The Taproot Podcast - The Weird History of Psychotherapy Part 3: No Body, No Soul, No Discharge in the War

Episode Date: June 9, 2025

From genius discovery to UFO battles: The man who found trauma in the body Wilhelm Reich made one of psychology's greatest discoveries: The body remembers what the mind forgets. Trauma doesn't just live in thoughts and memories - it's held in muscle tension, breathing patterns, and physical armor that protects us from unbearable feelings. Then he went completely insane. This episode follows Reich's journey from Freud's most promising student to a paranoid exile shooting orgone energy at alien spacecraft. But here's the twist: His early insights about somatic trauma were revolutionary. They laid the foundation for every body-based therapy that actually works. https://gettherapybirmingham.com/the-weird-history-of-psychotherapy-part-3-wilhelm-reich/ https://gettherapybirmingham.com/what-are-wilhelm-reichs-character-styles/ https://gettherapybirmingham.com/wilhelm-reichs-analysis-of-fascism-enduring-wisdom-and-controversial-reception/ https://gettherapybirmingham.com/the-curious-case-of-wilhelm-reich/ https://gettherapybirmingham.com/john-c-lilly-when-dolphins-drugs-and-the-deep-end-of-consciousness-collided-in-the-psychedelic-70s/   You'll learn about: Character armor: how the body holds emotional pain The knife incident that got him expelled from psychoanalysis Orgone energy, cloudbusters, and weather control experiments Einstein's basement test that debunked Reich's cosmic theories The FBI raid that destroyed his life's work How his somatic discoveries live on in modern trauma therapy Discover the untold story of how trauma therapy evolved from Freudian analysis to revolutionary body-based healing approaches that preceded "The Body Keeps the Score" by decades. This evidence-based deep dive explores the pioneering work of Wilhelm Reich, Carl Jung, and Fritz Perls who discovered that trauma lives in the body long before modern neuroscience proved them right. Learn why your physical symptoms might be stored emotional memories and how the therapeutic revolution of the 1960s changed psychology forever. What You'll Learn: Why Reich was expelled from psychoanalytic institutes for discovering "character armor" How Jung's archetypal psychology laid groundwork for modern therapy approaches The real story behind Fritz Perls and the birth of Gestalt therapy Why America abandoned somatic approaches for cognitive behavioral therapy How trauma gets trapped in muscles, creating chronic tension and pain The scientific evidence behind body-based trauma treatment Perfect for: Mental health professionals, trauma survivors, psychology students, anyone interested in the history of psychotherapy, and those seeking alternatives to traditional talk therapy. Evidence-Based Content: Drawing from peer-reviewed research, historical documents, and the foundational texts of somatic psychology, this episode traces the scientific evolution from Freudian psychoanalysis through modern neuroscience-backed trauma therapy. Keywords: trauma therapy, somatic therapy, body keeps the score, Wilhelm Reich, Carl Jung, Fritz Perls, PTSD treatment, psychology history, mind-body connection, character armor, nervous system healing, experiential therapy, depth psychology Hosted by experts in trauma-informed care with clinical experience in EMDR, brainspotting, somatic experiencing, and Jungian analysis. Resources: Visit gettherapybirmingham.com for articles on somatic trauma mapping, Jungian therapy, and evidence-based body-centered healing approaches. Discover the untold story of how trauma therapy evolved from Freudian analysis to revolutionary body-based healing approaches that preceded "The Body Keeps the Score" by decades. This evidence-based deep dive explores the pioneering work of Wilhelm Reich, Carl Jung, and Fritz Perls who discovered that trauma lives in the body long before modern neuroscience proved them right. Learn why your physical symptoms might be stored emotional memories and how the therapeutic revolution of the 1960s changed psychology forever. What You'll Learn: Why Reich was expelled from psychoanalytic institutes for discovering "character armor" How Jung's archetypal psychology laid groundwork for modern therapy approaches The real story behind Fritz Perls and the birth of Gestalt therapy Why America abandoned somatic approaches for cognitive behavioral therapy How trauma gets trapped in muscles, creating chronic tension and pain The scientific evidence behind body-based trauma treatment Perfect for: Mental health professionals, trauma survivors, psychology students, anyone interested in the history of psychotherapy, and those seeking alternatives to traditional talk therapy. Evidence-Based Content: Drawing from peer-reviewed research, historical documents, and the foundational texts of somatic psychology, this episode traces the scientific evolution from Freudian psychoanalysis through modern neuroscience-backed trauma therapy. Keywords: trauma therapy, somatic therapy, body keeps the score, Wilhelm Reich, Carl Jung, Fritz Perls, PTSD treatment, psychology history, mind-body connection, character armor, nervous system healing, experiential therapy, depth psychology Hosted by experts in trauma-informed care with clinical experience in EMDR, brainspotting, somatic experiencing, and Jungian analysis. Resources: Visit gettherapybirmingham.com for articles on somatic trauma mapping, Jungian therapy, and evidence-based body-centered healing approaches.  

