reposted (2003jan11) **
Wilhelm Reich and orgone provided by GOE = Galactic Orgonomy Exchange ---- © Copyright 2009
**last update (2009 March)

This reaction is, by and large, magnified by neurotic characters who have discovered a hook to promote a massive drive towards sexual repression, much like in previous historical eras. (Harmon, 1988)

People do utilize more caution when engaging in relationships. However the evolution and persistence of a love relationship requires the emergence of tenderness, not merely sexual feeling. Even considering the fact that the incidence of STD increased since Harmon's article, the fear of STD, from a rational perspective, need not be a concern with relatively healthy individuals who permit the emergence of tenderness, not anxious sexuality, to determine the movement towards each other and the sexual embrace. For, as we know, one of the functions of the relatively healthy character is a natural desire for serial monogamy. Polygamy is a function of the neurotic structure, and is generally absent in relatively healthy individuals.

In the initial stages of a relationship the emergence of tenderness generally takes time. Testing for the absence of STD during this time period, when one feels movement towards the other, can certainly allay any fears. Thus, the irrational basis of the argument for sexually repressive approaches to the problem of STD becomes readily apparent.

What occurs in relationships that accounts for the decreased incidence of relatively pleasurable long term involvement between two people? The foregoing discussion proposes an answer to this question from the perspective of a characteristic and/or conflicts functioning, unconsciously, to sabotage either the development or continuance of closeness and intimacy between individuals. These conflicts, manifested within the neurotic character structure, function to block natural organismic pulsation that determines, energetically, the quality of movement of one organism towards another.

Of course, extrinsic factors may prevent one from engaging in and establishing a close relationship. Perhaps one lives in a location where there are few available individuals seeking to engage in a mutual partnership. In such an instance, the individual with a degree of health rationally decides to expand energy in travelling or, in some cases, relocating where the possibilities are greater.

More specific to the question at hand are those who begin tender relationships with the exuberant optimism of new lovers, only to discover a partner taking flight when the relationship appears to solidify and the couple begins to speculate on future options. The departing partner, most often, has had a lifelong difficulty with sustaining closeness. If actual flight is not effected, they may foster unconscious actions that undermine the closeness e.g., having affairs, becoming arrogant, violent, hostile, angry, verbally and/or physically abusive, etc. The neurotic structure generates many creative and subtle strategies to protect us from or prevent contact and closeness.

A likely ground for this process of avoiding closeness can be observed in individuals who have had a series of scarred intimate relationships, including toxic primary relationships with parents. The parents being too constricted in their own emotional development, as a consequence of their upbringing, to sustain a consistently close, nourishing, warm relationship with their children. Subsequently, in adolescence and later years, these individuals become frightened when intimacy with another looks as if it is an emerging possibility. A number of strategies are effected. Intellectual arguments against continuing the relationship are advanced, or these individuals actively and unconsciously begin to act as saboteurs.

Common sense tells us that neurotic characterology unfolds as time in an intimate relationship evolves. If we are fortunate to meet a partner whose neurosis is compatible with ours, the relationship can develop and be successful. However, this is not often the case. For what lies beneath the surface of the neurotic character is a reservoir of repressed aggression, cruelty, and hatred.

In most intimate relationships the unconscious aggression, sadism, and hatred come to the fore under various guises, early on. The unconscious expression may masquerade under the pretense of authoritarian, controlling interactions with our partners, penuriousness (with feelings), coldness, exploitation, unreasonable demands, etc. Most often these manifestations are motivated from an underlying fear.

There is only one unconscious fear: Fear of closeness. This is at the root of the neurotic character structure. The fear is that if we were to become closer with the intimate other, the other will relate by withdrawal, coldness, cruelty, anxiety, etc., as our original intimate others (parents) unconsciously did when we felt close to them. This was a consequence of their relationships with their own parents, and so on, along back through the generations of parents.

Just imagine how it is for a 3 year old or 4 year old whose whole existence depends on parents. As the parents begin to feel warmth, tenderness or other signs of closeness, an unpredictable and unexpected change occurs. They become anxious, withdraw, become tense or cold, do subtle cruel acts, or any of the myriad adult distortions of natural feeling concomitant with the neurotic structure (present in all human beings). This creates a terrible fear and anxiety in the child.

