1. - INTRODUCTION: MY EXPERIENCE
2. - CLINICAL PRACTICE
A) The Beginning - the Genesis
B) The Diagnosis
C) Crisis Attention and Psicoterapia Breve Caracteroanalítica, P.B.C. (Brief Character Analytic Psychotherapy)
D) The Setting
E) Deep Psychotherapy: Vegetoterapia Caracteroanalítica (Orgonterapia) [Character Analytic Vegetotherapy (Orgone Therapy)]
F) Group Therapy
G) Prevention and the Reichian Divan
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1. - INTRODUCTION: MY EXPERIENCE
During my youth, while I studied psychology, I collaborated in social and cultural movements of the radical libertarian left, and participated in the life of a commune.
W. Reich was one of our theoretical references, and that way I could get to know his sex-political texts. The radicalisation of those activities in a social dictatorial and repressive system provoked my detention by the police and I spent a few months in jail of which I took advantage to deepen in his work that fascinated me and helped me to get through this hard period. With Franco’s death in 1975, democracy was gestating and one of the first means of change was the political amnesty that incorporated to my civil life of a student a deeply felt vocation of a social clinician, taking the bio-psycho-social model of W. Reich as a reference. While I was finishing my career, I was educated in psychoanalysis, psychodrama, bioenergetics and sexology in Barcelona and Paris. In one of the courses I got to know Frederico Navarro (1924-2002), an Italian neuro-psychiatrist and leader of the avant-garde movement of anti-psychiatry together with G. Jerwis and others. Navarro had been an A.P.I psychoanalyst for years (analysed by Lewi Bianchini) and later Jungian analyst (his analyst was Aldo Carottenuto) and realized at an already mature age the Vegetoterapia Caracteroanalítica (Orgonterapia) [Character Analytic Vegetotherapy (Orgone Therapy)]1 with Ola Raknes, Norwegian psychoanalyst, disciple and faithful collaborator of W. Reich.
The hours of lectures spent together with Navarro marked in me, definitely, a professional identity I felt but hadn’t developed yet. The coherence of his speech, actualising the Reichian paradigm and endowing this excessively intuitive and fairly structured clinical praxis with theoretical and empirical skeleton that allowed a clear line of work, of investigation and thorough examination, - clearly differentiated from the "bioenergetic analysis"-, impelled my desire to specialize me in this post-Reichian model. Following Navarro’s suggestions, I went to Naples to realize my analysis and formation in Vegetoterapia Caracteroanalítica at the Scuola Europea Di Orgonteraia (S.E.Or) where Navarro was president.
It was the lived experience with my therapy, - after a personal and professional identity crisis -, through this infernal trip on the divan of this room in the Neapolitan quarter of Posilipo that reinforced my clinical motivation. Because even if I had as well been getting closer to the social hell years ago through the police tortures received and the time in jail, this time I felt my internal hell and understood why we isolate from our essence, why we loose the contact with our interior. It’s the price we pay to not have to feel the infernal fire we carry inside of ourselves. The concepts I had read in Reich’s work started to be palpable, clear and vivid to me: the cuirass, our character-guided acting, our fear to live, of the orgasm, of death, our tendency to submission and resignation. I discovered all this with my heart being touched day after day in company of an expert guide called R. Sassone, one of F. Navarro’s team. For a while that seemed like eternity to me, when I left that room, I was invaded by loneliness, a profound sadness, a depressive state that incited me to abandon this world, let the hot waters of this Neapolitan beach full of sailing boats and couples practicing petting swallow me. Nothing stimulated me, and my professional motivation staggered like a boat in a tempest. I felt I couldn’t be a therapist, I met with my narcissism and its pitfall, I felt lost. But slowly I learned why I felt all this. The memories accumulated in my mind, my personal infantile anecdotes formed like the pieces of a puzzle. And after depression, I came in contact with rage, the destructive sadism. I felt I couldn’t control so much desperation. All this movement reflected itself in my whole being, to the point that I found myself loosing the colour of my skin in some areas. My body was whitening. I entered an acute process of vitiligo!!! I remembered that my mother and her family where suffering from that pathology, and F. Navarro explained to me that the intense therapy could have reactivated the genetic process like a miasma, but that it would change. I thought that he said that to console me, because I knew it was a chronic pathology that had no solution. But certainly, with time, I was slowly recovering my skin colour, the melatonin recovered its function, and after some years there were only some small spots of that episode left. And the very strong moments of pulsation also passed. Systematically, using neuromuscular techniques that followed the cephalocaudal logic of the segments described by