This means it’s difficult to write about Reich, as if you stick closely to him and his ideas, you find yourself having to advocate for his assertions about an unproved energy. I’m foregrounding this difficulty so I can’t sidestep or pretend it’s not there. Reich also saw sexuality as fundamentally energetic, which makes the cluster of concepts even more spicy. I have opinions about the phenomena he reported and researched, but I’m not going to fully develop these for now. For this short piece I’d just like to look at how energy plays a role in his conception of armouring and offer a few reflections. Part of the purpose here is to “persuade by inference” - to show how compelling and useful Reich’s thinking is, and thereby open up sympathies to his energetic ideas.

Reich talks about life in pulsatory terms - “what is living, pulsates”. There’s a mobile, living quality underlying all his writing. Even when he moved into microbiology, he looked at living organisms, not stained, dead tissue. If life pulsates, what is pulsating - it’s this energy. Pulsation can be understood as having two beats, contraction and expansion, which map to sympathetic and parasympathetic branches of the nervous system respectively. In a lot of ways, the idea of contraction and expansion is the key to Reich’s thinking, therapeutically and elsewhere.

There’s a beautiful passage in Morton Herskowtiz’s book Emotional Armouring where he describes the loss of armour in a patient and what it triggers for him. Seeing a patient’s unforced smile for the first time, after several years of therapeutic work, a memory emerged for Herskowitz, from an African safari and seeing a baboon troupe effortlessly melting and flowing down a tree. Why was this memory triggered at this time? He writes “The similarity between the two events is the flow, the natural expressions of ease in movement”. In the terms I’ve been using, we could say the patient was beginning to expand, to pulsate again, after a period of contraction and Herskowitz found a beauty and a communicative quality in this. The free flow of unforced energy. He adds “artificial inhibition of that movement … is always ugly. Tight lips are hideous and so is the stance of a dog disciplined to viciousness”. Incidentally, I think this is one of the reasons we respond so strongly to children - we recognise their emotional freedom, or as Reich would have it, the absence of armour.

To give some further examples of what this might look like in practice, think about the pulsatory quality of a long overdue cry, the release of constricting fear in the guts or stomach, a tight chest moving to exhaling freely. There’s a reason the word emotion is spelt the way it is - to emote is a motile process.

I’d like now to look at the history of armouring - how Reich arrived at these concepts and this way of thinking. From early on in his career, Reich was looking at the world in energetic terms. Even with his encounter with Freud’s libido, Reich was interested in this as a concrete energetic reality, rather than a solely interior “abstracted” idea. It’s hard to convey the exact nature of Reich’s writing at this point with psychic energy as something real, measurable. I feel like he’s talking from within a forgotten byway of the discipline. I’ve heard Reich’s conception of the psyche described as “hydraulic” before which conveys some of this feeling, but not its subtlety. Reich talks of charges, blocks, excitation, intensities. He reads a little Deleuze & Guattari (famously inspired by Reich in their Anti-Oedipus) with the caveat that it’s all very real.

Reich was interested in the intensity of his patient’s feelings and how and why this excitation arose and disappeared. Where did it come from? Where did it go? Why did it vary from patient to patient? One illustrative - though failed - treatment is a case study of a waiter who suffered from impotence. Reich treated him for three years to no avail and noted the patient was quiet, well-mannered, “industrious” in his life, and did everything asked of him. The patient reported a sensation of “deadness” in the genitals which Reich dutifully treated in psychoanalytic terms (memories of “the primal scene”, “castration” etc.). In terms of the theory of the day, Reich was using correct technique but the patient’s problem stubbornly remained. Reich later realised “that it was precisely this emotional tranquility, this unshakable equanimity which formed the pathological characterological basis on which erective impotence can be maintained”. Here we can see Reich making clear links between the character style, the way someone is in the world, and their particular symptomatology. The comments regarding genital deadness begin to show Reich’s emerging energetic conception. They show a “withdrawal of energy” and what Reich would later call armouring in the pelvis.

Reich also writes in this book about several female patients experiencing “cardiac neurosis” (anxiety around the heart) which dropped away when their genital feelings emerged. Reich is often disparaged for his work on sexuality, as if he was some kind of sex maniac, but here you can see it simply emerging from his clinical work. He simply notes that being in touch with sexuality and being able to allow its free expression grants therapeutic results. He also discusses a female patient who experienced attacks of asthma as sexual excitation increased. Remarkably, in treatment, she began to experience alternating attacks of diarrhoea and constipation, as if her inner conflict carried over into another bodily system. This gave way to genital excitation which she found difficult, and her asthma returned. She struggled with this for some months. When she became able to accept and enjoy her sexual excitation, her asthma finally disappeared. Reich mentions being in touch with this patient some years after the treatment with no relapse reported. We can see here a mix of breathing, physiology, sexual conflicts and embodiment, all at play.

