posted (98may23)
Copy and Permission to Post given by Dr. Herskowitz Summer WRM conference 1997
Wilhelm Reich and orgone provided by GOE = Galactic Orgonomy Exchange ---- © Copyright 2009
**last update (2009 March)

Reich viewed all living systems as pulsatile. In the mammal, there are many individual pulsations encompassed within the overall pulse of charge with energy, and discharge with energy. There is the heart's pulse, the lung's pulse, the gastrointestinal pulse, the brain's pulse, and so forth. Armoring narrows the pulsation from aliveness to all aspects of existence to, in the worst case, living at a level of near existence. The heavily armored individual fears expansion and pleasure gives him anxiety. Armoring blocks the flow of natural impulses and bends them to new purposes, just as light was bent when it hits glass or water, so, armoring bends impulses that come from our core and change them into another direction. For example, the natural aggression of a child whose parents cannot tolerate that aggression and punish him for it, turns when he armors from that punishment, turns into anger, hatred, sneakiness, or other manifestations which Reich called his secondary manifestations. And these are covered over, by what Reich called his supervision layer, that is, the layer that meets society. Therefore, his secondary layer might be covered over by compliance politeness, by characterological rigidity, or other kinds of cover-ups. Thus the orgonomist use personality not in terms of id, ego and super ego, but in terms of core impulses, secondary layer, and superficial layer, and in our therapy, we treat patients going in the opposite direction. We start with treating character as it's revealed in the superficial layer. When we reveal that and uncover that, we get to the manifestations of the secondary layer and if we can manage to unburden the individual of the secondary layer impulses we finally arrived at the core, at the natural matter.

I'm just going to give you some very brief anecdotes of what you might witness in our office. A patient whose history I have taken whose complaints I have listened to for the first time I have put him on the couch and I say I want you to breathe this way. Tale a long full breath in and just let go, and just keep breathing that way. So he lies on the couch and starts - and he does this for maybe five minutes, and then he suddenly starts to laugh and he tries to stop his laughter, and he starts to laugh even more, and he says what the hell am I laughing at. And, as soon as you ask the question, he bursts out laughing even more and the whole rest of the hour is consumed with him laughing, trying to stop the laughter, bursting into laughter again, and stopping it. At the end, he says, what the hell was that. He says, but I'll tell you, I fee I better.

The second patient, is a patient in a brief psychotic episode. She has been referred by one of our trainees in orgonomy who is a psychiatric resident in a local hospital. He has referred her to me because he knows that she is too much for him to handle. Her story is that her husband was a physician, left suddenly with his secretary and all their money, and left her with two children, and she quickly went into a psychotic episode for the first time in her life. Interestingly, her twin sister has been psychotic all of her life, She comes into my office, and she is very clearly disoriented and she keeps asking me, are you Dr. X, that is, the doctor who referred her. I say "No, I am Dr. Herskowitz". And every five minutes, she says "Are you Dr. X?" and I say "No, I am Dr. Herskowitz" and every five minutes she says "Are you Dr. X?" and I say "No, I am Dr. Herskowitz", and then she says "Are you going to hurt me, or do something bad to me?". And I reassure her "No I am not going to hurt you or do anything bad to you" and then she says, "Can I look into your mouth?", and I say "OK", and I open my mouth and she examines my mouth. And then when she is reassured that I am not going to swallow her, we begin to work. I say, follow this flashlight and I move the flashlight in random movements in front of her eyes, and at first, she has difficulty following the light, but eventually she follows it. And then I say, (she is laying supine), there are four objects, one object is this wall, that wall, that wall, and that wall behind you. Without moving your head, just move your eyes and try to see each of those objects. And she tried to do that exercise, and then I say, now just make your eyes soft and look into my eyes, and she does., and we do those three things following the light, looking at objects in the room, and looking at me. And at the end of the hour, she takes my hand and says that was good.

Now what I have worked on in each of those patients is one segment of armoring. Reich said that there are seven segments of armoring. Each of these segments is capable of its own emotional function, while practically several segments work together to express an emotion. For example, though the eye segment can express its own emotions, very often, it works in conjunction with other segments if one expresses anger, one not only looks angry, but clenches one's jaw, punches one's fist, etc. So very often an emotional expression, several segments are working simultaneously.