W. Reich, I was reaching serenity, strength and security that invaded my being. My emotions and my reason were very united, to the point that it was very difficult for me to act a distinct way from which I felt. The capacity for pleasure, sensuality and tenderness, for expression of my affects started to reveal. I felt that my character was getting weaker the same time I was conscious that this state of well-being had to be conquered day after day, conducting my life with a rhythm and a proper modulation. And also, I was more conscious of my limits, my neurotic tendencies, the pitfalls of my character. And more than anything, I understood that vegetotherapy was a radical clinical mean and not at all conventional. Because it facilitates crisis, it allows neither illusions nor evasions, it puts directly in contact with the reality of things. And that is hard…
When I finished my individual analysis and the didactic or control analysis I realized with Piero Borrelli, who also was my group therapist in 1982, I was admitted as orgone therapist by the S.E.Or and started working supervised for years with F. Navarro in Paris. He was my principal teacher and my therapist of maintenance or "ad-vitam" until his death in October 2002.2
This way, without hoping for it, after some years, I turned into the first Spanish Reichian psychotherapist that formed part of the S.E.Or, and soon we started regulated formation in my country. I was dedicating my professional life to my work as a post-Reichian clinician, to the teaching of this speciality, and the prevention of the pathology through intense cultural work and the intervention in the pathologizing family system. Consequence of all of this was a development of a collective of professionals, among which were Manuel Redón, Maria Montero-Rios, Maite. S. Pinuaga, Juan Alemany, and we founded the " Escuela Española de Terapia Reichiana" (Es.Te.R).
Twenty years have passed since then. I have received a rich inherited legacy during my time of formation in this speciality, which made me understand fundamental matters such as the importance of personal analysis and of supervision during the formation, the importance of group therapy as a complement of individual therapy, the importance of working in group to be able to approach sickness from a post-Reichian perspective. I have also acquired knowledge of the corporal, existential, psychoanalytic and systemic psychotherapies; I have had the luck to be able to share my professional life with a team of colleagues and to get to know the public and private attendance; of treating patients from many places in Spain that have come to my consultation in Valencia; and to be able to supervise, since a couple of years, psychotherapists from different countries of Europe and Latin America. And every day I try to pick up the messages that life gives me, more than anything in my function as a father. All this has been shaping my way of working and it has given me an impulse to get to the bottom of things and I realized modifications and contributions that I have shared with my colleagues and together with theirs they have been integrated in the clinical dynamics of Es.Te.R., creating a proper professional identity and a specific mode of functioning.
2. - CLINICAL PRACTICE
Now I would like to set out shortly which elements I consider are modulating said identity as post-Reichian and a member of Es.te.r, and therefore our perception of the "Reichian divan".
A) The Beginning, the Genesis
Emotional suffering and sickness possess a fundamental social aetiology that articulates during the process of maturation and integration of functions of our specific human structure. And so, the family system, as the main ecosystem during this period, - as to we depend on it to survive-, converts itself in the principal modulator of sickness or health. We know very well that the social system conditions enormously the conditions of life in the family system, to the point that it is its ecosystem. So, to understand sickness we have to get closer to understand the logic of human systems and the interrelation with the vital ecosystems. That’s how Reichian theory is situated in the new paradigm or "Global ecology" as F. Capra (1996) defined it, because the knowledge we acquire in the reichian divan serves us to prevent the pathological future, intervening in our ecosystems. This is our preventive work and a sign of our identity. Following Reich "helping to recover our identity as animals and as human beings", recovering the instinct, recovering the knowledge of the living and developing ecosystems and human systems that facilitate this process. Therefore, the process of ontogenesis is a fundamental element as much in the area of prevention as in clinical work and their connection. Because in our clinical system of Character Analytic Vegetotherapy – Orgone therapy (Navarro, 1983a, 1989b) much of the neuromuscular movement ("acting") that a person realizes on the divan, are reproductions of spontaneous muscular movements, "signs" of maturation and the functional psychosomatic integration during certain basic periods of our childhood life. This is the reason we are able to access memories and experiences lived during that time.