I predicted that in within a decade or two that the human species would establish communication with another species. Terrestrial, possibly extraterrestrial, but most probably marine. So we call it the physical isolation tank. Currently there is somebody inside this tank so that you can see what it's like. I think he was in here. Well all I can say is I recommend that you get terrorist-ridden because it is the jet fuel which will carry you farther into the various states and farther out into the universes than anything else will. Deleting memory, schizophrenic, what are you talking about? I'm talking about the treatment that would turn your prisoners of war into like-minded allies. With regards to your own people,

I'm talking about a treatment that would liberate them from erroneous ways of thinking. Kindly continue. The race to conquer the human brain, as well as the nuclear race, will determine our future. It looks as though the communists have already made a start. If we want to be fast and efficient, we have to learn from our enemies and forget morality and ethics. And as long as we continue to stir up fears of the Red Menace, we'll have the population on our side. I assume the CIA already has the green light from Washington for this research project.

I want all of the American people to understand that it is understandable that the American people cannot possibly understand. It's 1954 and a wild haired man is aiming a strange contraption made of hollow tubes open at both ends up at the sky. Behold Wilhelm Reich and his Cloudbuster, an array of metal tubes that he claimed could harness the power of cosmic orgone energy. Orgone is orgasms essentially. Reich took Freudian psychoanalysis and then extended it to be a cosmology. If everything comes from the power of sex and the repression of it. If healing comes from acknowledging how sex is the reason for everything, you know, there's that trope about how if you extend any model of psychology

indefinitely it will become a cosmology. Well, Reich did that with Freudian psychology in the same way that Jung would try to do with Jungian psychology through his conversations with people who knew how to do the stuff well that he was bad at. What most therapists and social workers like myself are bad at, like math, do conversations with mathematicians and quantum physicists like Wolfgang Pauli and Einstein. Reich did that with Freudian psychology, meaning that he thought that there was something that was powering the atoms, that was powering the soul, that was powering the cells,

that somehow was like orgasms, orgasm energy at a molecular level. And he believed that this mysterious life force that he called organ was associated with with sex but it could heal cancer, it could also do psychotherapy things, it could also manipulate weather, and then by the end of his life he thought that it could shoot down UFOs that only he could see with the organ energy by telling people where the UFOs were and then shooting that work on energy at them through tubes. Anyway this is Reich. He was once Freud's most promising student and then who discovered later that trauma lives in muscles which is a profound realization. He mapped how the body can hold on to pain which is one of the places where he wasn't wrong. Now he's shooting at aliens but alas, you know,

Reich's climatic battle against the evil space invaders was cut short by this more earthly foe. There was a long time where Reich had convinced everyone on his farm, namely his kids and friends, that there were UFOs assaulting the earth but if you aimed these tubes at the weather, not only could you control weather and bust clouds, but you could also shoot the aliens down, and he was one of the only things protecting the US. which were just sort of like wooden boxes that were lined with aluminum foil. He thought that people generated orgasms, therefore people generated organ. But organ also could cure psychology and problems and then cancer. So if you sat in the box, you didn't just get hot from there being, you know, aluminum foil and wood around you. You were reflecting your own orgasmic potential back at yourself until it cured things. Like I said in the 56, the FDA says that's wrong and they say they're fraudulent devices.

