Body Psychotherapy by Michael C. Heller

Author:Michael C. Heller
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780393707663
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

THE CREATIVE FRIENDSHIP BETWEEN FENICHEL AND REICH

Like Rousseau, Beethoven, and Tolstoy, Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957) was an immense humanist, a charismatic teacher, a virtuoso in his profession, with an inspiring intelligence and a powerful imagination; simultaneously, he could be highly selfish and obnoxious with those that were closest to him. Reich reinforced this image by presenting himself as a solitary genius at war against the stupidity of others. He is generally recognized as the father of body psychotherapy.40 In the following sections, I show that this title is justified if we admit that a father is part of a family and that he does not always agree to have the children that the social dynamics impose on him. We will see, in effect, that after having had a dazzling career as a psychoanalyst, he turned his back on all forms of psychotherapy to develop a new form of therapy that aims not at the psyche but at the organism. If his organismic therapy has nonetheless favored the advent of body psychotherapy such as we know it today, it is because Reich was part of a large and tumultuous family capable of allying itself to his creativity, and then to create different forms of body psychotherapy that emerged during the 1950s. To understand this process, it is also useful to present Otto Fenichel (1897-1946), who is somewhat of a secret and unappreciated uncle of this domain.

When I began to write this book, I had a specific plan in mind. Fenichel was not part of it.41 For me, he was a boring orthodox Freudian who had been one of the principal references on the psychoanalytical techniques for many generations of psychoanalysts.42 He would have done everything possible to have Reich expelled from the International Association of Psychoanalysis by spreading the word that he was psychotic. Such was his reputation in the Reichian literature. Yet the more that I read the writings of those who were part of Reich’s entourage, the more I encountered Fenichel’s name without knowing why. I therefore set about to inform myself more precisely about him. After some research, I discovered that he had played a central role in the birth of body psychotherapy. This function of uncle was obscured by the Reichians and Freudians for reasons that will gradually become evident.

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