I’ve had an awakening this week provoked by an article in Saturday’s Guardian Review written by Olivia Laing. She describes her experience of working with a body psychotherapist and her research into the life of Wilhelm Reich.
Wilhelm Reich and body psychotherapy
In the early 1990s I trained as a holistic body psychotherapist at the Chiron Centre in Ealing. The idea of a psychotherapy that centred on the body, integrating massage and energy work with talking therapy was originated by the renegade psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich. An analyst himself, Reich was driven to try and understand why his patients might want to escape or subdue their bodies and emotions and why, despite that, the body remains a naked source of power. As a young man in Vienna at the end of the first world war Reich was Sigmund Freud’s most brilliant protégé. In the early 1920s, he had a heretical revelation. Maybe the past wasn’t just housed in the memory, as Freud believed, but stored in the body too. In 1930 he moved to Berlin but his work came to an abrupt halt when Hitler seized power in 1933. He published The Mass Psychology of Fascism, explaining how the patriarchal family acted as a unit of indoctrination, training people from childhood to submit to authority. Reich emigrated to the United States in 1939, a refugee from Hitler’s Europe,
In the USA he claimed to have discovered the universal energy that animates all life. Calling it orgone energy, he developed a pseudoscientific machine to harness its healing powers. On 7 May 1956, he was sentenced to two years imprisonment for refusing to stop selling his orgone energy invention. He was sent to Lewisburg Penitentiary in Pennsylvania and six months later died of a heart attack in his cell. One reason he isn’t more respected or discussed now is that the unorthodox ideas he developed in the second half of his life have overwhelmed the radical, incisive ideas about sex and politics that he has evolved in Europe before the war.
Reich’s teaching
Reich wondered whether the energy he released in working with his clients was the same thing that Freud termed libido. Reich suspected the orgasm was the body’s innate way of releasing tension, dissolving the rigid armour of trauma and unhappiness in a rush of fluid, libidinous energy. In the early 1930s, Reich coined the term “the sexual revolution” to describe the universe of happiness and love that would arise once people had shaken off the punitive, prurient attitudes that shackled them to habitual, patriarchal family and social norms. He saw his own patients lying stiff and rigid on the couch alienated from their bodily emotions and energies, estranged from their own needs and desires.
He used the term body armour to describe the kind of clenching and clamping that pervaded a patient’s entire being, an almost impenetrable tension. He thought it was a defence against feeling, especially anxiety, rage and sexual excitement. If experiences were too painful and distressing, if emotional expression was forbidden or sexual desire prohibited, then the only alternative was to tense up and lock it away. This process created a permanent physical shield around the vulnerable self, protecting it from pain at the cost of numbing it to pleasure. He began to work with his patients’ bodies, first verbally and then by touching them, something totally prohibited in psychoanalysis. To his amazement, he found that the feelings lodged in the body could be brought to the surface and released, this emotional release often accompanied by a pleasurable rippling feeling that he called “streaming”. Laing’s therapy sessions included massage and more often than not patients experienced a sense of energy moving through their bodies, a tingling sensation, not sexual exactly, but as if an obstinate blockage had been dislodged bringing experience of a newly lively, quivering energy. Orgasm is one of the most powerful and pleasurable ways in which we spontaneously release streams of energy.
Reich thought hateful and cruel behaviours that suppressed energy were a consequence of the unequal and deforming systems in which people were forced to live. He believed that our bodies are burdened by both emotional trauma and the social conditions we endure.
Sexual liberation
Reich’s earlier work as a sexual liberationist opened eyes to the consequences of patriarchal models of ownership as well as restrictive attitudes to sex, a precursor of the #MeToo movement. Violence also woke Reich up to the ways in which not all bodies are protected by the state. From feminism to gay liberation to the civil rights movement, the struggles of the last century were at heart about the right to be free of oppression based on the kind of body you inhabited.
My awakening
Olivia Laing’s article about Reich awakened me to awareness that although the Changing Attitude England campaign for equality in ministry and relationships has been driven by a rejection of biblical fundamentalist homophobic teaching, it now has to become a forceful campaign against the abuse of LGBTIQ+ people by the Christian Church in general and the Church of England House of Bishops in particular. The House of Bishops, supported by various conservative movements and a toxic reading of the Bible, seek to maintain teachings that prohibit intimacy and sexual activity for clergy and licenced lay people, suppressing our bodies, emotions and life energies, banning recognition of our intimate relationships by forbidding blessings and the celebration of civil partnerships and marriages in church.