Reich himself would die in prison just a year later. His once promising career in psychiatry was reduced to a historical footnote, a cautionary tale of scientific and hubris run amok. But this was also after he got into a fight with Einstein about how the orgasms should be informing quantum physics more. Einstein shows up at Reich's farm. Based on some of his claims, he runs a couple tests, concludes that there's nothing measurable to the claims. Reich sends him letters for the rest of his life. He doesn't really get a letter back from Einstein. This is maybe one of the reasons why Jung and Einstein's correspondence is confirmed, is confined to like a dinner party that is confirmed and then maybe a visit at

Bollingen that has been reported by a lot of people but not also ever confirmed in something that was written so who knows if that happened. Anyway, could it be that Reich was on to something after all though? That he stumbled on some kind of hidden truth about bodily basis of mental life, a somatic reality that some of his other weirdness made other people write off. That he probably did notice before anyone else that this focus on a cognitive and linguistic dimension of experience and what would later become CVT but at the time was psychoanalysis was losing sight of a more primal reality that was the pathway into

healing trauma. So Reich had noticed something and that all these Viennese psychoanalysts that would later excise him from the community had missed. Reich was noticing that Freud was listening to words, where Reich was watching bodies. A lot of time bodies when they made words. A depressed patient slumped. An angry one clinched. Trauma victims held their breath or took shorter breaths that didn't fill the lungs, limited

the heart rate to faster pumping, upregulated the polyvagal response. A lot of things that we have language for now that Reich was intuiting at the time. So trauma victims often pulled their shoulders up. They armored their hearts, or what Eastern medicine practitioner might call the Anahata chakra. They had tension across the chest. A borderline patient,

or what we would now diagnose in the biomedical model as a borderline patient, a lot of the time was experiencing a constriction of the heart, feeling a black hole sucking in the chest, which is a pretty common somatic complaint of people with that sort of attachment style. The body wasn't just carrying the mind around. The body was the important parts of the mind because the mind was more of a CPU or central processing unit. The GPU of the brainstem

that was controlling our physical responses which informed and colored our emotional reality were all being controlled by something that we weren't aware of a lot of the time. It had learned how to remember things and if we were gonna heal trauma we had to learn how to remember how to feel emotion in a different way. Reich called this character armor. So chronic muscular tension that protected against unbearable feelings was something that he would pay more attention to than what Freud would, which is you know how you wanted to have sex with your family, or what Jung would pay attention to, which is how you wanted to

experience your dreams and myths and things like that. Your rigid neck wasn't just tight, Toreik, it was holding back years of unshed tears and you needed to cry. Your clenched jaw wasn't just TMJ, it was swallowing or clenching back decades of unspoken rage and things that you weren't allowed

to say during an abusive environment of being a child or being in an abusive relationship structure. For Reich, mental illness was quite literally a case of stuckness. It was a damming up of life force in the muscles and the tissues. And the key to mental health was to break down this armor, to release the blocked energy through deep breathing,

physical manipulation, and unrestrained emotional expression in an environment that was allowed. So if this sounds a little bit like Tantric Yoga mixed with primal scream therapy and some stuff from the 70s, that's not terribly far off because Reiki and psycho psychoanalysis or Reichian somatic therapy later turned into bio-energetics therapy, later turned into several models that would inform things like Bessel-Wanderkulk, whether or not he's aware of that influence, that's where it comes from.

But here's the thing, Reich was the first somatic psychologist. He was the first to say that the body remembers what the mind forgets, and the first to work directly with the physical holding pattern of trauma and all those Viennese intellectuals that talked about the unconscious, Reich found it in a way that was a lot more perceivable than the sort of esoteric and subjective stones that they were trying to turn over with their fancy conceptualizations. It was right there on your shoulders. Born March 24, 1897 in Galatia, William Reich was a child prodigy with a restless spirit. He immersed himself in medicine, psychoanalysis, he became one

of Freud's crown jewels at the psychoanalytic institutes originally, but Reich had a problem. Well, Reich had a couple problems. Like, probably he had something that we would now call schizoid personality disorder. He was brilliant and he was kind. He was devoted and he was a healer. He never directly experienced psychosis, but he did have tendencies towards very entrenched beliefs that did not change when objective evidence said that they might not be right. He often had trouble reality testing his intuition or communicating his ideas and he found it difficult to abandon his failed theories or compromise. He also was right about a lot of things that we still are wrong

about. The Mass Psychology of Fascism, which is one of his books that doesn't have anything to do with what I'm talking about here, is still highly relevant. And to say that he was once brilliant and then went crazy is not correct because he maintained a pretty acerbic wit and clarity throughout his entire life. There is no point where his writing became incoherent. There is no point where it became misguided or strange or schizoid. He stayed more or less pretty coherent, whether or not you agree with everything that he believed,