Notice a little person literally shrink when yelled at, when a parent turns away when they are crying out for them, or when the mother withdraws her breast from the child because the sensuous arousal from breast feeding evokes anxiety in her. The choices for the child are limited. Repression of the fear and anguish, the intensity of which is intolerable to such a small organism, is the likely direction. The child accomplishes this repression by initially tightening their musculature. With time and repeated subjection to the fearful stimuli, the yelling, withdrawal of contact by the adult, or other forms of abuse, the tightening becomes chronic. This tightening or hardening of the musculature becomes an individuals characteristic way of presenting themselves to the world. It accounts for the myriad differences of the physical or bodily expressions in each of us. We see individuals with stooped shoulders, with thrust out chest and/or abdomen, an individual with a pulled back or retracted pelvis, an exaggeratedly swinging pelvis, or individuals with persistent downturned mouths, facial grimaces, vacant appearing eyes, beady eyes, barely opened or squinting eyes, eyes constantly darting from side to side, etc. These are some of the biophysical ways the repression is maintained in the unconscious. The unconscious fear and anxiety the individual represses by necessity in childhood will, in all probability, again emerge into consciousness in the initial stages of close adult relationships.

Hardening ourselves so we don't feel the fear, anxiety, rage, sadness, or other feelings is a learned response to a toxic environment. This is just about the only strategy, aside from becoming psychotic, children can avail themselves of. They tense their musculature to stop feeling. Over time, with repeated tightening, the feeling remains unconscious, only to rear it's head at each instance of closeness, beginning in adolescence and carrying through to adulthood.

Anger is a particularly excellent process to fend off closeness. Anger is a secondary emotion. We express anger, most often, because we feel hurt, vulnerable, too soft, or out of control.

One easy lesson to teach our patients, through description and modeling, is a peculiarity of our humanness. If we were to maintain our softness when attacked or hurt and communicate this to the other rather then hardening and communicating our anger, the situation may often reverse itself. If the other is in any contact at all, they would clearly feel the shame, embarrassment, and/or compassion that comes with recognition that their actions evoked pain in the other, as unintentional as it may be. In such moments, if we respond with anger to the other; the other would often respond, in kind, with a hardness and anger. A state of contactlessness is thus effected.

Contact is an energetic process. One's energy must be soft to effectively engage in good contact. Good contact can result in instantaneously knowing, without words, what the other wants, is feeling, and on a few rare occasions, even thinking.

I personally know of one couple who, after a few months of a close and contactful relationship, have had a few of the same dreams, almost identical in content and occurring at different times. Neither party had discussed the content with the other until the other had the same dream, some time after the fact. Unfortunately, one of the partners became frightened at the depth of their closeness and took flight, ending the relationship.

In order for good contact to occur, we must be relatively healthy; the health akin to a person who has been characterologically restructured to the point where genitality or the genital character is dawning (Reich, 1945).

A concomitant of good contact is an energetic opening, including an opening and/or contact with all our senses. This opening must be relatively devoid of the unconscious conflicts that serve to harden and render us incapable of sustaining contact and tenderness. If we feel tenderness, when either thinking of or when in the presence of another, it is a good bet that our senses are open to engage in good contact.

Tenderness is a distinct organismic message. The warm glowing or melting sensation, when in the presence of a loved one, is the actual feeling of love.

To be able to engage in sustained tenderness one must be relatively free and unincumbered by childhood repressions or unfinished emotional business, thoughts or unconscious representations of lost love from others, from parents, and thoughts or unconscious representations of fears of being taken advantage of, etc. To sustain a feeling of warm tenderness with another, almost necessitates that we trust that person without question.

To be intimate is to feel unblocked tenderness and be in good contact; to remain soft and vulnerable most of the time, even when attacked, admonished, or criticized.

If attacked, admonished, or criticized by the other one may transform the attack, as if by magic. The magic is in the ability to remain soft and share the pain the attack or criticism engenders, in a non-threatening manner:

Individuals attack or criticize, usually because they feel unacknowledged pain. If one does not acknowledge the pain from another's attack and attacks back, the responsibility of damaging and perhaps disengaging from one's own tenderness, contact, and the relationship becomes a real possibility.