That way, through the clinical experience we are able to understand the types of pathologizing relations that establish in the family system and facilitate the development of a structure with a constrictive autopoiesis (using a term of H. Maturana in our orgonomic concept), and are therefore degenerative, through the substitution or block of the basic instinctive answers during pregnancy and birth that causes neurohormonal dysfunctions and clinical and traumatic births; during the sexual stages, facilitating the establishment of oral ambivalence and/or the triangular edipic fixation; and during adolescence, impeding the possibility to develop a human structure with an expanding autopoiesis that is engaged in a constant growing process, evolution and satisfaction, which Reich described as the genital character. In that sense it is important to point out that a clinical birth with forceps or cupping glass is traumatic, but what really provokes a strong ocular and diaphragmatic tension is the loss of contact that can take place between the mother and the baby before, during and after birth, always that it is not compensated with a maternal attitude of the father. This is what makes the foetus feel wretched, lost and alone in the cosmic "emptiness", broken the lace with the nutritious vessel. We know, aetio-pathologically speaking, more than one traumatic or dysfunctional situation, what is influencing is the content that is associated to said action, the emotional and energetic impression, and therefore the relationship factor. And this occurs during the whole ontogenetic process (psycho-affective maturation). During pregnancy, birth, lactation (through the oral stage), where the essential and really important thing is not only that maternal lactation exists, but that a loving relationship is established in the family system, not only between mother and baby, but also with the rest of the family system, especially with the figure of the father, because if there is no third one, the risk of fixation of the baby and the displacement of the mother’s pervert affects towards the baby is very great. So we see that behind every dysfunction, there has always been a problem of relation, and therefore, a problem of the system itself, that could not be compensated. One of the clinical consequences of this reality is that to cover the therapeutic goals, there has to exist a clinical space where a therapeutic relationship is gestating that facilitates the psychotherapeutic process. This is the base that fundaments the importance of the setting.
So we see, depending on the particularities of this process of constrictive ontogenesis, every individual develops different dynamical structures, far from the functional dynamic of the genital character. Understanding "the corporalisation of a standard of organisation" (Prigogine), following W. Reich’s concept of "organismic structure".
In our experience (Serrano, 1990b) there are three types of structures with characteristics that are not only psychical (as the French analytic school described it), but also somatic, emotional, perceptive and existential: The structure of the neurotic character (fundamentally conditioned through the pathogen triangular edipic dynamic and with an organized cuirass); Borderline or frontierized structure (fundamentally conditioned through the pathogen oral ambivalent dynamic, with a depressive or depressive-psychotic nucleus and a character covering whose function is maintaining a social "normality", preventing the explosion, being able to develop a minimal organized cuirass with this pathogen nucleus) and the psychotic structure (fundamentally conditioned through a primitive oral dynamic that provokes an absence of contact and an incapacity to relate with the other, limiting almost totally the formation of an organized cuirass, developing a mimetic character behaviour to survive).
For of its global and essential peculiarities, those three structures are separated through ferrous frontiers. The battery of proofs that allows differentiating constitutes in what I defined as Diagnóstico inicial diferencial estructural, D.I.D.E (Initial differential structural diagnostic system) (Serrano,1990 ). I consider it an epistemological diagnosis because it pretends to know the essential reality of a person, his emotional, neuro-vegetative, energetic, vital dis-equilibrium; and insofar every aspect of his behaviour and his pathology. But it has not exclusively the psychopathologic symptomatology in mind, and that way neither divides nor partializes the reality of the person.
