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In addition to the details of his own patients’ sexual functioning, Reich proceeded to examine, through interviews and case records, the love life of over 200 patients seen at the Vienna Psychoanalytic Polyclinic. He was testing several hypotheses here:
(1) That genital disturbance was present in all neuroses;
(2) that the severity of neuroses was positively correlated with the degree of genital disturbance; and
(3) that patients who improved in therapy and remained symptom-free achieved a gratifying sex life.
Reich was impressed by the frequency and depth of genital disturbances he found. He became very suspicious of the superficial reports about sexual experience, whether supplied by clinic patients themselves or by the psychiatrists who evaluated them. For example, a patient whose sex life was reported to be normal, on closer interviewing by Reich revealed that she experienced pleasurable sensations during intercourse but no climax. Moreover, she was consumed by thoughts of murdering her partner following the act...
He noted that while some patients were potent in the usual sense of the term, they lacked what he called
"orgastic potency." Orgastic potency included, among other attributes, the fusion of tender and sensuous strivings toward one’s partner, rhythmic frictional movements during intercourse, a slight lapse of consciousness at the acme of sexual excitation, "vibrations of the total musculature" during the discharge phase, and feelings of gratified fatigue following intercourse.
Reich was not unique in his emphasis on the capacity for uniting tender and sensuous feelings in a healthy love relationship. As early as 1912, Freud had noted that many male patients would not unite both tender and sensuous feelings, but would concentrate the former on an idealized mother figure toward whom they could not feel erotic, and their sexual feelings on prostitutes. What was original was Reich’s emphasis on the involuntary physical aspects of full genital discharge.
-- Myron Sharaf, Fury on Earth
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