. III: Sudden ascent to the acme. A: acme. IV: orgasm. The shaded part represents the phase of involuntary body contractions. V: steep “drop” of excitation. R: relaxation (from 5 to 20 minutes). Source: Reich (1940, p. 60).
For Alexander Lowen,106 the description of the orgasm proposed by Reich is relevant but overevaluated in its importance:
Having defined the contours of a particular sexual act in a sketch, it becomes easier to analyze the connection between sexual functioning and certain aspects of the theory of the libido. Reich takes up the theme of the intensity of the thoughts in the same way Hume and Freud do, but he links it more explicitly to the vegetative mobilization of the propension that influence the thoughts. He observes that the sexual fantasies are intense before the climax and tend to become milder with the evanescence. He also notices that when the thoughts linked to the genital sexual act are maintained in the unconscious, the vegetative energy is then diverted toward secondary drives, or even in directions still further away from sexuality. In certain cases, the diversion is so important that problems in the sexual mechanics are observable, such as impotence or frigidity. In this, we find once again the idea that a human propension needs to mobilize a certain type of coordination between psychological and physiological systems to become actualized.107
As we can see, Reich integrates Freud’s drive theory but proposes a simplified analysis of the psychological dynamics. The unconscious contains everything that is repressed (representations and drives), and he already supposes that there is just one energy in the organism: a kind of vegetative libido that can be influenced by behavior and thoughts. The psychological dimension is reduced to mental representations. Even in his psychoanalytic period, the analytical therapy is conceived as a therapy of the drives more than as psychotherapy. The only psychological dimension that seems to interest Reich is the ideology or morality adopted by a person. If someone adopts a morality that accepts that affects express themselves by following their own proper procedures, the psyche is healthy; if someone adopts a morality that does not support the regulation of the drives, such an individual would necessarily become ill. The capacity to feel body sensations and remember what happened in one’s childhood is also sought by Reich’s work at that time.
The Reichian orgasm is a form of reaction that requires participation from all the dimensions of the organism. When Reich studies the components of an orgastic reactions and their coordination, he inevitably ends up with a systemic view of the individual. In this sense Reich always considered that his formula of the orgasm had been his principal source of inspiration. He consequently detailed this global organismic view in his activity as a psychotherapist. The psychoanalysts of the day sometimes had a systemic intuition (especially Ferenczi), but it remained implicit. The work of systemization of the psychoanalytic techniques was the direction Reich took to put some order in the plethora of local models which the psychoanalysts of the time had to take into account in their practices.
THE “VIENNA SEMINAR FOR PSYCHOANALYTIC THERAPY” SERVES AS THE BASIS FOR THE ELABORATION OF CHARACTER ANALYSIS
In 1923, Eduard Hitschmann created a training seminar for the psychoanalytic technique. Having become a training analyst, Reich was again Hitschmann’s assistant.108 Freud asked Reich to direct this seminar starting in 1924. He remained in this position until 1930. In the letters addressed to Reich, Freud expressed admiration for his enthusiasm and creativity, while asking him not to transform the seminar into a platform for his particular points of view.109 In his correspondence with others, Freud makes sarcastic remarks about the orgasm theory that seem exaggeratedly absolute, but he defended Reich against diverse attacks.
Character, Defense System, and Partial Drives. To understand what follows, recall certain points that were previously discussed:
This refinement in the analysis of the defense system led Reich to propose a particularly interesting definition of a person’s character. Every link in the defense system is composed of the gathering of the following forces:
Content and Manner. Reich asked the participants of the technical seminar to present cases in which they were experiencing difficulties. The members then detailed the technical aspect of the process engaged in by the therapist. Reich focused the discussion around one of Freud’s and Ferenczi’s predominant preoccupations at that time:112 the necessity to relive a repressed situation conjointly on the cognitive and affective plane so that healing might occur.113 Reich came to the conclusion that no one is able to explain which one of all the techniques makes it possible to achieve this goal.114 This clinical research soon allowed Reich to propose a series of explicit technical recommendations, such as the following:
The content on which Reich focused is mostly verbal, whereas the manner is mostly nonverbal. This distinction is close to what Sabina Spielrein suggested. He concentrated on the tone of voice, the posture, and the gestures that accompany a memory to evaluate the way a patient presents his verbal associations. A voice that is too flat, a chin that tends downward toward the throat can, for example, indicate a holding back of affects. Returning to the previous example, Reich noticed that his patient continuously held back his chin. This bodily trait is a kind of tic that everyone can see. It is found at the visible surface of the behavioral dynamics of the patient. Reich then asked his patient to explore what goes on within him if he moves his chin forward. He then discovered that the muscular tension that maintains the chin so close to the Adam’s apple is part of the link that the patient has built to inhibit the desire to bite his little sister’s clothing.
In this example, we see that Reich was inspired by Ferenczi’s active method. The psychoanalysts, trained in this circle of influence inspired by Ferenczi, ask their patients to associate on the way they present their thoughts. Reich confirmed Ferenczi’s observations when he noticed that by focusing on a patient’s specific behavioral trait, sometimes the patient strongly experienced repressed emotions, which suddenly erupt into consciousness and the expressive motor system. This emotion captures the organism; even a habitually polite patient can suddenly begin to scream, cry, tremble with fear, or bite a piece of fabric.