Recall the scenes in the Edward Albee play Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf. The major characters, George and Martha, model a symmetrical relationship. Each hardens against the other in symmetrically increasing degrees or levels. Is there tenderness, or craziness? The answer apparent. The video of the play with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor is a classic, and illustrates quite clearly, in part, the nature of closeness and it's contactless substitute.

In some situations that do not transform with maintaining a softness and repeated tenderness, bear in mind that one may love the other, but to compete with their craziness is well nigh impossible.

Closeness is the goal of all healthy relationships. It can only be achieved with the experience of increasing tenderness and softness of both partners, and a little bit of magic.

The converse of closeness and contact is a special phenomenon found in all neurotic structures, but particularly in those individuals who have sustained a particularly difficult childhood in which their natural vegetative motility had been frustrated and suppressed by parental introjects and admonishments regarding natural sexual expression (Reich, 1945, p. 323 Character Analysis, 3rd Edition, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1945).

The specter of substitute contact is depicted in the following situations.

A woman had engaged in a new relationship with a man shortly after sufferring major losses in her life. She related in a warm, syrupy, loving way to the man. The man was initially suspicious and pointed towards her effusiveness. She initially took offense at this characterization but shortly returned to her warm, ostensibly loving words and gestures towards him. The man, wanting to trust her out of his own neediness, accepted her defense and subsequently rationalized his original suspiciousness of her effusiveness. His rationalization took the form of seeing her behavior as a manifestation of growth and evolution from what he knew was normally neurotic. This fit perfectly with her own persona.

He had observed how fairly and kindly she related to her child. She maintained she had always been this way. After a few months, the man felt a deep tenderness with the woman which he correctly interpreted as an emerging love for her. She continually told him how much love she had for him. She continued to relate in this warm, effusive way.

Following the significant losses she had become involved with a new age course teaching forgiveness and love that should be rendered to all. This system tended to promote the use of substitute contact. Most who were engaged in it, including some of the trainers exhibited a loving and peaceful facade, which was a misconstrual of the basic message of the course. The basic message had to do with becoming aware of ego entanglements and changing one's ego perceptions.

Utilizing a hardened defensive structure, she developed a pseudo contact with life. In her thinking, it seemed a necessity that she maintain a degree of psychic integrity and not succumb to the feelings of rage and grief over the losses, as her child had no one else to depend on.

After a few months, as the new couple grew closer, the woman began to exhibit angry outbursts towards her child. The man observed this and thought it to be somewhat out of character, but said nothing.

On a few occasions she became angry at him over intellectual disagreements. During these moments, she rapidly turned cold and withdrew, emotionally.

Of interest is the context of the disagreements. The man was a professor of philosophy at a local university. As his brother was a psychotherapist, he would occasionally talk of his belief in the value of psychotherapy for people in general. She would strongly disagree, indicating that all that was needed was to embrace the beliefs contained within the spiritual teachings she was learning. She asked him to cut short his planned week long stay at her house on one such occasion, a direct result of an intellectual argument with him over this same subject. The argument, rather than heated, was nothing stronger than what friends often have over differing opinions. For the sake of discussion, he innocently pointed towards examples of some inconsistencies in the spiritual course material that he had, by this time, also engaged in studying. She became extremely angered and asked him to leave in the middle of the night. On another occasion, she also cut short their vacation together, this being the last time they were together. On the first occasion she indicated she had become angry and accused him of causing her anger. In the second instance she simply broke off contact, never providing him with an explanation.

The warm, syrupy, 'loving' way that she portrayed was a substitute contact, the result of a reaction formation. The reaction formation had to do with the repressed rage she felt towards those significant people who had abandoned her by either discontinuiing contact or through their own death. She 'lovingly' accepted these tragedies and assured her new partner that she had adequately worked through her negative emotions.

In subsequent relationships, she acted loving, warm, and tender with each man until they subsequently opened and felt the tenderness which is love. At this point, she cut off the relationship with little or no explanation. The rationalization she often believed, and told others, was that the partners had disturbed her tranquility.

