Wilhelm Reich, psychoanalyst and scientist

Reich died in jail in America nearly sixty years ago, after having most of his books burnt on the orders of the American government. As a young psychiatrist in Vienna, in the mid - 1920 he had been a brilliant pupil of Sigmund Freud and part of the inner circle in the growing world of psychoanalysis. Many of his ideas are in use today; often unacknowledged However, many distorted idea and rumours were circulated about him and his work during his life and after his death. 

I became interested in Reich's work in my late teens sensing that his connection of the body, energy,  sexuality, repression and political ideology were key. His book Character Analysis showed some of his therapeutic approach; based in the early work of Freud. This book is still recognised as one of the foundations of body psychotherapy; an approach that is coming back in to recognitions neuroscience supports its principles. 

In 1933 he published The Mass Psychology of Fascism and soon after had to flee Hitler; ending up living in the United State. You can listen to a recent radio interview on Reich. Click Here.

After he died, on his orders, all his papers and laboratory notes were all locked away for fifty years. They are now available and at last a film is being made which will give an accurate account of Reich and his ideas using his original notes. The film has been funded through crowdfunding. It has been shot and now money is needed to edit it. They have now got about half the money they need. I have made a small contribution. If you would like to do so then Click Here to go to Crowdfunding Page.

On Tickling and being excited

Over the years I have come across several clients where being tickled has been a major trauma.  It meant having their boundaries crossed and their body and excitement taken over without any means of stopping it. If later they indicate that the did not like or want this, then it is received as if they cannot take a joke or dislike fun.

Having one's body at the mercy of another unasked is of course traumatic as in sexual abuse, but with tickling it is also the deliberate manipulation of their excitement into a place where it goes over from pleasure, excitement and fun to invasion and fear or even terror as the object of  fear is within - the effects of excess excitement on the system.

It may be in  such families it is just one example of not being listened to and lack of empathic attunement by caregivers. It is an exercise of power over which starts as fun with but leads to an objectification of the other with the refusal of recognition of the traumatic impact. The victim is invited to laugh it off as well.

It is part of the normal adult interaction with babies to play with their excitement and give an experience of the thrill of some danger with the return to safety. This is often done by throwing the baby or small child in the air and catching them.  I gather than men are more likely to let go than women and perhaps the role of the man is to expose the child to increasing risk as part of growth and adventure. However this is done within the frame of attunement and modulation of the level of excitement and the reality of the return to safety with a cuddle as they are caught.

With body psychotherapy with adults the question of what constitutes too much activation is harder to gauge. I remember many years ago a trainer saying to us that if you want to increase the flow of the river you need to increase the height of the banks; this was in the context of general working with energy. The general point is that the container of the therapy has to be strong enough to support the appropriate abandonment of safety in that moment with a certainty of return to earth; safety and the possibility of re-integration at a higher level with increasing ego-structure. We can only grow when we risk we can only know the strength of what we can test.

With tickling it is the child's weaker sense of self and their relative powerlessness along with the lack of attunement and empathy which is so destructive. Not being listened to and taken seriously afterwards, and often a sense of being played with, compounds the trauma. Tickling is one of the first self-other interactions which is why you cannot tickle yourself and can be formative or destructive.  If in doubt about your abilities to judge another; don't tickle!

Exciting Times for Psychotherapy

When I started training as a psychotherapist in the 1970's "proper" therapy was psychoanalytic and they  generally wouldn't even acknowledge the existence of any other ways of working. Behavioural schools had been around and were used a bit (after all it works for training dogs) and were looked down on and Humanistic approaches were completely ignored even though they had been around for nearly twenty years. Gradually things have changed; dialogue started. Many conditions, such as anorexia were very hard to improve from just one orientation. Deeper understanding of the therapeutic relationship showed how different approaches focussed on different strands of the relationship. Different therapies came from different social and political milieu and also reflected the preferences of the founders. For example Freud was a doctor, a medical researcher, and came from a scientific and rather mechanistic understanding of the human being. He was also quite a shy person. His methods and his theories reflect this. In the middle of his working life came the Great War, which also affected his understandings of human nature.  Some humanistic approaches came from America in the nineteen fifties and sixties.  A very different world.

Now the dialogue has turned into a real debate with real listening and with many people training and working across modalities. Discoveries in neuroscience, greatly speeded up by the development of brain scanning, have allowed us to see the brain in action and more fully understand the roots of our behaviours.  The move towards recognising the essentially human nature of the therapeutic relationship with two fallible human beings in one room has allowed the subtleties of the interactions to be studied and understood. Increasing respect for human subjectivity has gone along with the knowledge of the mind and body and how they are really two sides of the same coin.

For many therapists,  the move towards integrative approaches to therapy and the inter-subjective revolution are more than enough; but there is more.   Neuroscience has validated the work that body psychotherapists have been doing for half a century or more to reduce trauma. The basic practice of mindfulness from the Buddhist traditions have been incorporated into therapies like Mindfulness based CBT and DBT. Research has supported traditional practices and given them respectability in the West; where we want to know why something works before we will accept the evidence of our own senses.

And there is even more when we move to the edges of conventional psychotherapy.  Remember that psychotherapy comes from Psyche meaning Soul  and Therapiea meaning healing. Healing the Soul which is also reconnecting the Soul to its source and in to Nature is a shamanistic practice. Most shamans use plant substances to help with healing; sometimes through journeying to other realms.  LSD and Ecstasy have been used in psychotherapy in the past; and until recently in Switzerland.  Natural substances such as ayahuasca can speed up the process of therapy by a considerable factor when used in a clear professional capacity. The recent dropping of the Government's attempt to prosecute the Santo Daime people in Britain may give some support to those who want to extend its use to therapy. This of course won't be welcomed by those trying to make psychotherapy as respectable a possible - an impossible task as psychotherapists hear the secrets of people's unhappiness with life and therapy deals with what is not acceptable in the world. 

The other big revolution, also not discussed in psychotherapy circles comes under the name of Energy Psychology; the collection of approaches that use the meridians, energy lines and chakras of the body for psychological healing. Some have fallen more under the heading of alternative therapies and some are more clearly under the banner of psychotherapy. The former include Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT), Tapas Acupuncture Technique (TAT),  Thought Field Therapy (TFT) and the latter; developed by a Jungian therapist,  Advanced Integrative Therapy (AIT). All can have great results in skilled hands. AIT, with which I am most familiar, speeds up the process of long term therapy by about a factor of three. They are not magic methods; just a refinement of what Freud intuited, that energy flows in the body and how it is blocked and channelled is important. AIT removes the block caused by trauma which are held in the body. The silence of the psychotherapy world with all of this is deafening. 

However, things are changing fast. The current issue of both the major professional journals in Britain have interesting leads. Therapy Today has an article on Yoga as Therapy; and the current issue of the UKCP journal The Psychotherapist is mostly on The Theory of Love.  Perhaps things are really beginning to change and fresh air of change is blowing through the world of psychotherapy even as other changes are making what is available on the NHS more and more scarce and restricted. In this blog I want to open the windows wider. Join me!