Reich eventually proposed a systematic way to approach these resistances (Reich, 1940, V.3, p. 90), which he calls Character analysis. It consists in beginning with the resistances close to consciousness, which would also be close to the surface,115 and concluding with the deepest ones. In Character analysis, the therapist first analyzes a trait that is particularly easy to approach in the context of the therapeutic relationship. It is often the trait (mental, behavioral, affective, bodily, or physiological) that is most obvious, but not always. It can happen that the therapist discovers two layers in a dream: an aggressive layer and a homosexual one. Reich proposed that in this case, the therapist concentrate on the layer that is more easily accessible to the patient and analyze the second layer later. For example, he can analyze the aggressive dimension of a dream but not the unconscious homosexual desire that generates this aggression. If the patient is knowingly homosexual, it is possible the therapist would begin by analyzing the homosexual dimension of the dream. Everything depends on what the patient is capable of integrating at that moment on the plane of representations and of affects.
This aspect of Character analysis is also part of the strategies explored by Fenichel (1927). In this article, Fenichel gives an example of the way in which the Freudian therapists approached dreams at that time. In his analysis, he uses the model of the layers without referring to Reich, as if this model was also his own. He discovers in his patient an anxious urge to suck his father’s penis, which covers up the need—and perhaps the memory—of sucking his mother’s breast.
THE ORGANIZATION OF THE DEFENSES STRUCTURES THE LIBIDO AND THE WAY THE LIBIDO STRUCTURES THE PSYCHE
The Organization of the Characterological Layers. This way to approach the defense system led Reich to propose a model of the character structure that would be the organization of the partial drives and the way they are put together by the defense system of an organism. This definition has several implications:
Reich eventually conceptualized the character as a series of zones with the structure of an onion. Each layer contains many links of the defense system, such as the ones just described. Let us take up this model in greater detail.116
Reich gives the following example. A child loves his mother, toward whom he has genital fantasies. There is then a split in the energy contained in the love drive that divides into four functions:
In this model, we have on one hand a splitting of different parts of the Oedipus complex (love of the mother and conflict with the father), and on the other hand, a dispersion of the energy (disinvestment) that maintains the representation of a drive in the unconscious. This is, of course, a metaphorical model of what really happens, as it is impossible to analyze with precision how these processes function. Furthermore, as Gurdjieff’s model shows very well,118 it is possible that a defense also mobilizes energy coming from sources other than the energy of the repressed drive. The summary I propose is thus a pedagogical simplification of a more fluid and more complex system. That said, whatever might be the real operation put in place, there will be a reduction in the quantity of energy available to the organism and, consequently, a loss of vitality.
The previous example summarizes what has been analyzed in a case having a character Reich119 identified as “passive-feminine”; a case that can be broken down as follows:
Genital drive: The object-related genital120 love toward the mother.
The establishment of this seven-layered system implies such an expenditure of energy that the patient is now sexually impotent.
Reich’s proposition is that this structuring of the drives was produced in the order just given and that the analysis, as much as possible, ought to proceed in the reverse order. With some experience, the analyst who encounters a person having a passive-feminine character will assume that his extreme politeness masks an urge to kill. But if the therapist begins to talk about murderous drives from the start of the analysis, the patient will either reinforce his defense system or experience an anxiety attack, which he will not be able to integrate. The other possibility is that, frightened, the patient stops the therapy and renounces the project of understanding himself better. Reich used such examples to demonstrate that it will never be useful to analyze a deep layer early on in therapy. In body psychotherapy, there are no absolute rules. Each therapist knows of a few cases when an analysis of the deeper layers at the start of therapy was useful. But these cases are rare. By default, the rules that Reich proposes in Character analysis are recommendations that are often best to follow.
Remember that a thought is maintained in the unconscious because if it rose to consciousness it could to generate a general dysfunction of conscious dynamics. This implies that above all we must carry out work that permits consciousness to acquire the capacity to integrate the repressed drives. Character analysis is one way to make this integration possible. Reich begins by asking the patient to talk about his symptom (sexual impotence) and associate his need to be polite (the most manifest defense for the therapist and the patient). Gradually, the patient speaks of his past awkwardness and the mockery he suffered due to his clumsy way of criticizing the various forms of authority that surrounded him (the school, the church, morality, etc.). These associations explain next to nothing. There is a danger to believe that to bring the cause of the seventh layer to the light of day is enough to explain the patient’s neurosis. Nonetheless, the analysis of this first layer will allow the patient to have a bit more energy. He gives himself the right to be critical; he learns to better experience and appreciate who he is. For most psychoanalysts, this result only brings transitory benefits if it is not consolidated by the analysis of the other layers. However, many psychotherapists are content with a positive result of this type. The idea is that the patient will be able to follow a more profound treatment once he has appreciated the momentary benefits of this first layer. The advantage of this approach is that the therapist abandons the belief that it is possible and desirable to understand all the details of a patient’s mental and affective life. The patient can be content to analyze only those layers that prevent him from having a relatively pleasant life. This result is often preferable to an interminable analysis. I have had many patients who came to see me several times in their lives. What had hitherto been analyzed had been integrated into the life of the patient, and he was then ready to explore a new aspect of his personality: one that is particularly relevant to his life at the time of seeking me out.
Character analysis began with the analysis of individual processes. It was used to discover what had been put in place in the course of an individual’s development. It then became possible to detect similar character traits that often require similar forms of intervention. The treatment can then be carried out more quickly, because the therapist will no longer be obliged to feel his way along when he encounters a certain type of character structure.
