Wilhelm Reich (1897 to 1957) was a psychoanalyst, trained by Freud, who came to see that our defences against feeling are held not only in the mind but in the body, as chronic tension he called armour. He is often called the founder of body psychotherapy. Therapeutic Shamanism draws deeply on his early work on the body and on how a repressive society shapes us, but sets aside his later claims about a cosmic energy he called orgone.
Who was Wilhelm Reich? #
A doctor and psychoanalyst whose life was as turbulent as his ideas were original. He was born on 24 March 1897 in Galicia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.1 As the therapists Nick Totton and Em Edmondson put it, he “trained as a young man with Freud in Vienna, and worked as a psychoanalyst.”2 He later moved to Berlin, and became increasingly involved in politics, which brought him into conflict with both the psychoanalysts and the political parties of his day. In 1934 he was expelled from the international psychoanalytic organisation, and over the next years he moved through Scandinavia before settling in the United States in 1939.3
He died in the federal prison at Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, on 3 November 1957, whilst serving a sentence for contempt of court in a case brought over his later work.4
What did Reich discover about the body? #
That we hold our defences in our muscles. Reich noticed that the ways we protect ourselves from painful feelings show up in our whole character, and in the body as chronic tension. His biographer Myron Sharaf, who trained with him, explains that this “character armour” served “to protect the individual against pain, but also served to restrict severely the capacity for pleasure”.5 Reich himself defined armour as “The total defence apparatus of the organism, consisting of the rigidities of the character and the chronic spasms of the musculature”.6
Reich, “founder of body-centred psychotherapy”, taught that “the body never lies.” See What is body armouring, and what does Reichian work contribute?
What did he say about society? #
That repression is not only personal. In The Mass Psychology of Fascism, published in 1933 as the Nazis came to power, Reich’s case was that a society which teaches people to hold down their feelings and their bodies produces people who will submit to authority. Sharaf notes that he made this argument “almost ten years before Fromm’s Escape from Freedom”, a better-known book on the same theme.7 It is a link Therapeutic Shamanism also makes. The first organised religions were “agents of further domesticationDomestication. The process by which, in domesticating other species, we domesticated ourselves. When dated precisely, Domestication begins with the Neolithic era, before the Fall proper, which begins with the first city-state cultures around 4000 BCE. What rewilding works to undo. More about this and control”, and they “tell us that we cannot trust ourselves and our own instincts, or trust the feelings in our own bodies”.8 See What does domestication do to us?
What happened in his later years? #
His work took a direction that most scientists rejected. From the late 1930s Reich believed he had discovered a universal life energy, which he called orgone, and he built boxes, called accumulators, which he claimed could gather it and help treat illness. In the 1950s the American Food and Drug Administration took legal action against the accumulators. Reich refused to recognise the court’s authority, was convicted of contempt and sentenced to two years in prison. His accumulators and many of his books and journals were destroyed by order of the court, which his supporters, and later his biographer, saw as an attack on free expression.9 He died in prison before his parole hearing.
Even Sharaf, who admired him, writes that “The weight of scientific opinion still considers Reich’s experimental work unworthy of serious investigation.”10 Therapeutic Shamanism does not teach orgone. What it takes from Reich is his earlier work on the body, character and society.
Why does Reich matter to Therapeutic Shamanism? #
Because so much of what has been done to us is held in the body. Reich is among Paul Francis’s heroes, alongside Carl Rogers and Ursula Le Guin, though Paul knows perfectly well that, however heroic and inspiring they have been to him, they are (or were) flawed individuals.11 Reich is also among the psychotherapists drawn on for Therapeutic Shamanism’s picture of a healthy Adult: “particularly from Rogers, Maslow, Reich and Jung”.12
His ideas also lie behind the character types Therapeutic Shamanism uses in its work on the body, though that scheme is not Reich’s own: it was put together later, drawing on writers who followed him. See What can shamanism offer Reichian work?
Where does Therapeutic Shamanism go beyond Reich? #
Reich’s work stayed with the human body and human society. Therapeutic Shamanism adds Soul, the Lower-WorldLower-World. The realm of Mother Earth: pure, unspoilt, wild nature, with no technology and no agriculture. Home of the Peoples and of our own Soul, and completely safe: feeling threatened in a journey is a reliable sign of not having reached it. Read the full answer and the other-than-human Peoples, and the healing of parts of ourselves we have had to send away in order to fit in. Reich did write about animism, and defended what he called its “rational core”, but he did so in terms of his own theory of orgone, and he should not be read as an animist. See What is soul-loss?