Now, these seven segments of armoring are the ocular, the oral, the cervical, the thorasic, the diaphragmatic, the abdominal, and the pelvic. These are the seven segments of armoring. Now the ocular segment is always involved in processes of psychosis and disassociative disorders. Now we have known for a long time that for example in schizophrenia, there is a problem in eye tracking. That's a well-known, long ago phenomenon, and in ordinary psychiatry, it's considered one of the phenomenon in schizophrenia. In orgonomy, that fact is regarded as a central issue. The fact that the eyes are not in contact with the world out here to the extent that they are in normal people, we think is a factor in being able to distinguish reality from unreality, and we worked at great length with such people in establishing better eye contact with the world. What one learns when one investigates how eyes are armored is sometimes surprising. For example, one patient reports that when she looks into a mirror, what she sees is her body outline. Another patient reports, that when he is in a painful confrontation, he has learned to endure that confrontation by focusing on one point on the other person's body, and keeping his eyes fixed at that point, and that way he is able to get through the confrontation. Another patient reports that she has no visual memory. When she looks at something and closes her eyes, she cannot remember what she has just seen. These are things that happen not in psychotic people, but people who are walking around as if they are normal.

The oral segment - We look for voice tone, we listen to people, are they talking in a rhyme, are they balking, are their jaws tight, do they have a problem biting, do they have a problem sucking, are they talkative so that they cannot keep their mouths shut, can they cry fully, can they scream, can they yell fully, and finally, are they capable of gagging. Is there a problem in the throat and the oral segment that keeps them from maintaining a lively gag reflex.

The cervical segment - Some people walk around with their shoulders held high and their neck held high as if they are watching for where the next blow will come from. 'Where will the next danger come from, and they look like scarecrows in the field - this neck always rigid and on the alert. And such people if you ask them on the couch to just let their heads fall and let gravity take their head, it is impossible, they cannot let their heads simply fall because then God knows what danger might come in the interval. In the neck is also revealed stubbornness, hautiness , trying to separate the head from the rest of the body, with a big, long separation here, and problems in the cervical area also involve problems in deep crying, shoving, yelling , etc,

The chest - The chest is one of the most significant areas for armoring because the full expansion of breathing is involved in all armoring, in expressing anger, we breath heavy, if we are really fully angry, if we are passionately loving, we go, ha, ha, ha, ha. Contrary wise, in fear, we go, he, he, he, he. We pull our chest in, which is why people with acute anxiety so often complain of a lump in the chest or a weight on the chest. When we cry, we move our chest fully in sobbing so that in all of the emotional expression, the free movement of the chest is involved. Contrary wise, when we want to inhibit any emotion, we hold our chests which is why most of us walk around not breathing fully, because all of us are repressing something which we might feel fully if we let this go. This helps me now to understand the first patient that I described because, when he is on the couch, and for the first time he let his chest go, something arose from deeper in him which turned first into laughter. Almost invariably, if you just let that go on, that laughter turns into sobbing, but we didn't have the time to do that in the first session. I didn't want that to happen in the first session. Also, involved with the chest segment are the shoulders and the upper extremity, which is part of this segment. In the expression of the emotions that this segment is capable of, we have patients punch with all the anger they can muster on the couch. I have a baseball bat that they bang on the couch, and we distinguish between those people who punch like this and people who punch like that because the second is like human beings should be capable of. And another expression of the upper extremities is to be capable of feeling love, of being able to stretch out his arms longing for someone else, and longing for contact with the universe just to male connections.

The diaphragmatic segment is used in all expulsive acts. The diaphragmatic segment is what we work on mostly in the expression of gagging for that's where the gag reflex starts with the contraction of the diaphragm. It's used in and is obviously related to disgust which means to disparage what's in here to get rid of it out there. The diaphragm and armoring of the diaphragm is geographically very close to the solar plexus, which is one of the most important of the plexi of the body and to the heart, which is why when we feel emotions very deeply, we have a feeling in this area of our body and why we talk so much in terms of heart feeling because this is a very important area for deep emotional feeling. Consequently, when we succeed in loosening the diaphragmatic area, patients often experience a flowing of energy into their abdomen and pelvis which they have not experienced before, and which most invariably they first experience for a very short time as pleasurable, and then experience as anxiety provoking.