What actually `disturbed' her tranquility was the fact that with time, the partner became closer and more open with her. As his feelings unfolded she came closer to the awareness of the opposite, unconscious feeling that formed the basis for the reaction formation. As this awareness was so incongruent with her persona, she ended the relationship. She could not, at the time, psychically tolerate the recognition. The lack of vegetative contact became more visible, the closer the partners came to each other. The signal of the substitute nature of the contact was misinterpreted as a disturbance of her tranquility. What was actually being disturbed was the substitute contact. As tenderness and closeness became more paramount in the relationship, the repressed rage began to break through in angry eruptions. She managed this by totally withdrawing from emotional contact. Her "understanding," on each occasion, was that he had disturbed her sense of serenity by doing or saying something, or holding a belief that evoked a feeling that was inconsistent with her newly introjected mystical learnings, e.g., her anger would surface. To continue an intimate relationship with a person whom she reacted to in this way was totally incompatible with the nature of her consciously held beliefs about herself.

She externalized the reasons for the eruptions of her repressed feelings utilizing a well formed rationalization and intellectualization (she was quite intelligent, worked as a research scientist, and thus was especially skilled at intellectual defenses). She initially related with the reaction formation process in full bloom. This took up a tremendous amount of energy from an organism that was already overtaxed. She desperately attempted to keep in check the tremendous rage, anger, and grief she felt over the major, almost simultaneous losses in her life. With time, it became apparent to those who knew her, she could not sustain the energy developed in good contact. The substitute nature of the contact would evoke incredulous amazement from others as to how well she appeared to be handling the tragedies, on the surface. As her close friends would share their concern for her, she would smile a serene smile, disagreeing, and quote a passage from the new-age course she was involved in. In fact, she was barely able to function in life beyond her defensive structure.

In a similar illustration of substitute contact from a different perspective, a man ran an ad in a local newspaper personal column seeking a "committed relationship leading towards living together and having a child". A woman who held a responsible position with a book publisher, responded. She was intrigued by the directness and forthrightness seemingly contained in the words. She was approaching 39 and felt a desire to have and raise a child.

They met at a local restaurant. The man was quite gracious and inviting. The woman was impressed by his apparent sincerity. They spent increasingly more time with each other. The relationship eventually evolved to a more intimate place in which they alternately slept at each other's houses. The man, at this point, began to cancel occasional meetings saying that he had work to do. He was a psychiatrist working at a local hospital. The frequency of cancellations increased. The woman had made some significant changes in her schedule to accommodate their plans, only to receive his cancellation phone calls at the last minute. She confronted the man with this. He persisted in claiming that he was held up at work, and that he loved her and sincerely missed their time together.

Following one of his spontaneous cancellations she walked by a local restaurant on the way home from work. She glanced in the window and spotted the man amorously relating to a woman while having dinner. She confronted him the next day in a phone conversation. His attempt at dissembling, by claiming the woman in the restaurant was a patient, failed to convince the woman. She made some inquiries and found the man would continually have sexual liaisons with numerous women, assuring each of them that they were his only interest.

His ostensible sincerity and expressed desire for commitment was designed to engage in a sexual relationship where he could relate to her as an object of conquest, not, as she was led to believe, a person with whom he felt love. Once the conquest was made, he turned his eye elsewhere. Never once did he consider the feelings of the women he manipulated into his complex. The act of conquest was an expression of hatred and fear of the opposite sex rather than a genuine feeling. It was accomplished from a substitute contact.

The organism, when in genuine contact and relatively free of neurotic character blocks, is generally not capable of an exploitation of another's feelings. For the very nature of good contact brings with it a compassion and empathy for others.

We must keep in mind that hatred and fear provides a foundation for the neurotic character structure. Unfortunately, for some who endeavor to work through their neurotic structure, there are people who are quite skilled at disguising the untapped hatred within and relating in an ostensibly healthy fashion, in the early stages of a relationship. If the individual is at a stage in their own restructuring where they are not yet able to make good contact, they will often not see through the pretense. Given time, the unconscious hatred emerges under various guises, including displays of spiritual zealotry, gracious humanitarianism, and the like.

In the city of New York, as in all large cities, contactlessness and substitute contact are endemic and often function as either imagined or necessary survival defenses. The crime rate involving assaults and other violent crimes against the person multiplies each year. Residents who read the exaggerated and not so exaggerated claims in the media react by developing a fear for survival. When walking in the street, this fear creates the environmental push against the organism to withdraw energy from the senses, and in turn, from contact.

