Although some segments of the culture have adopted, or better yet never lost these practices, they are far from universal. For my doctoral dissertation, in the 1970’s I interviewed at length both Ilse Ollendorff (Reich’s wife and the mother of his son, Peter) and Gladys Meyer (Theodore Wolff’s widow) and also Evelyn Tropp (Oscar Tropp’s widow) as well as some of their children, and also some adults who had gone to Summerhill as children. At that time, all my interviewees considered themselves part of a “cognitive minority” and quite distinct from the cultural mainstream. And, when I presented some of these ideas at a Somatic Experiencing Conference in California recently, a surprising number of mental health professionals said that Reich’s suggestions were far from common practice. More recently, Peter Levine and Maggie Klein wrote prescriptively about the treatment of infants in Trauma Through a Child’s Eyes. I found enormous similarities to Reich’s ideas in what they propounded, again bringing home the lack of full cultural acceptance of such practices. Levine and Klein emphasize the importance of both the prevention of developmental trauma and the development of what would now be called resilience. They employ slightly different vocabulary informed by more recent research. What was speculative on the part of Reich is neuroscientifically-based and elaborated by Levine and Klein. An extended comparison will be made in later papers in this series. In recent years, the term “self regulation” has again become current, this time in the literature of applied neuroscience and neuropsychoanalysis. Authors such as Allan Schore (1994, 2003), Amini, et al. (1996), Daniel Siegel (1999), and Louis Cozolino (2002), have used the term to refer to the affect regulation developed by the infant in concert with the effective parent or caregiver. Peter Fonagy and his associates (1995) have explored the relationship between affect regulation and the development of the self. (See also literature review by Shapiro and Moore.) So contemporary neuroscientific research has picked up where Freud, and subsequently Reich, left off. With tools such as fMRI’s, scientists are able to trace happenings in the nervous system that Freud and Reich could only intuit or suggest. Freud left the neurological research in which he had been trained to find a whole new “science” of psychology. Reich at first followed his mentor but subsequently disagreed with him about, 28 Jacqueline A. Carleton Reich Was Right among other things, the biological/energetic basis of psychosexual development. What Freud ultimately saw as metaphoric, Reich saw as strictly physical/energetic. Reich and the autonomic nervous system Utilizing the model/metaphor of the amoeba, Reich noted that the human organism is in a constant state of expansion and contraction at every level. Most easily observed in pulse and in respiration, this principle is characteristic of every cell and organ in the body. He observed this expansion and contraction, sympathetic/ parasympathetic alternation, most poignantly in the human orgasm and a lot of his work eventually centered on the meaning and achievement of healthy sexual functioning. As we know, it also characterizes the emotions and is evident in the natural oscillation at low stress levels of the sympathetic and parasympathetic branches of the nervous system. Withdrawal of energy he termed anorgonia, and blockage by muscular contraction he termed armoring. Reich observed clinically that the control of anxiety was the main function of either armoring or withdrawal of energy from a body part. In the 1930’s, building on the work of Walter and Kathe Misch, and also the experiments of Krause and Muller, Reich began to associate anxiety with a blocked response of the sympathetic nervous system and to associate the parasympathetic with pleasure. Alternatively, the vagal system he associated with libidinal expansion and movement outward while the sympathetic was essentially the system of libidinal retreat, drawing back into oneself. What is important is not so much the details but the overarching principle of expansion and contraction characteristic of a healthy organism. Peter Levine would later characterize it as autonomic pendulation. According to his biographer Myron Sharaf (1983): …Reich was the first psychoanalyst to emphasize the role of sympathetic response in neurotic illness. It is interesting to note that current bio-feedback techniques often involve the replacement of anxiety states [sympathetic] with calmer ones by conditioning the patient to relaxing (parasympathetic) thoughts and feelings….It should be stressed that Reich’s therapy, unlike bio-feedback techniques, did not aim at the avoidance of anxiety states. On the
29 Publizr Home