which I certainly don't. He believed it in a way that was coherent to him and didn't ever become even as selective or cherry-picked or inconsistent as somebody like Freud or Jung. He often had trouble with governments with expressing himself. But he wanted more sex in psychoanalysis than even Freud did. Reich argued that repressed sexual energy led to psychological disturbances and physical tensions. He kept the Freudian route that the reason for trauma was sexual even though he

transcended the time that he was in and the modern psychoanalytic conceptualization of his time by noticing that it was held in the body when most psychoanalysis wouldn't pick up on that for another hundred years. He thought that sexual repression created this stagnation where energy got trapped in the body and it manifested as these physical symptoms that related to mental symptoms. He felt that a fully satisfying orgasm released the spent up energy and led to emotional catharsis and well-being in a way that was sort of Victorian that probably isn't the cure. Something like the way they used to treat histrionic women by giving them an orgasm is not effective. But noticing that there

is a somatic relationship to emotion is real and something that even modern psychology struggles to reconcile with its its modern you know obsession with empiricism. So regular fulfilling orgasms to Reich meant a balanced psychology, increasing vitality and greater emotional expression. Orgasms weren't just pleasurable, they were catalysts for personal growth and self-discovery, getting bad energy out of the body, experiencing good energy coming back in etc etc. But to be fair, no one has conclusively proved that orgasms don't power psychology or atoms yet. It's just that they

probably never will objectively. So in 1930, Reich's unconventional behavior and anger at the Institutes for not noticing his ideas manifests in this confrontational style that alienates him more and more from the relatively passive nerds like Freud and from the greater psychoanalytic community, which was trying to be very academic and not as blunt or aggressive as Reich became. Reich felt marginalized, he was frustrated, and he saw the resistance to his ideas. And so he did what any reasonable person would do. He wore like a huge knife and he carried like a large wooden club and stood outside of the psychoanalytic establishment where he was not invited to one of the the conventions and this was seen as provocative and threatening because it was. The knife for him had some kind of symbolism. For them

it just seemed like a threat and Reich's growing paranoia and disillusionment about what they were talking about and if they were talking about him marked this breaking point where he was no longer allowed. In 1934, he's formally expelled from the International Psychoanalytic Association, and the incident with the knife became symbolic of his rebellious nature and marked this final rupture between Reich and mainstream psychoanalysis. If you got Reich and traditional psychoanalysis, you would probably diagnose that he had never been noticed by a father figure and was trying to be, but like many of the pioneers of early psychoanalysis, they mistook their own shadow for the rest of the worlds

or the greater psychology. So once Reich is cast out of the institutes, he doubles down on everything that he thinks. If Freud's sexuality was important, Reich said it's not only important, it's actually everything, even the atoms that make up your skin. He extends Freudian ideas about libido

into this complete metaphysical system and invents the idea of org-on energy. Reich believed that he had discovered this universal life force that flowed through all living organisms, sort of like the force from Star Wars, but a lot more sexual. It's this cosmic energy, it's sexual energy, it's life energy, and the same force that

made plants grow in clouds form also makes us think. He built a organocumulantors that are boxes made of these alternating layers of wood and metal usually kind of sheet metal as thin as they could make it at the time, cheaply thicker than aluminum foil but like you know tin and things. And it supposedly concentrated this energy in order to treat conditions that the FDA would let her say it didn't treat. Patients would sit inside to cure diseases, vitality, and improve mood. In hindsight they probably benefited from some of the other practices that Reich did at the farm. The organ accumulators were probably not the mechanism of action, but who knows?

Reich saw this as this natural extension of psychoanalytic theory into metaphysics and the larger medicine. Freud didn't want to take it that far and never really thought about Reich or talked about him again. The FDA wasn't amused. Einstein was used to hanging out with psychoanalysts. He drank red wine with Jung at a dinner party, maybe goes to Bollingen, according to a couple people, but it's not confirmed.

