Psychiatric Orgone Therapy

The following is intended to offer the reader a brief birds-eye view of psychiatric orgone therapy. As therapy is a process and orgone therapy acts at the deepest levels of human functioning and feeling, such a description obviously can only serve as an introduction to the topic.

For further reading material, the reader is directed to the writings of Wilhelm Reich along with Dr. Herskowitz's book. You may also click on the Lectures section of this website for Dr. Herskowitz's December 1993 lecture which provides more detailed information on orgone therapy sessions.

Introduction:

People generally come to therapy because they are stuck, whether they are coming for orgone therapy, psychoanalysis, cognitive-behavioral therapy or medication. Whatever was working for them before in their life, is no longer. There may be a crisis of an acute and sudden nature, or they may come in due to a slow gradual decline, with vague complaints that they are not getting anything out of life, feelings of emptiness, etc. Most often it is in the sphere of their emotional life that their situation has deteriorated. The coping skills they had used to deal with the stresses of their life are no longer adequate.

Several factors, including the person's history, their strengths, overall functioning, motivation, support system and the degree of their decompensation - to name just a few - will go into the therapist's determination whether a person is a suitable candidate for psychiatric orgone therapy.

Is the person willing and able to make the commitment that therapy can require? Sometimes it is best not to open things up if there is not an opportunity to do justice to the situation therapeutically and be able to address the issues thoroughly so some type of resolution can be achieved. At the same time, a person can come to orgone therapy being quite symptomatic and still obtain a great deal of relief from a brief course of therapy.

Some patients may require a good deal of time in which primarily supportive therapy is done before more exploratory and deeper work can ensue. For others, the primary method of working on the armor may be through character analysis.

The decision to work on patients biophysically is not to be undertaken without serious consideration. Precisely because this method is such a powerful tool and can be quite effective in revealing and dissolving certain defenses and getting to the core issues of what is actually troubling the patient, it can also have untoward effects if applied inappropriately.

In orgone therapy appropriately applied, the therapist is flexible and may often move back and forth from the verbal characteranalytic realm to the biophysical mode, as the clinical situation warrants. Whether the therapist is working primarily characteranalytically or biophysically, a great deal of attention is paid to the non-verbal communications and behaviors of the patient. Emphasis is placed more on how the patient defends rather than why.

Energy Movement

Psychiatric orgone therapy is concerned with the movement of energy in the human organism. It approaches the individual as an energetic pulsating being. Natural pulsation is the movement between full expansion and contraction. One cannot exist without the other, and for a person to experience life fully one needs to be able to swing between both poles. The manifestations of expansion and contraction in organ systems is explained elsewhere, and while all emotional life functions within organs of the body in a unitary manner, for the purpose of brevity and illustration, we will be discussing in this format the emotional life of the individual.

Pleasure is an emotion that is directed toward the world and is considered expansive. Rage is also an emotion that is directed outward towards the world but, unlike pleasure, does not fully expand outwardly. Emotions such as anxiety, fear, and sadness are examples of emotions that lead away from the world; in these cases the energy is moving inward, contracting, from the periphery of the person toward the center of the person.

How We Got Here:

Being alive one needs to be able to fully experience and express that emotion appropriate for the situation. It is being able to enjoy our pleasures, grieve fully over our losses and aggressively assert ourselves. However, the formation of chronic armoring in the individual prevents this from happening. It is the misfortune of the world that our infants, children, and adolescents are raised in a world that at the present time knows very little of any other way.

A child's natural curiosity, needs, and drives are continually moving out into the world and interacting with it. However, instead of adequately childproofing a home, for example, parents may leave the glass jar on the table where the infant can touch it with their inquisitive hands. Then, rather than having their natural curiosity encouraged, infants receive a stern "No!" and a firm rebuke. Parents may rationalize doing so by saying they must teach the child early that the world is a dangerous place.

When the baby cries it is better to pick her up and soothe her, not let her cry it out, rationalizing that if we pick her up we'll spoil her and let ourselves be manipulated. Babies need kindness.

It is better to feed the infant when he's hungry by breast feeding according to the infant's own biologically determined rhythms, rather than put him on a feeding schedule.

Children naturally show interest in their genitalia. It is important to affirm childhood sexuality. These are all common and probably obvious examples of ways in which the natural self-regulating behavior of the infant can be encouraged and allowed expression, rather than exerting rigid external rules.

Be on the lookout for other, more subtle instances which can even be more damaging by their insidiousness and constancy: a mother who recognizes and shows affection and validation only for those types of behavior of the child that the mother finds desirable, behaviors that the mother rewards because they reflect well on her and make up for her own low self-esteem. These attitudes will be internalized as rejection by the child for behaving in any way less than as a perfect child.

Fight or Flight:

Encountering frustration, rejection, lack of love, and verbal abuse, the child can become hurt and enraged. But it learns, verbally and more important non-verbally, to suppress its anger, sadness, and frustration. To express it means inviting an even more disproportionate response from the parent, with all the rejection and fear that is implied.