For the development of D.ID.E., we used the following references:
a) The constitutional predisposition.
b) The orgonotic metabolism (bioenergy).
c) Object relationships and characteristics of the character.
d) Blocks and muscular tensions.
e) Neuro-vegetative and somatic functioning.
f) The actual reality: family, labour, affective-sexual state, clinical situation, motivations…
C) Crisis Attention and Psicoterapia Breve Caracteroanalítica, P.B.C (Brief Character Analytic Psychotherapy)
The diagnosis of every structure demands a certain type of setting and a determined treatment. On some occasions we find ourselves (above all in public centres or hospitals) with the need to realize crisis attention, the only setting where clinical praxis is realized without time for diagnosis. In this setting we work following the principles of "first emotional aid" of Eva Reich (1968), M. Herskowitz (1968), and own contributions. More than anything, we have the ocular hypertension and the loss of contact present, the cervical hypertension and the diaphragmatic spasms. In this setting, our way of being is active, with an open energetic camp, - a position of energetic and vegetative opening and receptivity- , and therefore a strong manifestation of empathy. And on many occasions it implicates corporal contact, a respiratory and diaphragmatic massage, and/or a provocative attitude, in many cases paradoxically "driven mad", which allows eye contact with the patient to feel our empathy.
We also see that it is necessary to apply a specific treatment with persons with a psychotic structure, introducing the family system in the process, psycho pharmacy in situations of crisis, and also a therapeutic community if necessary. The importance of the diagnosis is not only reflected in prognosis or treatment indication, but also to be sure about the type of setting that is required.
For example, we know -after years of working in this area- that the level of people that are abandoning therapy shortly after starting it for reasons of analytical resistances (therapeutic escape) is much higher in borderline structures, especially in those with compulsive-masochist or phallic-compulsive covering. To prevent this, we came to the conclusion that the number of sessions should be higher than in the rest of structures, and that it is very adequate to do a previous work with a focal or short setting that potentiates the level of insight and analyzability.
We also encountered people that are attended in public centres or that attend our private centres but have not enough economic resources to undergo a profound treatment like Vegetotherapy.
In trying to give an answer to both situations, together with a group of colleagues we introduced proper variables in the post-Reichian clinic coming to develop a system that I defined as "Psicoterapia breve caracteroanalítica", P.B.C (Brief character analytic therapy) (Serrano,1992). Using in this particular setting in the analytic clinical tradition of brief therapy (Mahler, Balint, Braier…) the technique of character analysis, the connection between muscular hypertension and acute pathogen reactions, and the realization of neuromuscular acting or movements of ontogenetic kind. In this frame, the objective is facilitating emotional conscience of those characteristics of the character that are causing a pathogen dysfunction, and therefore a symptomatology. This gaining of consciousness allows organizing a person’s reality and resources in a more functional and conscious way. And at the same time, the centres of hypertension reduce and breathing is superficially liberated, which leads to increasing receptivity and sensibility. The aims of P.B.C. are limited objectives that try to reduce the suffering and annul the symptomatology, using the crisis as a therapeutic tool, allied to insight. But being limited objectives, the setting as much as the technique has to be coherent, and that way different from deep therapy, to avoid the rupture of the essential defences, regression and transference neurosis, because we don’t have time handle all of it, objectives that we are able to fulfil with our deep setting, following our clinical tradition.
Here, the therapist has an analytical, but more managing position, avoiding induction and working a lot with signalling, contrasts, free association, and combining during the time of one session a frontal sitting position and the divan for the realization of acting (for a reduced time compared to deep therapy), that we combine with other corporal techniques, the patient being lying down, but is dressed. The sessions are weekly and the duration is prefixed with a mean of twenty sessions. The individual sessions can be combined with two group sessions a month of a duration of at least two hours (or one session of three hours/one three-hour session, depending on the specific circumstances of each group), but always starting in the third phase of treatment, from the third month on. It’s interesting to remind that Reich in his work "The Mass Psychology of Fascism", as well as Ola Raknes (1950) already thought about this therapeutic option even though they didn’t examine it thoroughly.