Following years of living away from Manhattan on the west coast I returned and was riding the subways with my brother, a professional musician. His half-joking caution to me was to look only at the overhead advertisements or read the paper but certainly do not look at other passengers.

In a recent issue of the Times following the subway murder of a young man from Utah who was protecting his mother against muggers, one man interviewed said he no longer reads the Wall St. Journal, just the tabloids while on the train. He cited fear of being marked by the violent youth who patrol the stations as someone with money and valuables, if he were to be observed reading the Journal.

Withdrawal in the eyes to avoid a potential violent encounter can create a condition of contactlessness. One dulls the eyes to avoid recognition of another on the street. The environmental push creates the contraction from without. When this is equivalent to the push from within, according to Baker, a stoppage of energy occurs (Baker, 1967, p. 69).

Feelings of loneliness, alienation, lack of life--"deadening"--, an annoying feeling of a gap or void in one's existence and in relationships can be the manifest symptoms.

We all desire close contact. However, in addition to the so-called "normal" childhood repressions, the increasingly aberrant conditions in society evoke substitutes and a negative contact. Parents who raise children in urban areas, continually caution them to be wary of strangers. To be suspicious of everyone.

I recall in the 40's and 50's having a fear of leaving the apartment instilled in me by my mother, as she was frightened of the increase in crime in the neighborhood. I consequently led a lonely childhood with few, if any friends. The most significant difficulty I subsequently encountered, as an adult, was in establishing meaningful friendships and relationships.

Substitute contact can be the origin of a hardened impasse, a serious dilemma in the final stages of the therapeutic process. Especially if the therapist has not yet developed an awareness of the feeling of the difference between what Reich defines as "the manifestations of free-flowing direct vegetative contact and of spurious, secondary, circuitous substitute relationships". (Reich, 1945, p. 525). He cites various manifestations of the substitute including:

The phenomenon of substitute contact is at the root of the so-called "good patient": the person in therapy who agrees with the therapist, expresses whatever feeling is expected, develops intricate insights into childhood dynamics, reports changes in feeling to a more pleasurable life, yet continues essentially unchanged in character structure. These individuals, in private moments, are given to a secret misery underlying a basic inferiority. They are acting out the role of "good girl" or "good boy", forced on them in childhood by authoritarian parenting. If the therapist is not sensitive to the energetic dynamics of such a patient, the lack of movement is missed and therapeutic progress stagnates.

The substitute nature of the contact can be felt in therapy only by the therapist who maintains good energetic contact with the patient. All too often, in non-energetic based therapies, contact remains at an intellectual level. Thus, substitute contact is easily disguised and passed off as authentic. Consequently many years pass by, along with thousands of dollars spent on therapy, with very little organic change in structure.

Many therapists, who function primarily on an intellectual level, report frequent burnout and desires to change careers or engage in non-therapeutic aspects of their profession.

The issues in life and in therapy are complicated by the varied manifestations of human functioning and the armored neurotic character structure. Since the latter part of the 19th Century, volumes have been devoted towards an understanding of human neurosis. This paper attempted to touch upon and illustrate the intertwined aspects of closeness, contact, and substitute contact, viewed as the red thread running through the fabric of modern life and some of the problems that emerge in therapy.
 

1. Baker, Elsworth, Man In The Trap, Macmillan Publishing Co., New York, 1967.

2. Harman, Robert A. The Emotional Plague as Manifested in the AIDS Hysteria.
      J. of Orgonomy, V. 22 (2) pp. 173-195.

3. Lowen, Alexander, Love And Orgasm, Macmillan Publishing Co., New York, 1965.

4. ----------------, Narcissism, Denial Of The True Self, Macmillan Publishing Co. New York, 1983.

5. Pierrakos, John C., Core Energetics, Developing The Capacity to Love and Heal. 
      Life Rhythm, Mendocino, Ca. 1987.

6. Reich, Wilhelm, Character Analysis, 3rd Edition, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1945. 
       (First German edition published as Charakteranalyse, 1933.)

7. --------------, The Invasion Of Compulsory Sex-Morality, Farrar, Strauss And Giroux, New York, 1971.

8. --------------, Early Writings, Volume I, Farrar, Strauss And Giroux, New York, 1975.
 

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