BEGINNING THERAPY

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

He told me, "If I take you on in therapy you must agree to sign a paper saying that if I want to hospitalize you, you will agree to be hospitalized."  I couldn't see that that would ever eventually happen, but I thought, "OK, I'll sign it."  As a matter of fact, he never gave me a paper to sign, I never signed such a paper.  He also said, "Therapy is always provisional.  If I decide to stop therapy or if you decide to stop therapy, so be it."  It was a provisional arrangement for the two of us, which I thought was reasonable.  Another thing he said was, "When  you come to therapy, you are a patient, you are not a trainee.  You are a patient like every other patient. You may become a therapist, or you may not.  Right now, you  are a patient."  To which I agreed.

Then we started therapy.  It was immediately apparent to me what a powerful technique this was.  No one who has not been in therapy can really fully appreciate the power of the therapy.  You must have experienced it in order to really know what it does.

I can remember that after most of the sessions at Forest Hills, each time that I left the therapeutic session and was walking towards the subway, I felt like I had never remembered feeling.  I was flying.

Therapy became much more important to me than I assumed that it would, because so far as I knew I was not in bad shape emotionally.  Initially, the reason I was pursuing therapy was mostly for training purposes, because I believe that anyone who goes into psychiatry should have been in therapy.  I had a kind of academic approach to therapy.  But being in orgone therapy, one's mind is quickly changed, because things happen that you never had anticipated happening to you.

The man himself had a force, an energy, like no one else that I ever saw.  He had a very large head and he was always serious.  One never talked trivia or about little commonplaces with Reich.  Whenever one went into a session, one kind of straightened up emotionally and was prepared to be serious and as deep as one could be.

In therapy, I figured out later, that he had a way of dealing with patients to kind of keep patients off balance.  For example, at that time, I paid him $50.00 for a session. At one of my sessions, he said the fee would be $100.00 from now on.  I said "OK," because I would be willing to pay $200.00.  I went to his wife Ilse Ollendorf and I gave her $100.00.  I came in for my next session, or after my next session, and I handed Ms. Ollendorf $100.00, and she said, "Dr. Reich said the fee will be $50.00  from now on."  So it was a matter of testing to see whether I thought he was valuable enough to pay $100.00 .