contrary, the binding of anxiety in the armor was more of a problem than free-floating anxiety itself. Intense anxiety was often aroused in the course of therapy as the armor loosened. The patient was helped to work through his anxiety states, not avoid them. The cardinal therapeutic problem became the fear of intense emotions and, in particular, the fear of strong pleasurable sensations (what Reich termed “pleasure anxiety”) (Sharaf,1983, p. 208). In a personal communication, Kristi Foster, a doctoral student at Santa Barbara Graduate Institute, points out that: This concept of autonomic nervous system response ties in with polyvagal theory. Polyvagal theory states that in situations of sympathetic nervous system activation the capacity for the ventral vagal, or social nervous system, to function is impaired (Sahar, Shalev, & Porges, 2001). Attendant with impaired social nervous system functioning is a shutting down in nerve pathways to the gut. This shutting down of nerve pathways to the gut affects the enteric nervous system, or gut brain, and also lessens one’s capacity for pleasure (Porges, 1998). What Porges’ (1998) theory suggests parallels the work of Reich (1942/1973). An impaired capacity to experience pleasure leaves one with a tendency toward anxiety. This tendency toward anxiety pushes one toward social shut-down as well as enteric nervous system shut down. This shutting down of social or bodily intelligence creates an inability to read the warning signals generated by one’s body. So Reich was concerned with what would be seen by neuroscientists and traumatologists such as Pat Ogden and Peter Levine1 and their colleagues as dissociation of the anxiety. But, unlike many Reichians and neoReichians, they have developed many techniques for titrating the amount of anxiety that is aroused in the course of therapy. Great emphasis is placed on gradual introduction of highly activating material, with the therapist keeping a close watch on the patient’s gradually increasing tolerance and thereby, resilience. Some of these principles will be outlined below in the section on clinical applications. 1 Perusing Peter Levine’s doctoral dissertation, I noticed that he briefly noted (pp.65-6) the significance of Wilhelm Reich’s thought to the development of contemporary paradigms used in many somatic psychotherapies, chief among them, Somatic Experiencing. He specifically highlighted Reich’s theory of energetic charge/discharge involving the autonomic nervous system. Reich, Pierrakos, and contemporary neuroscience In Reich and Freud’s time, and still in John Pierrakos’, most patients came to therapy heavily armored, rigid, with resistance that had to be penetrated. That is how I was originally trained by the Reichians (Orgonomists), and then in Core Energetics. But, by and large, those are not the people we see today. Today, our challenges are containing, grounding, and preventing fragmentation as we help our patients heal themselves. Over the years, I have had to learn to modify techniques, to titrate, to PREVENT people from going too deep all at once rather than helping them go deeper quickly as I was trained to do more than 30 years ago. One particular patient comes to mind as I think of what neuroscience has taught me: a North African man I worked with many years ago. He had been repeatedly traumatized by physical punishment in elementary school and then by his parents at home. He told me about one particularly significant event when he was about 8. His parents went out on a Sunday afternoon, leaving him with a massive amount of arithmetic to learn for a test the next day. He remembered trying for a while and then, lured by the sounds of his brother and sister playing in the courtyard, finally joined them. When his parents returned, his father quizzed him on the math. When it was obvious in his father’s eyes that he didn’t learn enough, his father beat him so badly that he could not go to school for the next several days. Nobody in the family would speak to him, except for a maid who crept up to his room and dressed the lacerations on his back, buttocks and legs. In one therapy session we agreed he needed to revisit that afternoon expressing the feelings he was unable to express at that time. As we worked through it, he hit, punched, kicked, yelled obscenities (only in Arabic, of course), etc. We worked until pretty near the end of the session. When he got up to leave, we did some grounding, but I could tell that he was still somewhat dissociated, so I suggested he sit in the waiting room a while before venturing out onto the streets. He missed his next session because of an attack of bronchitis, but that didn’t register with either of us as retraumatization. It was just the kind of thing that occasionally occurred in therapy. In the following session, he told me he was pretty out of it for the entire day following that session and we both figured he had done some good, deep work in that session. energy & character vol.37 may 2009 29
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