Each layer of a character constitutes a sort of module that forms “a character trait.” The same character trait can be found in several character structures but may fulfill, in each case, a different set of functions.121 We again find ourselves in a rough sketch of a systemic model where an element potentiates itself differently in function of the construction that contains it. The characters that Reich identifies are the following: compulsive, impulsive, hysteric, masochistic, obsessive, passive-feminine, phallic-narcissistic, rigid, and schizoid. This list is not presented as exhaustive. It represents Reich’s clientele. Terms like oral, anal, genital, are henceforth a characteristic of certain character traits.
Character and Psychoanalysis. The attempt to define global configurations of behavior and their underlying dynamics was a clinical research that gradually imposed itself on many analysts when the clients became more numerous and consequently more varied. When the psychoanalysts met with each other, they had a sufficient number of cases to attempt to group some of them together and develop strategies in function of these groupings. The first proposition was put forth by Freud around the sexual stages (oral, anal, phallic, and genital). Abraham (1925) had already proposed another characterological system based on different forms of organization of secondary drives.
In the clinics of Berlin and Vienna, Franz Alexander (1923) and Wilhelm Reich (1927a) used the notion of character to describe the personality of the young people at odds with the norms and the laws, antisocial, sometimes violent against others as well as against themselves. Reich categorized these patients as impulsive characters.122 This work does not concern this textbook; it is noteworthy to the extent that it will serve as a basis (probably through the intermediary of Annie Reich) for Otto Friedmann Kernberg’s (1984) notion of “borderline personality organization.” Alexander and Reich draw inspiration from the works of Viennese pedagogue and social worker August Aichhorn (1925) who worked with this type of youth. Aichhorn recommended for them an active method of psychotherapy particularly adapted to their problems: one that could contain them, correspond to them, and protect them. The character analysis of “impulsive characters” inspired Reich to pursue methods much more active than Ferenczi had imagined.
Reich left for Berlin just before being dismissed from his positions as director of the seminar and the polyclinic. His Viennese colleagues appreciated his creativity, inventiveness, and intelligence, but they suffered from his intransigent authoritarianism and the fact that he used his institutional power to promote his own theories. Also, they were not pleased to have communist jargon thrown at them at any given moment. They were hoping for a more pedagogical attitude, like that of the Berlin Institute, which allowed each one to find a “personal style” while remaining within the psychoanalytic frame of thinking. In Vienna, only Reich had the right to a personal style. Freud would have said of Reich that “the one who wants unceasingly to be placed at the front of the scene shows that he wants to be right at whatever price.”123
In Berlin, the sponsor of the institute, Max Eitingon, had lost a large portion of his fortune in the financial crash of 1929. Some members of the board of directors were afraid of the rising power of anti-Semitism that was manifest in all of Europe and especially in the German-speaking countries. For these reasons, many eminent members of the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute accepted positions outside of Europe. This was the case for Alexander, who obtained a position in Chicago in 1930. This state of anxiety and concern dominating the psychoanalytic community in Berlin explains in part why the community was so happy to be able to count Annie and Wilhelm among them as new members. They brought with them the most recent discussions that animated Freud’s entourage. Reich was known for his work in sexology, his chairing of the seminar on psychoanalytic technique, and his propositions concerning character analysis. The Reichs joined Fenichel’s technical seminar, which had become a meeting place for the psychoanalysts of the left. The practice they opened in Berlin was quickly filled.
Given the numerous negative commentaries on his character, Reich began psychoanalysis with Sandor Rado, who had been Fenichel’s analyst. This process was interrupted when Rado immigrated to New York in 1931. This was Reich’s only attempt to undergo a serious psychoanalysis. Years later, Rado would have told Annie Reich that Wilhelm suffered from an “insidious psychotic process.” A rumor circulated, affirming that Rado would have had diagnosed schizophrenia in Reich.124 This rumor hurt Reich immensely. He thought it had been spread by Fenichel. This rumor probably influenced Fenichel when he questioned himself concerning the mental stability of his friend. If the expression “insidious psychotic process” attributed to Rado is a plausible diagnosis, the one of schizophrenia is so inappropriate that it illustrates two aspects of the mores of psychotherapists, which persists to this day, in all of the schools:
We will see shortly how this rumor influenced the relationship between Fenichel and Reich. I do not know what Rado really said about Reich. It is ethically recommended to ignore all manner of diagnosis that is not founded on an appropriate assessment. Even in this case, it is common to notice that the same individual receives different diagnoses in the course of his life. If we imagine the hope with which Reich finally entered psychoanalysis and the sadness he must have felt to be abandoned by Rado, we can only imagine the wound and rancor that was created in him when he heard that his analyst would have circulated such a rumor.
Until the end of his life Otto Fenichel would discuss Reich’s psychoanalytical contribution to psychotherapy, but would not say a word on orgone and other exotic considerations.125 This silence is expressive, coming from someone who was probably informed by mutual friends on Reich’s explorations. It certainly expresses embarrassment, maybe the thought that Reich was mad, but also the will not to attack, publically at least, someone he had loved and admired.
According to Clare Fenichel (1981), Otto presented Reich to everyone as his best friend. On Sundays, the Fenichels regularly walked with the Reichs in the forests near Berlin. Annie and Eva Reich studied Gindler’s method by taking courses with Clare Fenichel.
