[ First Meeting with Reich ] [ Beginning Therapy ] [ Experiences in Therapy ] [ Reich Outside of Therapy ] [ The Trial ] [ Conclusions ]

As one gets older, one's memory gets less sharp.  So the things that I tell you are things as I best remember them.  If I quote Reich, it may not be an exact quotation, because over a long period of time things get distorted.  But I give you my best memories.

MY INTRODUCTION TO ORGONOMY

I'll tell you first how I came to orgonomy and how  I got to Reich.  A man who was a scholar in this city when I was in medical school, and knew I was interested in psychiatry, said to me, "I've read a book and I think you'd be interested in it."  I asked him, "What is it?"  He answered, "Sexual Revolution, by Wilhelm Reich."  And I said, "Oh, that guy, he's a nut."  He said, "How do you know he's a nut?"  I answered, "Everybody knows he's nuts."  And he said, "Don't you think you might read a book before you call a man a nut?"  That was reasonable, I thought.  So I read Sexual Revolution.

For people who read Sexual Revolution today, it is not as much a magnificent opening of the mind as it was when I read it, which was probably in the very early forties.

At that time I was considering going into psychoanalysis and I had been shopping around for an analyst in the city.  I had taken courses and had gone to lectures and of the people who are psychoanalysts whom I knew I hadn't yet found one that I would trust myself to.  And when I read Sexual Revolution, there were the answers to so many questions that I had raised in my course work and hadn't got any reasonable and straightforward answers to.  Sexual Revolution was a mind opener to me and thereafter I read all of Reich's books that were available.  By the time I had finished reading them I thought, "This is the man to whom I want to go to for therapy."

I called Reich and he was in Forest Hills at that time and we arranged an appointment.  I must tell you, of all the things that I've read, the only thing that didn't sit well with me was the concept of orgone energy because, having been trained in classical science, orgone energy was a wild concept.  So I had planned to go see Reich and to keep any mention of orgone energy out of the conversation because I knew the therapy made sense and I wanted to get into therapy with him.