Reich began to conceive of the capacity to really give in and yield to sexual gratification as the basis of emotional and physical well-being, which for him had an energetic component. He conceived of orgasm as having several stages - tension, charge, discharge and relaxation. For Reich, health was being able to yield fully to these sensations which he called “orgiastic potency”. He defines it as

“the capacity to surrender to the flow of biological energy, free of any inhibitions; the capacity to discharge completely the dammed-up sexual excitation through involuntary, pleasurable convulsions of the body”.

This sounds like some kind of jaw-dropping orgasm but I think it’s better understood as the capacity to give in and yield, to surrender. In my own therapeutic work, I’ve noticed that the capacity to exhale, to breathe out loosely and freely, is almost always lacking in clients, at least at first. To give in is always the hardest thing.

References

Herksowitz, M. Emotional Armouring (Lit Verlag, 2012)

Reich, W. The Function of the Orgasm (Souvenir Press, 1983)

Like our estrangement from our sexuality, it’s strange when you stop to think about it. Why? Why are we so distant - fearful even - about our own emotional lives, our biologies? Why does this happen? We can find a partial answer in Reich’s work. Reich never wrote at book length about the origin of armouring, though you can piece together his views from a range of articles, correspondence and research. I would hazard a guess that the reason he never wrote about this at length is because he was beset with legal troubles at the end of his life. He didn’t have a chance to systematise his though or have the “grand old man” phase of his career.

The most important document here is the posthumous collection Children of the Future. Like all good psychoanalysts, he had a deep respect for infant and childhood experience but there’s a concreteness and directness here that’s absent from a lot of the more abstract end of psychoanalytical theory. In direct, everyday speech, he attacks the cruelty of the child-rearing practices of his day. The first essay in the book is Reich’s short piece, The Source of the Human No.

When a child is born, it comes out of a warm uterus, 37 degrees centigrade, into about 18 or 20 degrees centigrade. That’s bad enough. The shock of birth is bad enough. But it could survive that if the following didn’t happen: As it comes out, it is picked up by the legs and slapped on the buttocks. The first greeting is a slap. The next greeting: take it away from the mother. Right? Take it away from the mother. I want you to listen here. It will sound incredible in a hundred years. Take it away from the mother. The mother must not touch or see the baby. The baby has no body contact after having had nine months of body contact at a very high temperature-what we call the orgonotic body energy contact, the field action between them, the warmth and the heat…

Here, in the very beginning, the spite develops. Here, the no develops, the big NO of humanity. And then you ask why the world is in a mess.

So, armouring develops in the initial contact between infant and the world, and the failure to meet the organism’s expectations. Admittedly, things have improved greatly since Reich’s day when the practices he described were standard. Reich was an early advocate for the positive developments we’ve seen in neonatal care. However, I’d say there’s still not a full recognition of the aliveness and responsiveness of babies and children in our medical treatment of birth, childcare and education.

We can perhaps find a parallel to the Reichian view in the work of Jean Liedloff and her book The Continuum Concept. Liedloff encountered the Yequana tribe while in Venezuela in the 50s. She was deeply fascinated with them, so returned to live with them. Her observations of the Yequana and their childrearing practices convinced that infants have an innate set of expectations about how they should be treated - this is the continuum of the book’s title. It involves being held in arms, sharing a bed with parents, on-demand breast feeding and other aspects of the childrearing process, but perhaps the deepest part of this is the basic orientation towards the child: “Infants are [known as] innately social and cooperative and have strong self-preservation instincts, and … are welcome and worthy”. Many of us in the modern world aspire to such sentiments, but we don’t live them in the deep, profound way that Liedloff observed amongst the Yequana.

Other things, of course, impact armouring - not least our confused attitude towards sexuality. There’s also the many adverse life events that can be grouped together under the heading of “trauma”. From a Reichian point of view, all of these elements come together to impact on the musculature, the respiration and the organism’s natural ability to pulsate.

One of Wilhelm Reich’s most important ideas is what he came to call “armouring”. Armouring refers to patterns of tension that are largely held out of conscious awareness, that help to keep the lid on our emotions. At root, Reich’s idea states that there’s a physical component to our emotional dysfunction - anger may show itself in a tight jaw, fear in tensions in the stomach and diaphragm. In sharing this idea, I’ve found it tends to resonate with people - I think most people understand that their emotional range is somewhat limited and that this has a connection with their physicality somehow.