Years later, in 1984, Judyth O. Weaver, trained in Reichian orgonomy, became friends with Eva Reich.126 Judyth once told Eva that she had also been trained by Charlotte Selver, one of Gindler’s students. Eva replied that her father Reich would have been happy to know that some of his students had followed a Gindlerian training. Eva was convinced that the methods her father established in Oslo and then in the United States were deeply influenced by Gindler. She did not think her father would have set about to work on the body and respiration if his friends had not explained to him how Gindler worked. She also described the gymnastics courses given by Clare Fenichel to children. “Eva Reich recalls liking the school very much because they got to crawl under, around, and over all sorts of things, and she had a very good time. She said that she loved the ways she was encouraged to use her body and be active and creative” (Geuter et al., 2010).
Wilhelm Reich probably never attended one of Elsa Gindler’s or Clare Fenichel’s courses. He might have come one or two times, but that is not certain. He had other fish to fry, but he listened a lot and learned quickly. What others told him awakened his curiosity. He was forever asking Annie and Eva what went on in their classes. I assume that he also discussed the Gindler approach with the Fenichels.
As a child, Reich had probably suffered from certain secrets concerning his mother’s love life.127 From then on, he wanted everything to be public. He was incapable of respecting the need to have private intimacy, be it for himself or for others. This complex was associated to a silent rage that was palpable by everyone: a silent fury against all those who requested some form of exclusive attachment from him and against all those who refused to attach themselves to him exclusively. This rage was so strong that one of the more famous of Reich’s biographers, Myron Sharaf (1983), made it the title of the biography: Fury on Earth.
Psychoanalysts tend to differentiate the inside from the outside, what happens in a practice from family and social life. Typically, Annie Reich was not necessarily rigid on such matters, but she appreciated such a differentiation. She could not sympathize with Reich’s compulsion to publicly mix therapy, militancy, and his private life.128
Fenichel had introduced Annie to Wilhelm in Vienna. He now met his next great love while associating with the friends of the Fenichels: Elsa Lindenberg.129 Lindenberg was one of four communist star dancers in the Berlin State Opera. She had probably taken a few lessons with Gindler,130 but she was mostly influenced by lessons taken with choreographer Rudolf Laban, who is still well known today.131 Laban is often quoted in the literature concerning nonverbal communication as one of the founders of the systems of the modern coding of gestures.132 He had developed a system that made it possible to record choreography and the dynamics of movements in a detailed way. He is also often mentioned in the literature dedicated to dance therapy.133 He created his school at Monte Verità near Ascona at the beginning of World War I. In 1930 he was asked to direct dancers at the Berlin State Opera.134
Wilhelm Reich left Annie in a particularly visible and public manner by making his relationship with Elsa Lindenberg an example for all those who fought for sexual revolution and against marriage. Without really noticing it, Reich brought his psychoanalytic adventure to an end when, intoxicated by the whirlwind that animated life in Berlin at the time, he left his wife. She kept the surname Reich for the rest of her life. It appears that she would have wanted to stay with Wilhelm, even if their life as a couple was complicated. In 1932, she wrote to Elsa Lindenberg that the new couple’s happiness was built on her tears. Annie preferred to return to Vienna, where she divorced Reich.135 Reich did not abandon his role as a father. He joined Annie to have “family” vacations.136
Otto Fenichel and Annie created lasting friendly and professional ties. This probably explains Wilhelm Reich’s growing hostility toward Fenichel. Fenichel wanted to remain on friendly terms with Annie and Elsa. I am convinced that this lasting friendship was something that Reich never accepted. He felt excluded from the “group” of which he was a part before betraying her so openly. It is bizarre that this possible cause of the conflict between the two friends is not mentioned in the biographies of either Reich or Fenichel.
In the 1933 version of Character Analysis, Reich insists on the fact that he uses the analysis of behavior to bring forth the mental defense system of a patient.137 Only in passing does he relate the character armor to muscular tension: “All the muscles of the body, but especially those of the pelvic floor and pelvis, the muscles of the shoulders and those of the face (cf. the “hard,” almost mask-like physiognomy of compulsive characters), are in a state of hypertonia” (Reich, 1949a, IV.2, p. 214). Reich speaks here of hypertonic muscles and not hypotonic muscles, as Fenichel does. We will see that the Oslo School of Body Psychotherapy speaks as much about the hypotonic as the hypertonic muscles, as Fenichel did. Generally, the Reichians know how to work with the hypertonic muscles and have no techniques to approach the hypotonic muscles.
Reich quickly developed this line of thought by focusing on the vegetative system, which would be the link between Fenichel’s motor activity and Freud’s psyche. He progressed very fast in this direction. At the 1934 Psychoanalytic Congress in Lucerne, he discussed his thoughts on the matter in a presentation titled “Psychic Contact and Vegetative Currents.” He already spoke of awareness of body and vegetative sensations, such as tingling and warmth, as a way to get in touch with one’s libido. This change of direction shows how the seeds sowed by the Fenichels and Elsa Lindenberg138 regarding the work of Gindler and Laban began to grow in the fertile soil of Reich’s imagination and intelligence. It took him less than a year to accommodate his theory and his practice to these new perspectives, which he then developed in Oslo.139 Given that his point of view was sharpened by his increased familiarity with the techniques of dance and gymnastics, more and more, Reich left the psychoanalytic reserve behind to directly approach the behavioral attitudes and bodily tensions of his patients. He imitated them and encouraged them to modify their habitual behaviors. He observed their breathing and made comments on whether it was too ventral or thoracic; he invited them to explore different ways of breathing. He began to analyze the way the segments of the body are coordinated with each other and breathing. He palpated the muscles. He explored what is going on when he massages them while asking the patient to explore the movement or the expression blocked by a chronic muscular tension. He asked some patients to explore the feelings associated with a particular kind of chronic restriction in their breathing. Briefly, instead of respecting the limits that psychoanalysts and Gindleriens set for themselves, Reich explored possibilities that were considered dangerous for the patient and for the therapist. He thus began to perceive that the muscular dimension of the defense system that regulated the drives has an organization all its own. It is sometimes structured like a “corset” or “armor.”140 These technical explorations far exceeded what psychoanalysts like Ferenczi and Fenichel dared undertake. He now utilized more explicitly a brand of introspection close to that used by Gindler. He asked his patients to feel their body from the inside, insisting mostly on the sensation and the affects that are related to the parts of the body being explored. This Reich is the father of body psychotherapy.
