Chain of Referral

When David Lichtenstein asked me to be the editor of the Reminiscence column for D/R, I thought of several psychoanalysts whose stature and indigenousness would justify their inclusion in a series devoted to recalling the lives and works of important contributors. I also thought of people in the profession with sufficient knowledge of them to write about them. My role, I assumed, would be to shepherd the projects in various ways, but not to be one of the writers. So, when David suggested I write something myself, I tried to pull together the threads of my past that would converge on the psychoanalysis of my youth.

Before I knew anything about Freud, I became excited about the theories of Wilhelm Reich and proceeded to read almost all of his works in print. This was in 1952. Reich was still alive and teaching at his enclave in Rangely, Maine. Among his students were many well-known psychotherapists and psychoanalysts. His influence had been strong among European analysts who had leftist leanings, and later, among a group of US psychiatrists and psychiatric residents, including Victor Sobey, Chester Raphael, Michael Silvert, and Ellsworth Baker, all of whom he taught the theory and method that he called Orgonomy. A. S. Neill, the English educator who founded the Summerhill School and published a widely read book about his work there, was also deeply affected by Reich's ideas. Others who evinced a more than passing interest in Reich's perspective were the artist/cartoonist William Steig, the entertainer Orson Bean, and the novelist, Norman Mailer.

My own introduction to Reich was by an artist friend who had undergone a short course of Reichian therapy and found it useful. I had just returned from a kind of gap year in Mexico after dropping out of high school, and was struggling to understand the turbulence of my inner life. As described in the few books by Reich that I had already read, the therapy seemed relevant to the problems I wanted to address.

Accordingly, I phoned