Body-based psychotherapy (here, self-therapy) is a wonderful technique. It accomplishes things that no other form of psychotherapy can accomplish. Except for depth therapies like psychoanalysis or Jungian analysis, this is the only therapy that seeks basic change. But unlike psychoanalysis or Jungian analysis, it does not depend on massive amounts of time and money and it is not dependent upon your willingness to believe in things of which you can have no personal knowledge.

Now it is true that, in general, body-based psychotherapy (here based on the technique that Reich developed) is a slow process. But, then, so are the other depth therapies. The very idea of "depth" carries with it the idea of slowness.

Except for body-based psychotherapy and the two depth verbal therapies, other therapies are problem-oriented. That is not a criticism. Some people are introspective, they want to understand themselves and why they act as they do. But most people seek out a therapist because they are having a problem with living. Some part, or many parts, of their life is (are) not working as they wish. These people don't necessarily want more than specific problem resolution and, if so, there are many fine verbal therapies available to them.

If you are in some form of verbal therapy, this work does not conflict with that verbal therapy. In fairness to your therapist, you should tell him or her that you are starting this work. But other than that, there is no conflict between this work and any form of verbal therapy.

That being said, here is the caveat. As fine a technique as Reichian therapy is, IT IS NOT COMPLETE IN ITSELF. Reichian therapy without verbal therapy — whether formally done with a therapist or with integrity undertaken by yourself — does not do the whole job. This is not to diminish Reichian technique, the same caveat is true of all the other body-based psychotherapy approaches.

In saying that it is not complete I am not belittling the work that I have done for over 35 years nor am I aiming criticism at any of the other schools of body-based psychotherapy. It is just that when you treat a person, you can't just tr eat their disembodied mind or their disemminded body. Disemminded is my made-up word, but it fits. It is a whole person that lives, it is not just a body with tensions (or holding) and it is not just a repression-dominated mind. A complete job requires that all aspects be addressed.

In this book I have presented Reich's approach to body-based psychotherapy to the extent that it can be done by oneself. A practicing Reichian therapist can, not surprisingly, go beyond what I have presented. But for all the good that Reichian therapy does, it is not sufficient. It is not complete. It needs the added step of either formal verbal therapy or of self-study along some of the lines I will present here. Just doing the work that I have presented in this book can take you a long way; but it will leave behind much that still needs work.

Up till now this book has been a work book, not a text book. In the words that a philosopher would use, this has been a knowing how rather than a knowing why. Now I have to get technical and thus you will now see the references that I have, till now, generally avoided.

Self-study is a big subject, far too big for a concluding chapter; so I will limit myself to presenting some of the major issues and some methods you can use to supplement the body work with thinking work.

Footnote 37. I have serious doubt that the concept of repression is valid. There is a whole literature which has appeared in the last 25 years that effectively takes Freud's theory apart piece by piece and, as well, a body of literature which calls into serious question the validity of "recovered memories." I would also mention that the theory of repression as put forth by Freud was that memories, ideas, drives, or drive derivatives, not emotions, were repressed (Laplanche & Pontalis, 1967/1973; Moore & Fine, 1990). The idea produced unpleasant emotion and to avoid the emotion the ideas and memories were repressed.

Throughout the preparation of this book a major issue which has confronted me again and again is the question of the order of presentation of material. That problem rears its maddening head even more in this chapter. I would prefer, following the general approach of this book, to just present techniques that you can use to do the cognitive work. But that is simply not possible; there are some theoretical issues that are requisite to the effective use of the techniques. So, with some apologies, I am going to present the technical material first. If you find the material uninteresting or annoying, you can skip to page 418 and read just the techniques section.

A reasonable question, before I even start this exposition, is why? Why go into all this? Obviously I could just close this book at this point, at documenting the therapy for home use. However, I am a therapist, not a documentary book writer. To leave this book without this chapter would be to leave my reader better off, but still with major uncorrected issues. That is not the stance of a healer, it is the stance of a pitchman. Thus, this chapter.

When I wrote this chapter, it all seemed logical to me and to flow properly from subject to subject. But that was before I came back to read it many months later. Then it seemed immensely dense. So much material in so little space. This chapter is already over 100 pages, so expanding on all the topics was out of the question. My solution, presented here, is to first provide an outline of the chapter with page number references. Then, at least, you can see where you are and where you are going.