Up to this point, Fenichel and Reich assumed that the chronic tensions organized themselves around specific behaviors (the urge to cry, hit, be caressed, etc.). By consulting the body specialists, Reich became aware that a local muscular tension inserts itself into the muscular chains that coordinate the muscles from head to foot. He confirmed Fenichel’s hypothesis that each dimension has its own particular functioning by discovering that the body has a particular coherence, linked to the postural organization within the gravity field. This implies that a chronic local muscular tension influences the whole of the functioning of the muscular chains from head to foot. The inhibition of the urge to strike out with one’s fist is rapidly associated to an inhibition of the breath, voice, gaze, and support taken by the feet to reinforce the back, and so on. This is how what Reich called the character armor gradually formed itself. The notion of armor proposed by Reich is nothing more than the result of an entire series of tensions—each one associated to a partial drive. It gradually becomes a kind of pathological organization of the musculature and of the equilibrium of somatic dynamics:
The armor is first formed through its participation in the repression of specific affects and their expression. However, gradually, these tensions also influence other muscles, and cause general compensating postural disturbances. It thus creates a structure of tensions that follow bodily causal chains, are built parallel to the mental defenses, and then influence the way the mind inhabits the body and what surrounds it.
Because of these formulations and his way of working, Reich became known as the one who dared to introduce bodywork into the psychoanalytic frame. Fenichel approached the subject only on the plane of psychoanalytic theory. Reich wanted his psychoanalyst colleagues to do like him and intervene on the body during sessions of psychoanalysis or of psychoanalytic psychotherapy. He asked them to approach the mind in its interaction with somatic dynamics. The mind passes necessarily through the body to encounter others. The body is therefore part of the transferential relationship.141
The influence of the character structure of the masses determines the state form, no matter whether it expresses itself by passivity or by activity. . . . Only this mass structure is capable of implanting in itself the true democratic tendencies of a state administration, by taking over, piece by piece, the administration “above it.” (Reich, 1946, Mass Psychology of Fascism, IX.8, p. 242f)142
A SEXUAL REVOLUTION FOR THE MASSES AND FOR FAMILY PLANNING
Given that neurosis is a widespread and socially constructed illness, Reich proposed an epidemiological approach to sexual problems. A recent example of this medical approach is the strategy put in place, these past 20 or so years, to understand and to treat AIDS. Institutions like the World Health Organization have supported actions that gather the analyses of the cells of an organism, analyses of sexual behaviors, the high stakes of industry (research for a vaccine and condom manufacturing), the recruiting of political support, educators, and advertising capable of teaching people about the necessity of wearing a condom when having sex, and so on. In acting on such a heterogeneous set of institutions, the prevalence of AIDS was reduced. With far fewer means, Reich tried to mobilize a similar strategy to undertake a preventive action against neurosis by helping people ameliorate their way of approaching sexuality.
What was new was the recommendation of an epidemiological approach to modify the way that people behaved sexually; for many, their behavior conformed to current usage. The difficulty of this position was to convince physicians and authorities that their habitual sexual behavior was often neurotic. An epidemiological endeavor inevitably necessitates relations with political institutions. Reich found the support he needed for this in the Communist Party. He was thus able to mobilize an important institutional support but also the individual militancy of the communists to discuss intimate behavior in public debates. This type of militancy had already been proposed by the feminist movements of the nineteenth century and is taken up today by ecologists to save the planet from the effects of overpopulation and pollution.
That Austrian Communist Party of 1928 was a small organization in which Reich intervened, as always, wanting to give it some structure. He made financial contributions for the establishment of a Socialist Society of Sexual Information and Research. He expanded this activity when he moved to Berlin in 1930, where he became part of the executive committee of the German Communist Party which was in direct competition with the National Socialist Party (Nazi), directed by Adolf Hitler. The society for sexual education founded by Reich in the Communist Party was called the Association for a Proletarian Sexual Policy. This association proposed encounters between individuals who desire to share their sexual experiences, as well as a support and consultation service. The association had at least 30,000 active members143 and reached far greater number of sympathizers through its conferences and journal. Many themes are taken up, and almost all have been incorporated into various institutions, like the family planning movement that became influential in the 1960s. Some of the proposed reforms also entered into the lives of many families around the world, especially in urban centers. Here are a few examples:
Reich (1932) even wrote a pamphlet that directly addressed the adolescents, proposing that they engage in a militant activity to protect their right to a sexual life. This publication would have fit in well with the thinking of the youth movements of the left, if it were not written in the jargon of Leninists. A language with less of a leftist connotation would probably have had a larger impact. The developed themes, on the other hand, would remain the same when Reich discovered that the communist movement was about to become a form of “red fascism.”144 Only in the second edition of Mass Psychology of Fascism did Reich describe in an explicit fashion how he discovered that Stalin was establishing the same laws pertaining to sexuality and the family in the Soviet Union as Hitler was in Germany. This family policy contradicted all of Lenin’s laws on education.