D) The Setting
We are able to affirm that, except under the circumstances described before, the setting of our praxis is following the tradition of European psychotherapy, and insofar takes psychoanalysis as a reference. In fact, Reich perceived himself inside this movement all the time (see book: Reich speaks of Freud, 1970). For this reason it is an analytical setting. We identify partially with the psychoanalyst Etchgoyen (1986) when he reminds that the setting is "first of all a mental attitude of the analyst and that it accommodates a content, the process. This content consists of the singular relationship between analyst and analyzed, and is composed of three elements: transference, contra transference and therapeutical alliance. To make the process develop, there should exist a frame as stable as possible, the setting".
In our experience, this attitude isn’t just mental, but also emotional and insofar energetic and analogical, and it is the basic element of the "reichian divan". The setting,- without which there is no process, and insofar the clinical objectives are not covered-, is shaped by a system that vehicles a series of techniques, but to be functional, they should be modulated by the position and the way of being of the therapist. Being beside the with the patient, respecting his rhythm, with neither inductions nor advises, neither formulations nor recipes about actual aspects of his life. With this attitude, the person feels accompanied, but at the same time the displacement of affects that develops with affective historical objects and through which transference is established, is facilitated.
In short, there exists sufficient neutrality, without which the empathetic atmosphere would get lost. With the words of Matte Blanco, we would say that the therapist should know how to collocate himself in the two plans of an analytical setting: the symmetrical and the asymmetrical.
The individual sessions are realized with the patient lying down and the body visible, the therapist at his side but without invading his space. The number of sessions and its periodicity is determined in function of the structure but normally lies between a minimum of one session a week of 50 minutes or one session every fifteen days of one hour and a half (double session) and a maximum of two double sessions a week. There is no established time (as a difference to the P.B.C. setting) to end the process. The process will take place, as every other situation of the setting, from an agreement between patient and therapist on.
E) Deep Psychotherapy: Vegetoterapia Caracteroanalítica (Orgonterapia) [Character Analytic Vegetotherapy (Orgone Therapy)]
In the case of profound therapy, one time the therapeutic contact is established, the Vegetoterapia caracteroanalítica (Orgonterapia) begins: "When the orgasmic reflex was discovered 1935, the accent of character analysis shifted into the corporal. The expression "vegetotherapy" should take account of this displacement, because from now on my medical technique influenced the characteriological neurosis in the physiological area. Therefore we spoke of "Vegetoterapia caracteroanalítica ", to seize the work at the soul and the body apparatus in one. This expression had several disadvantages that I couldn’t remedy at that time. It was too long. Furthermore, it contained the word "vegetative," that was correct in German, but sounded like "vegetables" in the English linguistic usage. Finally, it kept the division of the organism in a psychical and a somatic part, what contradicted our integral view of the organism. The discovery of the orgone ended those difficulties of expression. In the living organism, cosmic orgone energy functions as specific biological energy. As such it steers the whole organism, it expresses itself in emotions as well as in purely biophysical organ movements. So for the first time since its origin, psychiatry had, with its own means, taken root in objective natural scientific processes […] It is intelligible, for which reasons I propose to cover also character analysis and vegetotherapy with the expression "orgone therapy". The common thing is given through the goal of working with the sick, by the mobilization of his plasmatic streams. In other words, under no circumstances can we divide a living organism into character characteristics here, muscles there and plasma functions in the third place, if we want to be serious in a practical sense with our uniform view of the organism. Orgone therapy concentrates our work at the biological deep, at the plasma system, or, how we use to say technically, at the biological nucleus of the organism. The reader will have understood that we made an important step with that. We have left the area of work of psychology, also of "deep psychology", and we reached over the physiology of muscles and nerves, into the area of protoplasmic functions." (Reich, 1949a)
This clinical praxis is fundamentally modulated by the therapeutic relationship that is developed having the structure of the patient very much in mind. The transferential dynamic is accompanied by the activation of memories and emotions linked in a particular way to the transferential object and to the segment of the cuirass we are working with. Following the Reichian tradition (Reich, 1945), the process is realized in a cephalocaudal way, from the first to the seventh segment, because this is the way the blocks and the tensions, the defences facing distress produced by its ontogenetic process, were established, as we have seen previously. This muscular approach is fundamentally developed by the execution of certain neuromuscular actings by the patient, that have been modulating signs of the evolutionary infantile process, for a certain time and a certain number of sessions. The time of execution of each acting is about 20 minutes. During that time, the person is centred in the muscular action and his breathing, observing the things that pass through his mind in a position of floating attention. If sensations or images appear, the patient is attentive to share them verbally with the therapist afterwards, communicating what he remembers. Moreover, if any emotion appears, it is lived consciously. Meanwhile the therapist is at the person’s side, accompanying the action, but without intervening in it, only emphasizing with what the patient could feel and observing his involuntary neurovegetative reactions, which take part of the corporal language that the therapist should understand, and in the appropriate moment contrasting, signalling or analyzing, inside the process of analytic elaboration.