I. Emotions In Human Life: Essential, Beneficial And Enemy (352)

A. Essential (352)

B. Beneficial (353)

C. Enemy (354)

II. Theoretical Section (355)

A. The Superego And The Ego Ideal (356)

    1. Description Of The Superego And The Ego Ideal (357)

    2. Structural Theory And The Superego (357)

B. Psychic Masochism, The Contribution Of Edmund Bergler (359)

C. The Tyrrany Of The Should, The Contribution Of Karen Horney (365)

D. Character (369)

  1. Introduction (369)

  2. On The Definition Of Character (370)

    a. Character disorder versus neurosis (370)

    b. Ego-syntonic versus ego-dystonic (371)

    c. Character in Freud's thinking versus the concept used in this book (372)

  3. Unrecognized Basic Statement (375)

    a. About himself (379)

    b. About the world (381)

    c. About the relationship of the two (386)

  4. On Character As Destiny (387)

  5. The new view in psychoanalysis (389)

E. Character And Language (392)

  1. Introduction (394)

  2. Language and metaphor (396)

  3. Language and identification for the child (396)

  4. emotive words have ostensive definitions (397)

  5. children have a poverty of language (399)

  6. the ostensive vocabulary of the child is a function of the ostensive vocabulary of the parents and their emotive empathy (399)

  7. language and identification for the adult (400)

F. Defenses (400)

  1. An Introduction To The Idea Of Defenses (400)

  2. Reich's Redefinition Of Character (401)

  3. Reich's Use Of The Redefined Concept Of Character (402)

  4. Defenses And Their Role (403)

    a. A cognitive theory of defenses (403)

    b. Why focus should be on the 41 coping mechanisms other than repression (407)

    c. The most important of the coping mechanisms in terms of self-therapy (409)

      i. projection (410)

      ii. introjection (410)

      iii. reaction formation (410)

      iv. life style repetition compulsion (411)

      v. incident repetition compulsion (412)

G. Emotional Experience (413)

  1. Feeling(s) (413)

    a. How does that make you feel (414)

    b. I feel that... (416)

  2. Emotional Lability (416)

III. Techniques Section (418)

A. Recovering Memories (419)

  1. The Technique (420)

  2. The Theory (421)

B. Taking The Blame, Dealing With Injustice Collecting And Psychic Masochism (426)

  1. Gather Data, Don't Make Changes (428)

  2. Behavior Is Over Determined (428)

  3. Data Needs Constant Reanalysis To Be Useful (429)

  4. You Are Fighting Your Own Character (430)

  5. Wants Become Functionally Autonomous (430)

  6. Look For Incident Repetition Compulsions (432)

  7. Look For Life Style Repetition Compulsions (434)

  8. Look For Patterns (436)

  9. Check Your Assumptions, Part One (437)

  10. Check Your Assumptions, Part Two (437)

  11. Apply Operations On Defense Mechanisms (438)

    a. Projection (410)

    b. Introjection (410)

    c. Reaction formation (410)

    d. Combinations (440)

  12. Now Look At The Other Person's Contribution (444)

C. The Adlerian Early Memory Technique (444)

D. Exploring Your Definition Of Emotive (Feeling) Terms (448)

E. The Action Approach (449)

F. Guilt, Valid And Invalid (451)

  1. Knowledge Of A Moral Issue (453)

  2. The Presence Of A Moral Code (453)

  3. Knowledge Of Realistic Alternatives Of Action (454)

  4. Deliberate Violation Of Your Own Moral Code (455)

  5. Overcoming Guilt (455)

G. Doing The Cognitive Work (456)

  1. Step One: What Am I Doing (456)

  2. Step Two: Why Am I Doing It (457)

  3. Step Three: What Is Valid (458)

  4. Step Four: Do It (458)

  5. Why It Works (459)

  6. Observations On Psychological Integration (459)

H. Table Of Coping Mechanism (460)

I. Emotions In Human Life: Essential, Beneficial And Enemy

A. Essential

I have pointed out, somewhat forcefully, that emotions are derivative of cognition, they are not primary and autonomous.

Thus, I have maintained, the issue in psychotherapy is mistaken concepts not "emotional problems."

There are implications to this emphasis that, by connotation, get incorporated into the natural view of my reader. Before I continue I want to deal explicitly with these connotative assumptions.

The neurologist and cognitive neuroscientist, Antonio Damasio (1994), in a justly famous book, in my opinion and those of the many other authors who cite this work, showed conclusively that rational action is not possible without emotion. Damasio spoke of people with orbital prefrontal lesions and the type of deficit which they routinely display. Such people, presented with purely rational tasks like math problems or logic problems operate at normal (that is, just like people without orbital-prefrontal-lesions) levels and their solutions are no more nor less rigorous that anyone else. The difference arises, and strikingly so, when they are required to convert rational thinking into rational action. Damasio cites the relevant test of solving MBA-type business problems. The solutions brain-damaged and non brain-damaged people arrive at are equal in rigor and logic. But when the people with orbital prefrontal brain damage are then put to the test of translating this thinking into action, they are wildly irresponsible, impulsive, and illogical leading to easily foreseen failure. The difference, as Damasio I think well demonstrates and defends, is that they lack the emotional component of desire and caring about the outcome. Their thinking is unimpaired, their action is greatly impaired because their action does not depend on emotional state.

Rational action, that is to say action that serves the end goal of successful living, requires emotion to operate.

B. Beneficial

There are people who are born without the ability to experience physical pain. They do not know when they have injured themselves or when they have an illness (like an inflamed appendix) because they can not experience the pain of the injury or the illness. They tend to die young and, in any event, need nearly constant monitoring such that a guardian serves as a surrogate pain evaluator.

Footnote 38. References are grouped after this chapter starting on page 463.

Footnote 39. It is the prefrontal cortex that evaluates emotion.