Vignette on sexual liberation and Gustav Marlock. In a conference,145 Gustav Marlock commented on the Reichian sexual revolution, from 1930 to 2006, and on what differentiated it from the proposition of the psychoanalysts. He underscored that it was conceived as a reform of the sexuality of families and the education of children.146 It is also in this sense that the Reichian theme was taken up by the youth movements at the end of the 1960s in the United States and Europe. Only in the 1970s was the movement gradually taken up by various types of homosexual militancy to become a movement of liberation for all forms of sexuality. This liberation of sexual behavior is closer to psychoanalytic propositions147 than to Reichian propositions. It seems to me that it is useful to distinguish between these two movements of sexual liberation because they have different goals. Reich was defending the sexual life of heterosexual families. Like most psychiatrists of his day, he considered homosexuality to be a perversion. This homophobic position has not been retained by the neo-Reichian movements.
SEXUALITY AS AN EXTERNAL PROPENSION
The libido expresses itself in the sexual encounter and in the encounter between colleagues. “The biological center and its libido need to express themselves sexually and professionally” (Reich, 1940, V.5, p. 146f).
Reich’s social work showed how diverse types of social services are necessary for the development of the instincts. He is one of the few who dared to follow the trajectory of an instinctive propension on its journey within the center of individual organisms and within the maze of the regulations in social systems. He thus explored all the articulations of an instinct and showed that most of these articulations are not accessible within a psychotherapeutic frame. The establishment of systemic therapy, centered on the functioning of the family, has henceforth reinforced this demonstration. The action of the psychotherapist is thus situated as a kind of social action, capable of supporting certain conditions of a propension, but not of all of them.
In terms of a goal for psychotherapy, this implies that the therapist and his patient are able to evaluate what changes are possible in a given situation. A married patient may discover that at the heart of his couple relationship, there are no longer any sexual relations possible and may prefer, to remain in the relationship nonetheless. This choice implies the analysis of high stakes that are not all of a sexual nature. Again, nonetheless, if the rapport between libido and sexuality remain unchanged, it will remain pathogenic even if it is accepted.
This brings us back to Guy Cellérier’s impossible agenda. Even if choices are inevitable, they always have a price. It would seem that human organisms can survive with an impossible agenda, but they do not have the resources to manage their complexity. For Reich, this analysis expresses a form of resignation. He believed that this complexity could be mastered in a coherent way.
Reich told his patients that the developments that were not able to be accomplished by them today because of the political situation would have to be undertaken by their children. For Reich, a patient who really understood his message would necessarily became a militant for life, someone who wants that the humanity of tomorrow become more human than the one of today. This was already the gamble of the women’s liberation movements. Some social changes are at least as important for the well-being of everyone as the change that can be accomplished by psychotherapy.
CHARACTER AND POLITICS
When Hitler was elected in 1933, Reich published The Mass Psychology of Fascism, in which he denounces on the one hand the huge danger that Nazism represents, but also the limits of the communist strategy that the election revealed.148 The goal of his book is to explain why a number of proletarian communists ended up electing Hitler. Reich blamed the communists for having only understood the economic structure of a society. Then he showed, by quoting Mein Kampf, that Hitler manipulated another social dimension: the psychology of the masses, or the value system of the people. Hitler, like religious institutions, manipulated the people’s fear, their attachment to the notion of the family and to the cultural values of their nation, their more or less explicit racism, and their sexual mores. For Reich, this dimension is, from the point of view of sociology, as important as the economic dimension. It would be harmful, according to him, if only the movements of the extreme right proposed political means to regulate what is for Reich an important regulator of social life and the motives that influence the vote of the population.
In 1946, Reich understood that the soviet regime had become as horrible as that of the Germans. His analysis of communism gradually became the following. When Lenin took power, he believed that changing the laws would suffice to change a society. These laws clearly foresaw a change in education (divorce, nurseries, etc.), but he did not expect that the masses would remain loyal to a tyrannical power structure. Reich’s reasoning was that the laws can change in one day, whereas the character structures require generations to be transformed. Not taking this variable into account leads to social disasters. In Germany and in Russia, everybody, outside of the intellectual and marginal milieus, had developed in function of a kind of power built into the educational systems for centuries. The citizens consequently have a character structure that does not function unless there is a strong central power. The elimination of the Kaiser and the Tsar did not modify this state of affairs, which explains in part the enthusiasm of the masses for setting up pseudo-kaisers like Stalin and Hitler. Reich noticed that Stalin decreed the same laws as Hitler concerning the cohesion of the family, the official prudery, and sexual repression. All of Lenin’s innovative laws on the matter were abolished. For Reich, this confirms the hypothesis that to strengthen itself, tyranny needs to create a psychology of the masses that develops individual character traits for its own ends.
For the future, he recommended cohesion between the modifications of the laws and the manner in which individuals function. This proposition is also compatible with Marx’s position that perceives the social development as a slow process that needs to advance one small step at a time. This analysis is close to the Darwinian theory. In Marxism and in Darwinism, the main argument is that what needs to be changed is so complex, and has so many ramifications, that it requires a slow process to regulate what is happening. Once genetics became a central metaphor, one could envisage small abrupt changes; but even then, a follow-up is still needed. Marx so admired Darwin that he asked him if he could dedicate Das Capital to him (Berlin, 1963, X, p. 247f).