These actings are developed in a sequential way, following the methodology of F. Navarro (1990), applying them in function of the structures (Serrano, 1994). To have a practical reference, I will describe some of the actings that are realized with the first segment: Looking at a point at the ceiling with the mouth open (object focalization: signal primitive relation); looking at a point at the ceiling and then/after that the tip of the nose (primitive object difference described by R. Spitz); looking to the right or left (entering of the third, emergency of the schizoparanoid) or looking around in a circular way (group relation, entering the family system, social reality and movements that only the human mammals are able to do). There exist actings to approach the seven segments of the muscular cuirass described by W. Reich that are dynamic, looking for the recuperation of the vegetative motility and the neuromuscular functioning. There are not much actings, but those that we employ have been experimented and have proven their functionality sufficiently. On the other hand, the important thing is not the quantity of movements, but the repetition and the analysis of the way a specific movement is realized, which is different in each person. All this being part of the character analysis, understanding the character as the defensive psycho-somatic structure, that is reflected as much in the behaviour with its psychical base as in the muscular response with its somatic base. This way, we neither induce nor provoke neither emotions, nor regressions, but we facilitate a progressive corporal conscience through which the subject feels the difference between the I and the character, the relationship between his history and his present behaviour, his limits and his potentialities, and is learning to manage his reality in function of an I that is accompanied by a cuirass - a flexible character that is based in the principle of pleasure and expansion, of love, and therefore in the capacity of surrendering, and of living the orgiastic experience that which always accompanies a greater capacity of social compromise.
But this is not easy, it implicates to submerge oneself into hell, in what is behind the resistances, find oneself with the repressed pulsations, and there appear resistances that determine the time of the end of the process.
Our individual approach is accompanied by group work. I will make a short commentary on it. The group work starts when in individual therapy the process of "separation-individuation", using the term of Mahler, has sufficiently advanced. That means, when the patient has integrated in his I the negated aspects of his maturation process in the first stages of his infancy (primera infancia) and is able to relate with the "other", being able approach all the conflicts that this person was faced with in his process of social integration (family in a broad sense, school, clique…). This uses to coincidate, from a neuromuscular point of view, when the work of cephalocaudal deblocking reaches the third or forth segment. They are mixed groups of 12-14 people with two co-therapists of distinct sex with a monthly session for two years (the social is concrete and as the group space, it has a certain time of duration) and where the group system develops its own matrix to work on conflictive social dynamics such as gender conflicts, social paranoia, the roles, the fear of authority, individualism, the difficulty to assume social responsibilities and group identity.
Within a proper system (Serrano, 1997d), references of Foulkes´ group analysis are used, as well as references of the Psychodrama of Moreno, together with psychocorporal techniques. But the fundamental aim is that through the group matrix and the conflicts that develop within the group, the participants gain consciousness of the social conflicts they life in their real life, and that, with all of them, they find ways to solve them. It’s a very important way to acquire the "social or collective identity", something so very lacking in our social system.
Being aware that this group space is a convergent tool of individual therapy and in function of that thesis the praxis of the therapists is developed.