The Abdominal segment has generally much simpler emotional functions. The educator, A. S. Neil, the man who originated the Summer Hill School, says that he used to divide his students into the tight bellies and the soft bellies. The tight bellies were the children who were scared, insecure, and the soft bellies were the children with more security who were able to move around more freely. I'll tell you one fascinating anecdote about currents into the abdominal area. One lady had succeeded in freeing her armouring and through the diaphragmatic area and had experienced these pleasurable flows of energy in her abdomen. She came in to her session the next week and she said, 'Do I have something to show you" and I said "What". So she opened her blouse, and there, halfway across her abdomen, starting halfway across, was a red rash. She said, do you see that, it says stop, it's a red light.

The Pelvic segment - When one begins to work on the pelvic armouring, what one invariably encounters is more anxiety than one had encountered up until that time throughout the whole rest of the therapy because the pelvis is the place where there is the residue of all sex negativity, all the sexual repression, and everyone in our culture suffers from pelvic anxiety. In addition to the anxiety that it has generated when one starts working on this segment, one also sees the secondary layer of manifestations in the pelvis which are rage, and the contempt that the pelvis holds, and it is not by chance that in practically all western cultures the expression, "fuck you' is the most hateful thing that one can say.

Now the dissolution of armouring , how is armouring dissolved. In psychiatric orgone therapy, we employ all conventional modalities. We do talking therapy, we analyze dreams, we use whatever knowledge we have gained from our psychiatric residency and psychiatric training, we employ all the intuition that we are capable of, and all of the medical art that we are capable of. We try to be as creative as we can because dealing with armouring is a creative process, and every therapist has his own individual methods in addition to what we all do commonly. What we look for is that in each segment, the individual be capable of expressing every emotion of which a human being should be capable of expressing. We also examine to find out areas of hypersensitivity because they always reveal armouring. For example, if you go to touch somebody's flank and they go like this, you know that's an armoured area. People shouldn't shrink when you go to touch here, or here, so that an area of hypersensitivity reveals the presence of armouring. Now, in dissolving the armouring in the eyes. In addition to what I have already told you about following the lights and looking at objects around the room, patients express every emotion that they can through their eyes. They express anger, they cry, they express fear, they express paranoia, looking out of the side of their eyes, and to some extent, they should even be capable of expressing some degree of psychosis. One of the exercises for people with Dissociative Disorder is that we tell them to let their eyes go off as they often do just naturally, and then to sharply refocus on our eyes to really make contact with our eyes and let the eyes go off and sharply refocus, to learn how to bring themselves back from that state when they are not in this world. And you also give them exercises to do at home. We say, when you are walking in the street, look at the people coming toward you, see if you can determine the texture of their clothing, all the color that you can distinguish and what they are wearing, what is the expression of their face when we walk past a shop window. Look at what is displayed in the window, then go back and check to see what you have missed. When you are riding in a bus, look at the expressions of your fellow passengers and what happens very typically is that people come in and they say, "I did what you said, I looked at those expressions and I never saw it before, everybody is either mad or sad". So these are all things that people learn to do at home, working to make their eyes come more alive.

I had a very interesting experience with a schizoid patient. In the beginning of my practice in my treatment room, I had no natural light. And it was artificially lit, and after a while, I was getting tired of that, so I knocked down an entire wall and put glass brick in the wall. About six months after I had put the glass brick in, a patient who had been coming every week said, "There is something different about this room". I said, "No there is not". She said, "Yes there is". She said, "You didn't used to have that", six months later.

The Oral segments - The oral segment usually involves some kind of facial expression. So if the patient is walking around with a blank facial expression, we imitate that facial expression to them. I have a mirror I show them what they look like with that blank face. Or, if they have a constant smile, we have a session where I sit there smiling at them as they are smiling at me, and or, if there is any emotion revealed in their constant expression, I try to imitate that and demonstrate what they are walking around with, and we practice expressing anger by biting, I give them a sheet to bite on, and try to bite a hole in it, and they practice biting at home on dish towels. As one lady who was practicing biting at home said as she was biting, she said, "I had an image of biting my fathers finger". She said, "and I know what that meant". And an interesting fact was that when she had that experience at home, she had always complained of a tightness in her throat. And having had that experience, and having integrated into her conscious of knowing what biting of her father's finger image meant, her throat relaxed thereafter, she never had that complaint again.

I imitate their own voices, the patients who whine, which is one of the things, which drives me crazy. I whine back to them and I can do it very well. An example of another very interesting patient, is a very big man, he is Welsh, and all Welshmen like to sing, and he sings in a chorus, but he talks in a voice that you can hardly hear. I asked him to sing, if he sings, in that big voice and a big chest, but his speaking voice is almost inaudible. So we were working on his voice, and I said, "What do you think it means, the fact that I can hardly hear you speak". He said, "I'll tell you," he said, " If I walk into a bar and speak in this voice, somebody can challenge me to a fight." So he had learned that the small voice is safer to walk around with.