Reich was a student of Freud’s and the idea of armouring comes directly from his work on character, Reich’s first major contribution to psychoanalytic theory. Reich’s idea was that rather than focus on symptomatology, the analyst should focus on character as a whole. So rather than focus on, say, impotence, he would ask how does impotence play a role in this person’s life and is it reflected in other attitudes? Are they perhaps passive? Do they seem to embody a forced equanimity? What is the connection between this symptom and the broader personality traits - how is this person in the world? Is there anything in the person’s face or manner that suggests anything connected to these attitudes? This naturally led Reich to look at the body as he was looking at how someone was from the moment that entered his office. How did they cross the room? Did they stride in or was their gait timid? How did they shake hands? With force and directness, with shyness and reserve, or something quite different? Reich began to ask these questions in the late 1920s - they were the outgrowth of a technical seminar, focused on improving psychoanalytic technique. Over the next few decades, he refined his technique and his ideas about what might be happening, ending up with what Myron Sharaf (his principal biographer) described as an “almost wordless therapy” by the late 1940s. Reich kept the psychoanalytic positioning - that of a patient lying on the couch, but the process became more like a physical examination that incorporated touch, expressive movement, vocalisation and vitally, respiration. He worked out a theory of seven “segments” of armouring in the body, at right angles to the spine as well as an energetic theory of release (both of which will be covered in future posts).

One of the first times I ever had the sense that Reich’s ideas might be a very real thing was when I was playing with some breathing and movement exercises (possibly from Christopher Hyatt’s Undoing Yourself with Energised Meditation). I was lying on my back, breathing, with my knees up and feet on the floor, and I let my knees fall out to the side - I felt a sudden flash of fear but situated *in* my hips. Sexuality is a process around which we build up so much conflict and neurosis - strange, when we consider its importance in the propagation of the species - and this seemed a physical expression of this process, happening under my nose, in my body - it was the manifestation of some sexual fears picked up earlier in life (I can even identify when!). Sexuality, the armouring against it, and how this plays out socially, takes a central role in Reich’s analysis of the human condition.

A later experience came working in a group setting with an Austrian psychotherapist. She worked with me for about 90m, and at one point got to me to very lightly bite her forearm (you do some odd things in therapy, sometimes), really just the application of a slight pressure. I thought not much had happened until afterwards when I stood up and felt “hmmm.... my jaw feels smaller” A thought - or rather a feeling - then arose, namely “I don’t have to defend anymore”. This was the “translation” into words of something I was experiencing somatically. So for years, I’d been ever so slightly pushing out or holding my jaw. This tension expressed an embodied sense of defensiveness and after that session it just .... disappeared. I don’t think it went for good at that point - one thing about armouring is that as a habit of the body, it may well return, especially when one is under stress or pressure - but several years of Reichian therapy, later, produced enduring shifts.

One might ask is this the same as contemporary trauma therapy, which tends to highlight embodied experience as a way of accessing feelings and emotions inaccessible via verbal enquiry. I have a great deal of respect for contemporary trauma work and practitioners like Peter Levine and Babette Rothschild (the latter is a stone cold genius in my book) but I would say Reich’s thinking has a different point of origin and rests on different assumptions, though there’s no reason there can’t be fruitful dialogue. Reich goes a bit further than contemporary conceptions of nervous system regulation and trauma management in that for him, everyone is armoured to some degree. My own therapy is testament to this - I don’t regard myself as particularly traumatised, yet I got an incredible amount of Reichian therapy. I see Reich as instead stating something true about the human condition in its broadest sense. He gets under the bonnet of what it means to be human.

We can find one example of the power of the idea of armouring if we look at Reich’s commentary on politics. He famously wrote the first book to apply a psychoanalytic lens to mass political movements, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, based on his observations of fascism in Germany in the 1930s. This book makes the sublimated, libidinal content of fascism clear. Later, Reich came to think that why revolutions (and revolutionary situations like communes) so often fail is because we literally carry our oppression with us, in our bodies. Reich was a critic of Stalinism on this basis, referring to it as “Red fascism”. He’d say we’re not built for autonomy or the free societies we fantasise about and aspire to, because of our armouring. We are like trees that grow stunted, to use a metaphor he often employed. Therapy can fix some of this but not all of it. I’m sure everyone reading this has known political or spiritual people who seem bursting with suppressed anger or spitefulness (hey, perhaps even someone who’s in the top role in a very important world office right now). The emotional condition that underlies and drives the “super-structure” of their beliefs and ideologies is a more important factor than these ideas themselves. A Reichian analysis wouldn’t really be interested in the content of ideas and ideologies but more the physicality that underpins them, and how this manages and channels ideas, desire and frustration. Armouring gives us a way of thinking and talking about this process.