Finally, I want to review two more aspects of our clinical praxis and of our identity as orgone therapists (specialists in human systems). The first would be the importance of cultural praxis and the consequent intervention in the implicated social ecosystems that allows prevention of the functional pathology and of the suffering of the human animal. With the years we have been able to do follow-ups of family systems where the affective relationship and the rhythm were different from the habitual one and where the process of ontogenesis was respected, assuming the force of the instinct as a modulator of the species´ reality. And together with the experience with our own children we were able to observe the importance that certain moments have during the maturation of the human animal and the kind of action to facilitate it: a desired and loved pregnancy, a birth without violence, an oral relationship where the lactation is lived as a fountain of pleasure, not only of nutrition, and where the whole family system is implicated (see bibliography), etc. And we come to the conclusion, that prevention is always related to clinical work.
Secondly, the need to work to work in a team: We feel part of a collective of professionals with one language, one identity and a shared formation that serves as an axis to integrate the particular formation of every member with the rest of the team. That way, homeopaths, naturists, psychiatrists, psychotherapists, specialists in P.B.C., specialists in V.C. in prevention in family systems or couples, in obstetrics and in other medical specialities share their knowledge to, from a shared diagnostic system (D.I.D.E.) on, establish a clinical praxis where the objective is the patient’s health and not the prestige or salary of the professional.
This is for us the only way to be able to give answers to a series of clinical cases where several systems of the human structure come together, particularly people with bio-pathology or functional sicknesses usually called psychosomatic, like cancer, ulcer, the immunologic or neuroendocrine sicknesses. Where together with vegetotherapy we should incorporate the Or.Ac., accumulator of orgone energy (De Meo, 1989), audiopsychophonology, trace elements, vitamins, and even psychopharmacy if necessary, but all of this in a functional and individualized way, developing the global project of post-Reichian orgone therapy.
This clinical work we realize day by day is full of difficulties because we stop acting in function of our needs and our "hidden" and clandestine space to pass on to reveal and share our work. But it is very stimulating professional challenge. That way, in one case we can work with a couple therapist, a specialist in vegetotherapy and one in prevention together if it is necessary (for example, in the case of a divorce of a couple with children), be aware of the requirement of clinical communication between professionals maintaining a practice with determined ethics and professional deontology.
And despite all this experience we are conscious that there are many things to investigate and resolve, particularly all that is related to the treatment of multi-systemic disorders (eating disorders, schizophrenia, family conflicts…) being aware of what was contributed by other models; being fundamental for it the communication and interaction between the therapists to be able to enrich and deepen our clinical praxis in THE REICHIAN DIVAN.
Xavier Serrano, November of 2002.
NOTES:
(1 ) Name given by W. Reich 1936 to his form of psychoanalytical work, incorporating the thesis that "every muscular rigidity contains the history and meaning of its origin", giving special importance to the connection between a person’s behaviour and his character, his way of breathing and his muscular tensions. The hypothesis is maintained because of the idea that the characterological neurosis is reflected in the neurovegetative dysfunction, and therefore in the vegetative nerve system, which is the system that governs the emotional world and the pulsating and involuntary movement of the vital organs. This is the way psychosomatic medicine started. 1945 I defined it as orgone therapy, looking for a word that wouldn’t indicate a division between psyche and soma: "Embraces character analysis and vegetotherapy" (Reich, 1945) and the clinical aim was to recover the capacity of biological, vital pulsation, the recuperation of the free vegetative current which integrates, through the emotionality, the psyche and the soma, "and whose means of functioning are found in the so called "orgasmic reflex" because there is where the function of the biological, bioenergetic, orgone energy is expressed" (idem, 1942). But the changing of the name hasn’t modified the basics of the therapeutic work, it was just combined with other treatments, such as the ORAC, or accumulator of orgone energy. For this reason, F. Navarro was in favour of going on to use the term vegetotherapy, until investigations of the orgone (name given by W. Reich to the concept of vital energy, or prana, "elen vital", Chi…) would have advanced further.