Then, as I have indicated before, when working on the neck, we do a lot of painful stimulation of these tight cervical muscles in order to elicit the anger that is behind the stubbornness, or to elicit the fear that is in these muscles and sometimes, I put my hands around the throat of patients, who obviously walk around afraid of being choked to death.

The Thoraxic segment - We work on breathing, sometimes I have to help the patient to breath by pressing on their chests in exhalation, releasing the chest by tickling the intercostal muscles,- or by painful pressure on the intercostal muscles, by hitting and reaching the upper extremities, and once again, we run into interesting phenomenon. A lady who was unable to reach out and call "Mama". Every time she tries to do it, she just bursts into tears and I say "can you close your hand around my hand", and she can't, She can't make that much contact. She can touch that hand, but she cannot close her hand around my hand.

The Diaphragarntic segment - We work on gagging by… I have the patients swallow a glass of water and I have an emesys basin, and I say now stick your finger down your throat, breath deeply as you do it, and try to gag. And what happens to a lot of people, they put their finger down their throat and cough, caught, because their gag reflex has been denied by a superficial cough reflex and the model for a gag reflex is a one year old infant who either the milk goes down, and the milk comes up. And that kind of reflex is lost in many adults who are thereby unable to gag, if given Ipecac, maybe, you know but a shot of Ipecac he cannot gag and we sometimes spend hours at a time just working on loosening his gag reflex, because patients experience a great deal of not only emotional release, because very often, when the gag reflex is released, they are for the first time able to sob, or to scream, because along with holding that gag reflex is a lot of emotional repression in this area and in the diaphragmatic segment.

Then also, I have patients do an exercise like Santa Claus, they go, Ho, Ho, Ho, moving this segment which very often turns into involuntary laughter and then into sobbing.

Work on the abdominal segment is generally a matter of either painful pressure in the abdomen or tender stroking of the abdomen, to let whatever is held there come through, and to work on the pelvic segment, that's generally an area at which we must spend a great deal of time because there is a great deal, as I have indicated, anxiety in that area, and one can precipitate a great deal of trouble if one approaches this segment too quickly or too precipitously. Now in working on the pelvic segment, one of the first places that we work is the thigh adductors which Reich called the morality muscles, muscles that hold the legs together like this. So we apply painful pressures to the thigh adductors, and we also work on tightening and releasing the pelvic floor, and this helps to loosening the pelvic armouring. Also working in this area, we do lots of talking about sexual experiences from very early ages, sex negative experiences with one's parents, one's neighbors, or one's family, so it is a period in which a great deal of guilt is released verbally, and which a great deal of physical work is done orgonomically. If we succeed in loosening the armouring from head down to the pelvis, then there is the appearance of what Reich called the orgasm reflex. The orgasm reflex is an involuntary movement of the pelvic musculature, not only involved with sexual activity, but that is evoked in periods of high emotional excitement. So it is not a purely a sexual phenomenon. For example, one of my patients, who was an entertainer, a singer, was giving, like in her therapy, she was through to that segment, and she was giving one of the performances of her lifetime. She was really odd, and the audience was really with her, and she was in a period of very high emotional excitement and she said "suddenly my pelvis started to move and I couldn't stop it," and that's the orgasm reflex.

The orgasm reflex sometimes appears in therapy and it takes sometimes several years before the orgasm reflex becomes incorporated into one's sex life, so it becomes a regular part of the sexual orgasm as well as just a phenomenon.

Reich said that the full orgastic discharge was the nature expression of energetic discharge in the human being, Energy can be discharged by thought processes, by physical work. He felt that the large basic biological discharge mechanism was the discharge in sexual activity. Now some generalities concerning therapy; therapy is generally conducted once or twice a week most often once a week, and in times of emergency, we see patients of course more frequently. In incidence of, for example, panic attacks we see the patient maybe daily for that period of time. All human emotions are elicited, or attempted to be elicited in the course of therapy, so that usually our offices are soundproofed to the extent that we can keep the neighbors from hearing from what is going on. Despite the fact that all emotions are elicited, there is a clear distinction made to all patients that there must be no destructiveness, they must not attempt to destroy me, nor my office, that the expression of meanness is not in the service of their emotional development. On the side of the therapist, what we do is we probe painfully, we tickle, we stroke, and something I have innovated with my patients is openhanded boxing. It is very interesting what one elicits because it's like I am smacking the patient's face not hard, just gently, but the patient is doing nothing more than coming and hitting my arm. The patient is unable to get past this to get… (…. tape changed, dialogue lost…..)