When experiencing these feelings, the child's autonomic nervous system goes into a flight-or-flight response. An analogy would be that to an animal cornered in the wild. Obviously, it is not realistic for the child to take flight and run away from home although, as we shall see below, that is what the child does internally when it shuts down. While reacting with rage and aggression to fight might be an initial response, the child soon learns doing this just brings him more punishment.

There are countless experiences that people can attest to that when they were children and being physically punished, they learned that as long as they kept crying they would continue to be hit until finally they learned to push down the tears, hurt, and rage and be perfectly still. Only in this way would the parent quit their corporal punishment. Also, by doing this the child was able to exert some type of control over the situation and feel they had gained some type of mastery. The child can only successfully stop the expression of these feelings by tightening up and contracting those muscle groups involved in that particular emotional expression.

Before you start to think this does not describe the vast majority of our society, let's look at one of the most common exercises taught to parents to control their children and to keep them from expressing emotions that the parents don't like: the time out.

More, Not Less, Contact Needed:

When the child becomes angry, or once the neurotic process has already begun and the child no longer expresses himself directly but rather does so by some type of behavior that is trying to communicate indirectly what the child feels or wants, we tell the child to go to the corner or go to their room until they can come out and behave like a well-behaved child should.

So the child goes to his room, sucks it in and stuffs the feelings down, and when he has exerted control over himself then he is allowed to return to the company of his family. The message given the child here and in all of these examples is hopefully clear by now: there are certain feelings you can have and there are other feelings which we just don't want to see, and if you are going to have them you better go be by yourself. Just at that time when the child may be the most distraught and overwhelmed with what they are feeling and could benefit from being held and helped through it, they are banished from contact with the people they love the most. And so we accomplish the socialization of the child.

In learning not to express their emotions what the child learns is that he must control expressing those forbidden feelings. Control is established by a general contraction of the muscles involved in the expression of that feeling.

To deaden one's feelings it is also necessary to lower the overall energy state of the organism as well. If there is less energy, then there is less danger that the repressed feelings can break through that inhibition that keeps them locked in.

Incipient Armoring:

In children, the first signs of armoring are usually seen in the diaphragmatic area and the chest. Armoring that may already be immobilizing other areas, especially in the eyes, may be more subtle and not as evident. Holding in these areas as well as in other segments of the body can present in a variety of ways.

Generally, the muscles are in some state of chronic contraction and spasticity, with some degree of sensitivity to palpation. This would be expected in a person whose musculature is tense and in a state of contraction. At this point the armoring is usually not permanent and gives way fairly easily with proper therapeutic intervention. Of course, this is only true relative to the amount of damage the child has suffered. It can be expected to recur, but at this stage it is not permanent.

Chronic Armoring:

While some degree of armoring is necessary for any person to function in the world, it is when the armor becomes rigid and the individual loses the flexibility to take off the armor when it is no longer needed that problems occur. It is then we say the person no longer has armor, the armor has him.

This process can be greatly accelerated when the growing individual is either denied the opportunity to engage in loving, sexual relationships (whether due to external or internal prohibitions is not the issue here). If in spite of prohibitions the person still manages to establish a relationship, it can become so overladen with secondary drives, guilt, sadism, etc., that the energy economy of the individual remains blocked enough to give rise to neurotic symptoms.

To the degree that the individual retains contact with his core and primary feelings, the less this armoring process can take hold and anchor itself in the individual.

In those cases where it does, the adolescent and young adult can begin to develop chronic emotional attitudes. This character armoring is seen as an outgrowth of a number of dynamic factors in the person's life, including its genetic make-up, its own unique temperament as well as its environment. Specific attitudes (to name just a few) would include spitefulness, a what's-the-use attitude, a strong tendency to demean oneself, haughtiness, being overly compliant or always doing for others. Chronic character attitudes function as a compromise solution to the person's internal conflicts between their drives and the repressing forces, both external and internal. Repression serves to alleviate the person to some degree of the anxiety presented by these painful conflicts.

With time these characterological attitudes and muscular holding patterns become chronic, lending a rigidity to the personality style of the person as well as decreased emotional liveliness and expressivity. Overall a general chronic sympatheticonia prevails in the organism.

This chronic contraction of the musculature acts as a dynamic reservoir to continue to immobilize the energy and keep the energetic level of the organism low.

Tools of Therapy:

Orgone therapy works to undo this chronic armoring. It does so by utilizing character analysis to point out those neurotic attitudes and behaviors held by the patient. If they can be viewed more objectively by the patient, they can begin to consider them as something foreign that doesn't feel right to the person and that they want to rid.

It also uses biophysical methods to deal with physical manifestations of armoring: dissolving the muscular tensions, acute and chronic; to assist in the breathing; to bring the rage, buried sadness and longings to the surface; to get the energy moving.

Orgone therapy works to re-establish natural pulsation in the organism. One of the basic tools it uses is to work with the respirations of the patient to build up the charge of the organism. This in itself can bring to the surface emotions that may be weakly defended against. The goal, by dissolving the armor, is to allow the energy to move freely through the body so the natural pulsation of the body can occur. The pulsation can then swing from contraction to expansion. In the orgasm reflex one can see the full manifestation of this phenomenon.