The social regulation of sexuality would be the link between economic regulation and the regulation of each individual’s character. In other words, the anthropological dimension would be the interface that coordinates economic power and the needs of individuals. In a tyranny or in capitalism the anthropological dimension serves to enslave the masses. Thus, getting the people to believe that the family is a sacred notion or that sexual pleasure was created by the devil generates various forms of neurosis. Citizens are then easily manipulated. We find in this analysis the idea that all social dimensions are linked to each other and, at the same time, that they each have a particular function. From the point of view of individual consciousness, to believe that the family is sacred and to have a secret shame about one’s sexuality is one issue. To want to fight for the improvement of the elite is another. There are no direct explicit links between these two kinds of preoccupations. Reich shows that Hitler’s genius lies in leading the masses to believe that he defends only a limited number of cultural values that have no link with the power of money or an eventual warrior spirit. Once this value system became the center of attention of the masses, it became evident that Hitler and his entourage had selected some themes that indirectly led to the enslavement of the masses and the installation of a regime that we can, in retrospect, identify as horrible. Reich’s genius was to have detected this danger as soon as Hitler was elected. The tool that allowed him to do so is his flexible systems analysis, inherited from psychoanalysis and Marxism, which made it possible to coordinate the apparently heterogenic logic of the dimensions of a system. To summarize, the citizen believes he has voted for someone who will protect his family from the perverse mores advanced by the media and the world market; he finally finds himself imprisoned in a still more dangerous imperialism, without knowing how this turn of events came about.
This analysis can still be used today without referring to its original Marxist theoretical context. It can also be used to reframe the aims of psychotherapy, by stressing that one of the functions of psychotherapy is to allow people to feel their own needs and want to participate in building a social environment that respects their deepest needs. Reich also sought to promote policies that could respond to these exigencies without each and every citizen having to undergo psychotherapy. For him, it consisted of finding kinds of social support (institutions, laws, education, etc.) that permit the promotion of changes in mores that individuals need to integrate to participate in a functioning democracy. Here, he rejoins Freud’s analysis. The internal repression of sexual drives, advanced by some religious movements (especially Christians, Muslims, and Jews), is incompatible with the notion of mental health. The message that Reich addressed to the political forces of the left was the following: teaching people to defend the cultural values compatible with their profound needs is a crucial necessity. To defend only the economic advantages is insufficient. The denial of the importance of the cultural dimension that has become prevalent in the nations with large economies can only lead, for a Reichian, to social disasters.
AN INDIGESTIBLE POLICY
After the publication of the Mass Psychology of Fascism in 1934, Reich was thrown out of the Communist Party because he excessively focused the debate on sexuality and began to be suspicious of the turn taken by Stalinism. He was also thrown out of Germany because he was (a) Jewish and (b) a communist. A year later, Reich was excluded from the International Association of Psychoanalysis for reasons that seem mostly political. Briefly, I describe the complex situation by distinguishing two extreme positions within the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA):
Reich had become such a prominent figure of the Leninist movement in Germany that it became difficult to include him in the group of leftist psychoanalysts in Berlin who had Marxist leanings but were less involved in the immediate politics. Reich referred to his colleagues as cowards, and they warned him that he was becoming foolhardy. Around this discussion a conflict erupted between those who followed Reich and those who followed Fenichel. In 1934, at the congress in Lucerne, prudently held in Switzerland, the International Association of Psychoanalysis expelled Reich. Reich’s friends were asking themselves if it was the fellow, the politician, or his positions on sexuality, the body, and psychoanalysis that the association was expelling. At the time, it was assumed that it consisted of a bit of everything. Today, we know that it was mostly the politician who was expelled.
If I understood correctly, the technicalities of this situation are a bit more complicated. According to the rules of the IPA, an analyst joins his national association and is then automatically a member of the international association. Reich, having been excluded from the German association, could not, consequently, belong to the international association. When Fenichel and Reich lived in Oslo, Reich could have joined the national psychoanalytic association of Norway. Therefore, he would have been automatically a member of the international association. It is mostly Reich, who rendered this solution impossible, while everyone in his entourage, Fenichel included, encouraged him to take this step.
In his correspondence with Ferenczi, Freud demanded Reich’s expulsion because of his “bolshevisms,” while adding, with a bit of bad faith, that it was probably this nonscientific doctrine that pushed Reich to reject his concept of the death drive, “Thanatos.”149 For Ferenczi and Freud, Reich’s theory on masochism, which opposed the necessity to invoke a death instinct, is just an ideological position.150 Freud also reproached Fenichel for having remained too loyal to Reich and deprived him of his position as editor of the Internationale Zeitschrift fur Psychoanalyse.151 He explicitly complained about the “part played by Fenichel in favor of Reich’s bolshevism and other tactless behavior” (letter to Ferenczi of June 13, 1932; translated by Marcel Duclos). Notice that the term selected is “bolshevism” and not “communist”; otherwise, Freud would have had to exclude the entire group of psychoanalysts of the left, which would have angered a great number of psychoanalysts. Freud asks the editors of books written by psychoanalysts not to publish Reich’s book on character analysis.152 Reich published this masterpiece out of his own pocket.
Purely intellectual motives were given to explain Reich’s expulsion. It follows that his positions on the body, emotions, behavior, and the right to touch was then considered incompatible with the psychoanalytic approach.153 For at least 30 years, most psychoanalysts avoided exploring the possibility of including the emotional expression and the touch of the body in the psychoanalytic frame. We will see that a certain number among them could not restrain themselves from having an interest in the subject. But they had an awareness that they were entering into somewhat of an “exotic” domain in the eyes of their psychoanalytic colleagues.