Because there is so much physical contact in orgonomy, it is made very clear to all of our trainees that there must be a categorical imperative, that there must be no hint of any kind of sexual process that passes between the therapist and the patient because the process itself is conducive to that kind of thing. In the United States, our therapists must have completed standard psychiatric training and all people who are certified in orgonomy must be certified in psychiatry. We treat all ages of patients from infancy to old age. And an example of treatment in infancy; a patient brings in a four month old infant who has gradually stopped eating, stopped sleeping, is crying all the time. I look at the baby, she is pale, she is whiny, she has a pinched face, her chest is held, and I asked the mother what's been going on at home. And the mother said she's had full time work and care of the household duties before the infant was born. Now that the infant is born, she has all of her previous duties plus exclusive care of the infant. Her husband does not do a thing. And I said haven't you talked to the father, she has kind of wined to him that she wishes he would contribute a little more, which had no effect. So I say, "take the infant in your arms," which she does, and I say, "now scream bloody murder." So she starts screaming, and the infant opens its eyes, looks at her, and the infant starts screaming with her, so mother and baby are screaming together. Of course, the infant is no longer pale, her cheeks are red now, her chest is moving now, the mother's chest is moving, and the mother goes home. She has the fight of her life with her husband, lays down the law to him, where after he contributes to the workload of taking care of the infant, the problem disappears.

A story about working with a child, this is one of the nicest child stories. A little girl named Vickie. She has become increasingly phobic in recent months, and she started out needing a light in her bedroom at night, then she needed the hallway light lit, then she needed the next room light lit, until the house that has to be entirely lit at night now, and she is becoming increasingly agoraphobic. So, Vickie comes into my office, a sweet, polite, bright, lovely little girl, I put her down on the couch, her chest is held, her neck is tight, she has a constant, sweet, Sunday-school smile. So we smile at one another and that doesn't affect her one bit. And then I press on her tight neck, and she keeps smiling, and I say, doesn't that hurt, and she says "yes, but I know you're doing it for my benefit". Now this goes on for about four or five weeks and my hands hurt from the pressure on her neck, and she will do nothing but smile sweetly. About the fifth week, we are doing this, and suddenly, I have drapes hanging right by my couch which no longer hang there, Vickie ended the drapes. She pulled down the drapes, turns to me and says, "Drop dead, you rat", and then, there was a song at that time, " Id like to get you on a slow boat to China", and she said, why don't you take a long trip on a slow boat to China. And, I get her to scream and cry, which she does readily then, she sobs her heart out, and I hold her in my arms, the session ends. And my office is next door to my treatment room, and I am sitting behind my desk in my office, and she walks around my desk where I am sitting, she hugs me and she says genuinely, thank you. And thereafter, gradually, we had talks thereafter, her family was as funny as Vickie was. They were ultra, ultra, liberals who, when their oldest daughter started going out with a black boy, the family went crazy, like falseness was the modus vivendi of that family.

The treatment of adolescents - our general policy is to treat adolescents as little as possible, because its regarded as a time of hormonal furor, and the adolescents have all they can do to handle what's going on in their world, without, let alone, enter into an intensive dynamic therapy. So what we try to do is handle the immediate problem as simply as possible, and send them back into their world again. And, if necessary, they can come back later on when they are over the furors of adolescents, and when we can do some more intensive work.

The treatment of the aged is kind of like the treatment of the adolescents… One does not do intensive dynamic therapy with old people. We try to handle the immediate problem and send them out. An example of that is the mother of a patient, a 78-year-old woman who has just been through major surgery, and she came home from the hospital , took to her bed, and each day, strayed less and less from her bed, until she refused to move from her bed, and her daughter was scared because she was just lying rigidly in her bed , so she managed to get her into my office, and I saw the old lady is not breathing, her eyes here in a fixed stare, straight ahead of her, and she is practically immobile, so I gently push on her chest, try to get her to start to breathe, then I ask her to follow my finger, which she could not do at first, like her eyes are fixed, but gradually, she is able to do this if I am able to move my hands slowly and her eyes start to move a little bit, and first, passively, I move her extremities, her arms and her legs, and then she is able to move them a little bit, and she is able to walk out of the office a little easier than the rigid way that she walked in. On the second visit, she is kind of relaxed, she walks in the way she did the first time, we do the work again, and the chest, the eyes, the extremities, and then we talk about her fear of death, because it's clear to me that she is using a very primitive defense mechanism, as if to say, if I appear immobilized, maybe the angel of death will not see me, and he'll skip over me. So, we talk about our fear of death which she admits to very freely, and that gives her a great deal of relief, at least exposed it. After about two or three sessions, she is moving about the house normally again, and that's in general how we treat old people.