The Therapeutic Process:

As significant amounts of armor are dissolved, the patient may experience streaming sensations in his body. It is not unusual during therapy for involuntary movements to appear. This is generally regarded as a positive development and encouraged, unless it begins to function as a resistance.

In orgonomy, the therapist generally begins work at the most superficial layer. Superficial here is not meant in a derogatory way, but indicates those character traits and attitudes that are closest to the patient's conscious awareness. Biophysical work usually begins at the head, the area farthest from the genital, and proceeds toward the pelvis, progressing to deeper layers as the course of therapy indicates. For the vast majority of patients who have grown up in contactless families, this entails lengthy work on the ocular segment: the eyes and the related musculature.

It is necessary to first get the energy loosened up and moving in the upper segments before work proceeds to the deeper layers for a number of reasons. Energy freed up from the higher (more superficial) layers can then be used to help in the push to work through the deeper segments. Neglecting to adequately work through the higher segments first can lead down the road to a situation where the block then becomes even more entrenched and difficult, if not impossible, to dissolve.

Character analysis, which seeks to help determine where the patient is stuck energetically and developmentally, is another tool used by the therapist. Thus, character analysis can also function to help the therapist determine where the major blocks in the body are. Working on the character traits helps to reveal the person's defenses, allowing the therapist to confront the patient on how those defenses can be self-destructive and maladaptive.

Acting Out:

Speaking of self-destructive behaviors, patients who are currently abusing alcohol, drugs or engaging in other destructive ways are not candidates for orgone therapy, and they are required to stop those behaviors before being considered for therapy. Those behaviors serve to suppress the anxiety that is underneath, and prevent the therapist and patient from contact with the anxiety and associated issues. This goes for other antisocial behaviors as well.

The orgone therapist, unlike the conventional psychiatrist, does not seek to take away the patient's anxiety in a knee-jerk fashion by prescribing tranquilizers, although in certain circumstances they may have a temporary role. The goal is to get the patient to tolerate the anxiety, to breathe through and not tighten up against it. Thus by bringing the anxiety out into the open, one then can hopefully get at the underlying affect, memory, and armoring involved.

In orgone therapy, it is not uncommon for the patient to progress and work through much of the armoring without specifically recalling actual memories. Since many of us grew up in families where the armor came about not because of physical abuse or peak traumatic events, but rather with the insidiousness associated with the chronic, negative attitudes of parents, educators, peers and various institutions, this is understandable.

In fact, in therapy, one of the hurdles occasionally encountered can be an overemphasis on the part of the patient in trying to understand why they feel a certain way, or where an emotion is coming from. We are definitely not opposed to such an understanding. In fact, true functional understanding is encouraged because it can serve to integrate the person's different conflicted feelings and help the person from repeating and acting out his unresolved feelings in the present. Unfortunately, what can occur is that the patient uses this questioning as an intellectualizing defense, further distancing themselves from their actual feelings. It is thus often necessary to put more emphasis on the process than the content.

So the question becomes, not what happened to you thirty years ago that you're wanting to cry now during the session, but what are you doing now to keep yourself from crying. Frequently, one sees in patients that once they allow themselves to take the risk and give into expressing the emotion, the associated memory comes to the surface.

Therapy is usually conducted on a once-a-week basis. Patients in acute distress may need to be seen more frequently. Some patients benefit by taking breaks from therapy, giving themselves an opportunity to consolidate their gains and allow the restructuring process time to establish itself.

Concluding Remarks:

Orgone therapy utilizes all of the techniques one learns in one's psychiatric training, including psychoanalytical concepts and the appropriate use of psychotropic medications. Speaking of the latter, while one of the goals of therapy would be to have the individual functioning without medication, one needs to be realistic. We are dealing with organisms that have been living with their armor, their maladaptive defenses and irrationalities for years, if not decades. One's goals and therapeutic zeal need to be tempered with the reality of each individual's capabilities and limits. In such cases, one has to take a step back and take a more global view of what is possible.

As Reich said, with trees that have already grown twisted, it is not possible to get them to grow straight. The most one can do is to clear the undergrowth around the tree that interferes with its growth.

All the same, clearing one's undergrowth can provide a person with a new sense of themselves, a heightened awareness of one's needs and an ability to use one's natural aggressiveness to go after what corresponds to their natural needs so they can experience pleasure and happiness. It can provide one with new tools that allow a more natural expression of their emotions, so they can cry when sad, express anger when appropriate, to be intimate with a loved one without running away.

About our Orgone Therapists:

For information on whether a psychiatric orgone therapist practices in your area, please contact us at the address below. The IOS currently has therapists located on the east coast (Boston area, New York City, and Philadelphia area) and in California (Los Angeles area and San Diego area).

If we have no therapists in your immediate area, please be aware that patients frequently travel several hours by ground or air for their therapy. Some therapists will arrange intensive weekend or week-long series of sessions if patients cannot go to sessions on a regular basis. We will supply you with a list of therapists whom you may contact either in your area or out of your area.