(2) In the time I was writing this, the death of Frederico Navarro in his house en Naples took place, by then he was 78 years old.
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(1989b) "La vegetoterapia caracteroanalítica" Revista Somathotherapies et Somatologie Strasbourg, 1989.
(1990). "Metodología de la Vegetoterapia Caracteroanalítica a partir de Wilhelm Reich". Publicaciones Orgón, Valencia, 1993.
(1997) "La somatopsicodinámica de las biopatías" Publicaciones Orgón. Valencia, 1997.
PINUAGA, M.S.; SERRANO, X., (1997) "Ecología Infantil y maduración humana" Publicaciones Orgón. Valencia, 1997.
RAKNES, O (1950,) "An tratament brief with orgonterapy". Orgone Energy Bulletin,vol,2,nº1.Maine.publicado en el volumen 3, nº1 l(1985) en la revista E.C.S.en Español. Publicaciones orgon.Valencia.
(1970) "W. Reich y la orgonomía" Publicaciones Orgón. Valencia, 1991.
.REDON, M., (1987) "Génesis de la biopatía carcinomatosa" ECS, Vol. 6, nº 2.
REICH, E., (1983) "Primeros auxilios emocionales" ECS Vol. 1. nº 1. 1983.
(1983) "Infancia y prevención de la neurosis" ECS (Vol. 1, nº 2. 1983).
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(1927a) "Bericht über das Seminar für psychoanalytische Therapie am psychoanalytischen Ambulatorium in Wien 1925-1926". Int. Ztschr. Psa., XIII. Citado por O. Fenichel (1938) ob. cit..
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(1934b) "The orgasm as an Electrophysiological discharge" in Pulse of the planet, Journal of the Orgone Biophysical Research Laboratory. Oregon, 1993. Translated from "Der Orgasmus als elektrophysiologische Entladung" Zeitschrift für Politische Psychologie und Sexualökonomie, I, 1934.
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(1949a) "Análisis del carácter", de la Tercera edición en inglés. Editorial Paidós. Barcelona, 1980.
(1949b) Children of the nature. On the prevention of sexual patology, Nueva York, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1989.*
(1949c) "Ether, God and Devil" Orgone Institute Press. Rangeley Maine). Incluido en Ether, God and Devil and Cosmic Superimposition, Farrar Straus & Giroux. N.Y. 1973.*
(1951b) "The Orgonic Energy Accumulator" Institute Press. Rangeley (Maine).*
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(1991c) "El papel de los coterapeutas en la vegetoterapia en grupo".Comunicación en el Congreso Internacional de Terapia psicocorporal. Castelldefels, Barcelona.
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(1994 b) "Contacto-vínculo-separación, sexualidad y autonomía yoica". Publicacions Orgón. Valencia, 1994.
(1996c) "Lo existencial y lo transcendental durante el proceso
(1997b) "Ecología infantil y maduración humana" en colaboración con
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(1997c) "The word use with a borderline structure (coverture narcissistic-histeric-masochist) during the post-reichian Characteranalytic Vegetotherapy. Actas del Congreso de al Europoean Associatioon of Body Psychotherapy. Viena, Austria, 1997.
(1997d) "El grupo en la clínica post-reichiana" Actas I Congreso Iberoamericano de Psicodrama. Salamanca, 1997.
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(200O) "Al alba del sigloXXI". Ensayos ecológicos postreichianos".Publicaciones orgon.VAlencia
ABBREVIATIONS
- ECS: Energía, Carácter y Sociedad.
- SO: Scienzes Orgonomiques - Scienza Orgonomica.
- IZO: Internationale Zeitschrift für Orgonomie.
- JO: Journal of Orgonomy.
- ECS (i): Energía, carattere e societá.
- WRB: Wilhelm Reich Blatter.
- AIO: Annals of the Orgone Institute.
* Los artículos seguidos de este símbolo se encuentran traducidos en la
biblioteca de la Escuela Española de Terapia Reichiana (ES.TE.R.).
C/República de Guinea Ecuatorial 4, 1º C.
46022. Valencia.
ESPAÑA.
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