Psychiatric Orgone Therapy is not for all patients. There are some people who come to see me and I realize that they don't have the where with all to do the work that is required in therapy, or their structures are too fragile to start to tinker with, and I refer then to colleagues who do talking therapy.

All of the standard psychiatric approaches the patient are employed in psychiatric orgone therapy and I use anti-depressants when necessary and I use neuroleptic drugs when necessary, and I do everything that I learned in my psychiatric training when treating a patient. The difference is that I think that I have a range of activities and weapons with which to deal with patients which many other psychotherapists do not have. It's very typical for our trainees in psychiatric orgone therapy, who are doing their residencies, to say to us, "I am so happy that I have a larger armamentarian than those people have". Another interesting experience was a girl that I treated long time ago. A lady in her 20's, knew nothing about Freud, Reich, nobody, she didn't know anything about psychiatry, her family physician referred her to me and I thought she would be a good candidate for therapy, so we did orgone therapy. She did very well, and many months later, she came in and said " Do you want to hear something". I said "what." She said "I have a girlfriend who went to a psychiatrist and all they do is talk and that's the difference between what we do and what most other people are doing.

"From my point of view, what orgone therapy enables me to do is to reach into places with patients that no other therapy can allow me and give me that kind of entree that psychiatric orgone therapy does."

Thank you

Interviewer: Thank you Dr. Herskowitz. I'm thinking we have two choices. First would be to discuss… Certainly we have to do that, and the second would be since, if I look around, we all do not know Wilhelm Reich personally. I have been told that you knew him, I think it would be important for all of us if you just give us a few remarks about his way of appearance, personality, and… would you agree.

Herskowitz: Yes. Now it's interesting that, I'll tell you how I came to orgone therapy. I was interested in psychiatry from the time that I had an argument with a neighbor who did a lecture when I was sixteen years old, and he said to me you don't even know who Freud was, which was true. So I read Freud's studies and his theories at sixteen, and I understood this much when he was fascinating. So, that's how my interest in psychiatry was generated. Then, I thought that I wanted to go into psychoanalysis, and I was taking didactic courses in psychoanalysis in Philadelphia. And I knew many of the prominent psychoanalysts and I couldn't find one that I felt that I completely trusted myself with. So I had been looking around for a psychoanalyst, and in my course work I would ask questions, and I would get answers, which wouldn't completely satisfy me. Then I thought well, this is the state of the art at this time. Many of the things are clearly correct and you have to tale the bad with the good, and maybe as time goes on, psychoanalysis will develop further. At that time, an acquaintance of mine said to me, "I read a book that I think you will be interested in." I said, "What is it?" He said, "The Sexual Revolution, by Wilhelm Reich." And I said, "Oh, that guy, he's nuts." He said, "How do you know." I said, "Everybody knows he's a nut." He said, "Don't you think that you might read a book that he wrote, and see whether you think that he is nutty or not." So I gave him that privilege of reading Reich's book. And there, in The Sexual Revolution, I read the answers to some of the questions I had asked my psychoanalytic mentor, and answers I had been dissatisfied with. So I proceeded to read all of Reich's books that were available at that time, found that the therapy makes sense to me, so I said this is the man I want to go into therapy with. At that time, Reich was in Forest Hills, N.Y. So I called and made arrangements - this was in the late 1949's - and went to see Dr. Reich. He lived in a very nice, substantial house and at that time. What I had read about orgone energy seemed very strange to me. So, that was something I wanted to avoid when I talked to Reich about my personal therapy. I was waiting in the waiting room and Reich came down the stairs, dressed in a lab coat. My immediate feeling was - ah, he's playing the orgone energy scientist to impress people with his lab coat.