There’s a lot more to say on this topic - I’ve really only scratched the surface. But I hope to expand on this in future essays.

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For those that don’t know him, Wilhelm Reich is probably the 20th century’s most notorious psychoanalyst. He was initially a student of Freud’s, and had strange ideas about orgasms, the body and energy, culminating in trying to change the weather and communicating with UFOs, his life ending with a jail sentence. He died in prison in 1957. A deeper dig shows Reich had an audience with Einstein, was the originator of body based psychotherapies and wrote a pioneering work on fascism.

So, a fascinating CV, a man cursed with an interesting life. People who know me well will know of my long standing interest in this strange man. Why? Is there anything here beyond a fascination with eccentricity? This piece details the growth of my interest and tries to answer that question.

At some point in my degree (English/Media & Cultural Studies, Nottingham Trent), we were introduced to Reich’s Mass Psychology of Fascism. I imagine he’s a familiar inhabitant of undergraduate reading lists, brought in to spice up the course. I forget the name of the module now, but Reich was introduced as someone who developed a new perspective on politics, seeking to unify the disparate worlds of psychoanalysis and political theory. I decided, pretty much on a whim, to write about Reich for my dissertation. As part of this, I sought out therapists to interview. One of whom was Peter Jones, who had just started training as a midwife. He was interested in the birth process and child development from a Reichian point of view. He was in Leicester, near to me, so I went to meet him.

Notice here the jumps. I went from a critique of fascism to psychotherapy to the birth process. Our conversation spanned the specifics of the birth process, how Reich’s notion of armouring might explain difficulties around birth and also in emotional expression, why sexuality is such a hot topic for us. Talking to Peter made me realise that Reich’s work was actually a unified system of thinking, an approach to the world. More accurately, it’s a recognition of something that’s already happening, the idea that organisms move and that they pulsate. Reich’s therapy could be characterised as the reintroduction of pulsation. For Reich, this is the defining characteristic of life: “that which is living, pulsates”.

Reich felt fascism was a response to fear and frustration of our natural impulses towards life, a freezing of this pulsatory process and a replacement by the secondary gratifications found in fascism, the führer-worship, the libidinal excitement channelled into rallies and hatred of the Other, I think it should be obvious how pulsation is involved in birth. It’s this allegiance to the life process that characterises all of Reich’s work.

Reich refers to that which blocks the process of pulsation in us as armouring. The reasons for this are manifold and exist on a social as well as a personal level. On the personal level, armouring arises via the management of our trauma, fear and stress. It can take place on a characterological level - a fixed attitude, a personal taboo - or on the muscular - holding of the breath, a furrowing of the brow, a compulsive laugh. Most people seem to respond well to this idea, that via our “armour” our emotional range becomes limited and there’s a connection here with our bodies. In a way, it’s a defence against the aliveness of pulsation and is bound up with managing our complex feelings about sex. If you think of the dis-ease that might be provoked in someone by the sinuous movement of a snake, you have an illustration of armouring at work. A lot of these processes are shown (with great humour!) in William Steig’s illustration in Reich’s book, Listen Little Man!

The final piece in this jigsaw for me was understanding that in approaching armouring (in fact, any psychological change) an essential quality is gentleness. This doesn’t always come over in Reich’s writing as he can be quite urgent and strident, but in experiencing the therapy, and reading the literature, I’ve always found there to be a gentleness at work. The work involves initially just being with armouring and its flaws and difficulties, rather than forcing change mechanically - allowing a softer approach to life to emerge. Something I found remarkable was realising this approach to life was echoed in ancient literature and schools of thought. This passage from Chapter 76 of the Tao te Ching catches this attitude beautifully:

While alive, the body is soft and pliant

When dead, it is hard and rigid

All living things, grass and trees,

While alive, are soft and supple

When dead, become dry

and brittle

Thus that which is hard and stiff

is the follower of death

That which is soft and yielding

is the follower of life1

I would imagine that the reason I can find this in a 3000 year old text and note its re-emergence in Reich’s work is because it’s a lesson we need to learn over and over again.

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