Reich’s expulsion was nonetheless useless, since Freud finally had to exile himself.154 This exclusion is an example of the way movements like the Nazi government divide to conquer.155 They divided the psychoanalysts by letting them believe that most of them would be spared if they chased away the black sheep; yet in the end, the Nazis led the entire herd to the slaughterhouse.
Reich was convinced that Fenichel and his friends had supported the decision of the central committee of the International Psychoanalytic Association. The fact that Fenichel did not leave the association to establish another association with him was proof enough, for Reich, that his interpretation was correct. Fenichel considered his disagreement with Reich as a passionate discussion between friends and allies. He did not want to separate himself from Reich, whom he admired.156 According to Reich,157 Fenichel was so saddened by his expulsion that he had a “nervous breakdown,” which necessitated that he spend three weeks in a rest home. Reich understood this depression as the result of a tumultuous ambivalence toward him. Fenichel was probably deeply wounded by the impression that everyone asked him to choose between his friendship with Reich and his passion for psychoanalysis. For him, Reich remained a great psychoanalyst. He refused to choose.
Before World War II, Fenichel, Gindler, and Reich had many students. They created, among them, a network of knowledge that then developed in the United States.158 They animated what we now call humanistic psychotherapy. In the 1960s, one of its most representative centers was Esalen, on the coast of California. This center combined new forms of psychotherapy like Fritz Perls’s Ge-stalt therapy and an assortment of body-mind approaches:159
Many body psychotherapists in the United States had spent time in Esalen or were trained by a person who had taught in this center. These personalities in the world of body psychotherapy refined body-mind methods and developed new ways of approaching psychological dynamics. The “awareness exercises” developed by Fritz Perls and his colleagues (1951) are examples of these new techniques. These exercises were probably inspired by “the exploration of the gesture from the inside” (tasten) developed by Gindler. It allowed a certain number of psychotherapists to develop new forms of introspection and dream analysis (e.g., “directed daydream” or “waking dreams” techniques developed by Desoille, 1966).
The popularity of awareness exercises that developed in California during the 1950s and 1960s had several sources. The three most important ones are probably a renewed interest for Far Eastern meditation, an interest in Reichian Orgonomy, and the popularity of body-mind techniques such as those derived from Moshe Feldenkrais and Elsa Gindler. One of the key figures of this development was Charlotte Selver (1901-2003), who had studied with a student of Jacques Dalcroze (Rudolf Bode160) and Elsa Gindler. Even if Selver161 had worked at Esalen with students who were in psychotherapy, her workshops did not have psychotherapeutic goals. She developed a method that she called sensory awareness, which, above all, sought to develop the capacity to be aware of what is going on in the space that is a body. To allow her students to enter into the world of body sensations, she used a form of internal exploration that has been taken up by many body psychotherapists of today.
Here is a sample of what Selver asked her pupils once they were able to enter into conscious contact with what was going on in them:
You may feel how easy it would be for gravity to become overwhelming, pulling you down to the ground and how the earth even wants to swallow you. But no, there is something under you which supports you—and something inside you which reconditions you from moment to moment.
Could you be open in your bones and other tissues for that which supports you? Be grateful for that support—grateful in every cell, grateful in your skin, and in your bones! (Selver, 2007, p. 44)
Having experienced many exercises that use this type of mental technique, I know that it is possible to have the impression of feeling our tissues breathe; when this type of awareness becomes intense, it can activate a type of relaxation that gives the impression of being whole. I also know that introspection does not have the capacity to feel what is really going on in the tissues in such an explicit way.162 Thus, Selver solicits not only a state of exaltation in her students but also a type of introspection open to suggestion.
This is not what I am referring to when I speak of an exploration of the inside of a movement. These very precise “awareness exercises” in Gestalt therapy allowed many people to sharpen their contact with body sensations, first through suggestions, then in a more refined and precise manner. Selver influenced many body psychotherapists like Judith E. Weaver and Malcolm Brown. Brown was the first to have developed a form of body psychotherapy that is explicitly organismic. His school, founded in 1977, is called Organismic psychotherapy.163
Another student of Gindler was Laura Posener, who married Fritz Perls. Laura Perls was one of these women of this generation who were less well known than the man she married and inspired but who is probably at least as competent. She was part of the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute in the 1930s. She was in supervision with Otto Fenichel, while Fritz Perls went to Reich for his psychotherapy.164 Fritz trained in psychiatry under Kurt Goldstein in Frankfort. Laura studied phenomenology in Frankfort. She also studied with Gindler.165 Fritz and Laura both completed training in Gestalt psychology. The synthesis of Gestalt psychology and phenomenology, which is at the heart of Gestalt therapy, combines the knowledge of Laura and Fritz Perls. Laura and Fritz Perls left Germany for South Africa after Hitler’s election in 1933.
I have taken Esalen as a point of reference, but the influence of Gestalt therapy and Gindler’s students developed in many different parts of the United States. Thus, after her divorce from Otto Fenichel, Clare Fenichel taught mostly in New York. In what follows, we will see that henceforth there will be two types of body psychotherapy:
Other schools oscillate between these two possibilities, like the Biodynamic psychology of Gerda Boyesen, who was explicitly influenced by the two movements. I was trained in this third movement.