But, the impression of the man was immense - my immediate impression was this man is like a battery ram, there was a force about him that was undeniable. So, we started to talk about my background, my training, what I had read, and what symptoms I had. And he told me if I take you on in therapy you must agree, you must sign a paper saying that if I want to hospitalize you, you will agree to be hospitalized. I couldn't see that it would eventually happen but I thought ok, and I will sign it. And actually he never gave me a paper to sign, I never signed such a paper. And he said, well, therapy is always provisional. If I decide to stop therapy or if you decide to stop therapy, so be it. It was a provisional arrangement for the two of us. And, he said, when you come to therapy, you are a patient, you are not a trainee. You are a patient like every other patient, you may become a therapist, or you may not. Right now, you are a patient, which is agreed.

The man, himself, he had a force, an energy, like no one else that I ever saw. He had a very large head and he was always serious. One never talked trivia or little commonplaces with Reich. Whenever one went into a session., one kind of straightened up emotionally and was prepared to be serious and as deep as could be. In therapy, I figured out later, that he had a way of dealing with patients to kind of keep patients off balance. For example, once at that time, I paid him $50.00 for a session. At one of my sessions, he said the fee will be $100.00 from now on. I said ok., because I would be willing to pay $200.00, and I went to his wife Ilse Ollendorf and I gave her $100.00. I came in for my next session, or after my next session, and I handed Ms. Ollendorf $100.00, she said Dr, Reich said the fee will be $50.00 from now on. So it was a matter of testing to see whether I thought he was valuable enough to pay $100.00 to.

On another occasion, my therapy had been going slowly for about one month, we were in a period of doldrums. Nothing was happening, and he said to me, you are dead. How you ever thought you could be a therapist - there is no life in you, etc. You will never be a therapist. I was crushed, because I thought I was doing fine until then, and I was on my way. And, from that time on, I didn't know whether he was ever going to say you can do therapy, or you cannot do therapy, until many months later, when he said, why don't you take on a patient and start treating your patient and come in and talk to me about it. I thought, hallelujah, I know I've made it. But he kept people off balance like that in order to keep things moving, and he had an anger like no anger I have ever seen. Now he never demonstrated that to me in therapy - in therapy you can sometimes be impatient, but he was never angry with me as a patient. But when a group of therapists were assembled, and he would ask his questions or discuss something, and we would not come anywhere near the correct answer, he could get very, very, angry. In therapy, he also was very, very tender. One had a feeling that one was completely understood as everything that one did was accepted, except, ones trickiness or the kind of thing that superficial layer is. I'll give you an example of that. I had once read the book "Casper Houser" about the growing up of a wolf boy. Reich and I had talked about child development and all the things that can go wrong in child development. So I thought I am going to come to my next session having indicated that I have read "Casper Houser" which is a book that most Americans don't read, and he'll be impressed with my international learning. So I came in and started to speak about Casper Houser, and he said, that's not pertinent. His look said, don't try to impress me this way. That's foolish. Don't be a jerk again in here. So, I learned that lesson.

So that kind of stuff he did not tolerate. One of my habits when I censored material was to go, "um, um." which he would always imitate. And you know when people do that, when that is a big defense mechanism, and when somebody invariably hones in on it, that can be very, very, angry making. So, that was one way that I learned to stop doing um and secondly to express some of my anger toward him.

An incident of the kind of thing that would happen; once he had written an article in the Journal and I read the article on my way to my session, and he said did you read such and such an article and I said yes. And he said, what did you think of it. I said, Oh, I was very impressed, I learned a great deal, etc, etc. But, I said, you made some very bad grammatical mistakes in your English. And, he said to me, I have taken you up in my airplane and I showed you things that you hadn't seen before, and you say to me, oh, it's a nice flight, but do you know that you put the floorboards in incorrectly. You didn't put the nails in correctly in the floorboards in your airplane - which I thought that was saying exactly what had gone on between him and me in that session.

