 |
 |
|
|
|
EXPERIENCES IN THERAPY
On another occasion, my therapy had been going slowly for about one month, we were in a period of doldrums. Nothing was happening, and he said to me, "You are dead. How you ever thought you could be a therapist - there is no life in you. You will never be a therapist." I was crushed, because I thought I was doing fine until then and I was on my way [to becoming a psychiatric orgone therapist]. From that time on, I didn't know whether he was ever going to say you can do therapy, or you cannot do therapy, until many months later, when he said, "Why don't you take on a patient and start treating your patient and come in and talk to me about it." I thought, "Hallelujah! I know I've made it." But he kept people off balance like that in order to keep things moving, and he had an anger like no anger I have ever seen. Now he never demonstrated that to me in therapy - in therapy he could sometimes be impatient, but he was never angry with me as a patient. But when a group of therapists were assembled and he would ask his questions or discuss something, and we would not come anywhere near the correct answer, he could get very, very angry. In therapy, he was also very, very tender. One had a feeling that one was completely understood as everything that one did was accepted, except one's trickiness or the kind of thing from the superficial layer. I'll give you an example of that. I had once read the book Casper Houser about the growing up of a wolf boy. Reich and I had talked about child development and all the things that can go wrong in a child's development. So I thought, "I am going to come to my next session having indicated that I have read Casper Houser, which is a book that most Americans don't read, and he'll be impressed with my international learning." I came in and started to speak about Casper Houser, and he said, "That's not pertinent." His look said, "Don't try to impress me this way, that's foolish, don't be a jerk again in here." So I learned that lesson. That kind of stuff he did not tolerate. One of my habits when I censored material was to go "um, um" which he would always imitate. When people do that, it's a big defense mechanism. When somebody invariably hones in on it, it can be very, very irritating. That was one way that I learned to stop doing "um" and, secondly, to express some of my anger toward him. In general, therapy was a very electrifying experience. Halfway through my therapy Reich moved to Orgonon in Maine. At that time, he said, "I'm going to move to Maine. Do you want to go to another therapist down around here?" I answered, "Oh no, I'm going to Maine!" So about halfway through my therapy I went every other week. I would drive up on Friday night. Back then the roads were nothing like the super highways that are now going up to Maine. They were terrible roads. I would ride all through the night on Friday and get to Orgonon or the area at about six o'clock in the morning, sleep for about two hours and then go for a session on Saturday morning, then go for another session on Sunday morning and then drive home. In the middle of wintertime, when people from down here couldn't drive on the road, when not even people from Maine could drive in that kind of snow, then I used to fly to Augusta, Maine, and hitchhiked up to Orgonon. There were always lumber trucks going along, so you could always hitch a ride up to Orgonon. I always considered it as an adventure. I never looked forward to it with any kind of apprehension like, "Oh, now I have to go to Maine." I always looked forward to the weekend when I went up to Maine, no matter what the weather. So when one has a patient who lives 30 miles away who says, "The weather is too bad so I can't come today," I feel like, you don't deserve therapy. There is one interesting anecdote about driving to Maine. One day Reich said to me, "How long does it take you to drive from Philadelphia up to here?" "Oh, a little more than twelve hours," I replied. Then he said, "It takes twelve hours from New York." And I said, "Yeah, but I drive pretty fast." So he said, "You have a right to risk your own life, but you don't have a right to risk other peoples' lives. So unless it takes you twelve hours plus the time it takes from Philadelphia to New York, don't bother coming any more." So, after that I drove more slowly, and I took fourteen hours to get to Maine instead of twelve hours. Therapy with Reich, as I said, was exhilarating. There were times that it was, of course, frightening, but there was only one time that I ever entertained the thought of suicide. I knew I wouldn't do it, but for one brief period the idea of suicide entered my head. It was after a session with Reich and that was a new experience to me, having that kind of depressed feeling, because generally I'm an up person. I don't get depressed too easily. In therapy the thing that was unique about Reich was how he always hit the nail on the head. He just had amazing sensitivity and amazing acumen. He knew exactly where the patient was and he knew exactly what to do in order to evoke what had to be evoked at that time. And when he did he often said, "You will never be this good." Another time he said, "I'm the only orgonomist. No one else can really do therapy." And compared to Reich, it was true. The essence of the therapy with Reich was truthfulness. One would never think of talking small talk with Reich. There was always an atmosphere of deep seriousness. I remember an incident. When you're in therapy, as a negative transference starts operating and you do all kinds of silly things, I remember once before my session I was standing downstairs where Reich was in his dining room. I heard him say to Peter, his son, "Shut up." So that was grist for my mill. When we had my session I said, " I heard you talking to Peter and I heard you say urgently to him to shut up. I don't think that's how one should talk to children." So he gave me a lecture on how one talks to children. In fact "shut up" was the most direct way of accomplishing what he wanted to accomplish with Peter at that time. I kind of half knew why he was doing it. But you do things, you try to irritate him. Because he's gotten you. And you try to get back at him. Another time I heard the sweetest discourse between him and Peter. Peter wanted to know why you spell "knife" with a "k". He said it should be called "kneif" if you spell it with "k". I don't remember the details, but Reich gave him the sweetest discourse on why the "k" is in front of the "n" in "knife." That kind of thing, that was almost learned, but it was also a kind of thing that a child could easily understand. We had one session that's interesting to talk about: I had come for a series of sessions voicing some cynicism. I accused him of exaggerating a little, I believe. At that time there were lots of stories going around that Reich was psychotic, which I reported to him as things I had heard. Not as if I believed them, but I was just reporting them to him. So I came up for a session and he had a rifle standing by the fireplace in the room where he treated me. He picked up the rifle and he pointed it at my head and he said, "I'm psychotic!" I burst out laughing, because what he wanted to see was, did I believe these stories or was merely reporting them. I burst out laughing because it struck me so funny- the idea of a therapist putting a gun to a patient's head. And that was what he needed. Like he laughed too, and he put the gun back. That's how Reich got at something. He didn't monkey around. He wanted to see whether you believed he was crazy. He gave you ample chance to prove that you thought he was crazy. I think that Reich was truly one of the real geniuses in this world. I think that those people think by exploring all kinds of ideas that never appeared to us; they push ideas way beyond the limits that we hold ourselves to think in. And because of that he came up with so many of his marvelous ideas. An incident of the kind of thing that would happen with him: Once he had written an article in the Journal and I read the article on my way to my session, and he asked me had I read such and such an article and I said yes. And he asked me what did I think of it. I told him, I was very impressed, I learned a great deal, etc, etc. "But," I added, "you made some very bad grammatical mistakes in your English." He said to me, "I have taken you up in my airplane and I showed you things that you hadn't seen before, and you say to me, 'Oh, it's a nice flight, but do you know that you put the floorboards in incorrectly. You didn't put the nails in correctly in the floorboards in your airplane'." Which I thought was saying exactly what had gone on between him and me in that session. I think that Reich came to such areas because he was a man who was used to thinking in ways that most of us do not think.
|
|