About Reich's alleged psychosis - the story went around, apparently it started with Fenichel that Reich had been institutionalized, and everyone declared Reich psychotic when Reich passed the limit of their expectations of him. When as the political activist, he left them, and went into the next phase, his political cohorts said Reich is now gone crazy. When Reich passed psychoanalysis, into vegeto-therapy, some of the psychoanalysts said Reich has now gone crazy, Wherever he went past wherever people were, he'd gone crazy, and the story persisted through decades, that he was in a psychiatric institution. Once, one of my close friends, who was a professor of opthamology at Jefferson University, which is one of our best medical schools, said to me, "Mort, what do most psychiatrists think of Reich." And I said, "Most psychiatrists think that he is crazy, and I think that most of them think that he is in an institution." He said, "No, I mean the responsible academic psychiatrist." I said, that I think they think that he is crazy and is in an institution. So he was a very methodical man. So he went to the entire psychiatry department at Jefferson School starting with the professor, down through every member of the dept. and he said what do you know about Wilhelm Reich. They all said that he is crazy, and he is in an institution. And he said, are you sure, - yes, we're sure. And he said, well, I have a friend who goes to therapy with him at Forest Hills and they were amazed because they were all sure that Reich was in an institution. So that persisted, and toward the end, Reich had some ideas that had been reported as possibly psychotic. For example, during one of my sessions, an airplane flew overhead, and Reich said Eisenhower, - who was the president at that time, - is interested in our work and he sends these planes over protectively to watch over us. And I said, "I don't think so, I think that's just a plane flying overhead as they fly overhead all over." And he said, "Maybe, but I think that it's protectively." And every time he came out with a statement that other people regarded as possibly psychotic, and every time he expressed such a thing to me, and I expressed an opposite opinion, he did not react the way patients who are delusional react which is to say I know that I am right. His attitude was always, "You may be correct, but this is what I think," which is not the way delusional patients react when one confronts their delusion. I think that Reich came to such areas because he was a man who was used to thinking in ways that most of us do not think. He took leaps of imagination, and sometimes, his leaps of imagination landed in close to heaven, and sometimes his leaps of imagination landed him in a big puddle. But I think that to outsiders, those leaps of imagination that landed him in a big puddle seemed like psychotic statements. And some of them have used that as if to say, he said such and such, therefore, what he said about therapy must also be crazy. Which is to say the same thing as Newton had some very queer ideas and mystical beliefs, therefore, there must be something unsound in Newton's mathematics. Or Shuman went crazy therefore, there must be something wrong in his symphony. And people use those kinds of illogical arguments when talking about Reich. I've never known another man in my lifetime of such force, and such will and movement and spirit and Reich always thought of himself as a historical figure. Its interesting that for example, in his trial, his trial was almost like a fox because some judge had handed down an injunction which Reich clearly disobeyed. So the trial was, "Did Reich disobey the injunction or did he not?" And many times over in the course of the trial, Reich said I disobeyed the injunction. Then he went to tell the judge why he disobeyed the injunction. For example; the injunction said that Reich claimed that he cured cancer and it cited his book of Cancer Biopathy. Now in every case that was cited in the book of Cancer Biopathy, the patient dies, so obviously the people who had prepared this case against Reich had done a very poor job because to say that Reich claims a cure and the patient dies in the book is idiotic. That is the case and Reich, instead of answering the injunction, sent the judge all of his books, which is nuts. You don't expect a judge to read all of your books, but that was Reich, Reich was saying read this and see if this is a valid injunction. So it came to the trial and the trial is terrible, because Reich said that I disobey the injunction, which was all they cared about. One day, at the trial, things had gone on very badly for Reich and I was standing in an aisle, and I thought, he must be crushed at the way the trial went this morning. He walked over to me and I had written an article about a review of one of Reich's books, someone had reviewed, a psychiatrist had reviewed one of Reich's books very unfavorably. An d I wrote a review about that review. So he came over to me at the end of this terrible session at court and he said, you know that article you wrote, he hits us over the head with a club and you slap him on the wrist. I thought, Oh, my God, at a day like this when you are about to go to jail, its clear all you think about is the article that I wrote, it was too gentle with the reviewer and that was Reich, like the fact that he was an historical figure who was fighting for the right of a scientist to pursue his work in peace. The fact that the injunction was the issue, that was not but a piece of paper to him, an unimportant piece of paper, and he did not want to deal with it. Any questions?

One of the participants: What's a Dorbuster?

Herskowitz: A Dorbuster is an orgone energy device. DOR is the accumulation of Dead Orgone Energy and the Dorbuster removes this dead energy. Reich demonstrated the Dorbuster to me personally in my own therapy and in the beginning of my therapy, I had a Dorbuster and I was using it on patients. One of the problems of the Dorbuster is that I could never distinguish between what was the effect of suggestion, what was the effect of transference between the patient and me, or what was the effect of the Dorbuster. There was always a confusion in my mind, and the matter was settled when the FDA, Food and Drug Administration, outlawed all such devices. And we didn't want to get into trouble and so we removed those devices from our practices and most of us have never re-institutionalized it.

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