Reich was different though. In 1941, Reich visited Einstein at Princeton and they talked for five hours. Reich explains that his discovery of biologically effective energy is different from electromagnetic energy, but that it's this other form, maybe similar to what maybe we would call dark energy now in quantum physics, that could fight diseases and fascism, but it's not directly measurable. Reich is also really obsessed with fascism and disease being like a similar thing. He makes a whole lot of metaphors and it informs his thinking that the disease that he sees taking over Europe also is, and America, is also related to the way that cancer grows. So you see that happening a lot in the way that he makes metaphors. Einstein agrees that he'll test

this organ accumulator in Bragg's basement essentially. And so for 10 days he takes all these measurements trying to see if there's some sort of other energetic principle that he never finds. Reich claims that there's a temperature increase and so that proves that organ energy exists. Einstein's assistant points out that like this is just convection that when you encase something like inside of aluminum that it will get hot and Einstein concludes this is a temperature gradient you didn't discover a cosmic sex energy. Reich responds with a 25 page letter. Einstein never writes

him back. By the 1940s, Reich is advocating probably 20 years before America's ready for it that this sexual aberration should be adopted. You know, Alfred Kinsey is probably like in that same camp. He says that people who repress sex also tend to repress other things and then that creates these societal and endemic problems. He also has this tendency to relate that back to the organ energy that he thinks he's discovered. The FDA teams up with the FBI at this point. They're very frustrated that he hasn't ceased and desisted from telling people that these devices treat

cancer. The FDA tells him that he's not allowed to do these things anymore several times. By 54 the FDA gets these injunctions against Reich. In 56 Reich defies the court order. The FBI raids his main property. During the raid the FBI takes all of the organ accumulators and the research materials and Reich is charged with contempt of court. He's sentenced to two years in federal prison. The FDA says that he's never allowed to practice again. Reich says he will, he stays in prison because of that, and I don't know, maybe J. Edgar Hoover just wanted all the orgasm energy for himself,

but it is weird that there is so much focus because there's a lot of people that are pushing, you know, arguably stranger pseudoscience at this time. I'm wondering who it is that Reich made mad. I don't think that organ energy is real. I don't think that organ accumulators treat cancer. But when you look at the amount of attention that was directed at him for the amount of time that it was, there is someone that he must have pissed off. When Reich gets out of prison, he tells people that he can bust clouds and

create rain by aiming the metal tubes that collect orgasm energy at clouds. Strangely enough the same way that he gets rid of rain is the same way that he creates it so I don't know how the orgasm energy knows what to do but maybe Reich could tell you. Reich at this point decides that the UFOs are attacking the earth with orgasm energy but if you make the tube that busts clouds and controls weather then it somehow will make the UFOs go away. The FDA hasn't banned him from making these devices just the organ accumulators so this is allowed for a minute but he also goes back to making the organ accumulators later. He's a kind man, he's an intelligent man.

Maybe he's enabled too far by his family or had too much charismatic control over them because of his massive intelligence and other areas. I'm focusing mainly on the things that he did that were weird that later inform a broader psychology. He felt like he was doing the right thing and he probably would have benefited from mental health treatment but despite all of these erratic beliefs and behavior he writes poignantly and clearly throughout his life like I said before you know mass psychology of fascism some of the later work they don't really have any hallmarks of psychosis a lot of them are completely when he's not writing about UFOs like a lot of what he's writing about is completely coherent consistent and ideologically

consistent, as well as like literally consistent and well-organized. His prison letters at the end of his life are talking about his research. He doesn't seem to be slowing down at all. He dies of heart failure at age 60 in Lewisburg Federal Pediatrician. He probably didn't deserve to be in prison and he definitely didn't deserve to die there. He helped many people with somatically stored trauma in the body. One of his approaches was physical touch, Maybe something that later you know we would call like physical therapy or emotional trauma-informed physical therapy, pelvic floor work, a lot of the things that have been evidence-based to treat

psychologically stored trauma in the body. He would sit across from people much like Arnie Mendel in process oriented therapy and then poke the places that were tight until they released and then help the person express the emotion that was stored there. Peter Levin has a similar technique now, somatic experiencing. There's a lot of providers that are still not comfortable with doing these touch techniques. I'm certainly not. I kind of want the physical to be separated from the mental health part just for my own comfort zone, but I'm not really sure why patients had to be separated from the mental health part just for my own comfort zone, but I'm not really sure why patients had to be in their underwear. Maybe he wanted to see much

old tension. I also don't know why Reich had to be in his underwear, but that was something that he would do. Anyway, they would both be in underwear and he would poke you where you were holding somatic tension or he would call it psychic armoring, and then when he busted the psychic armoring by touching you enough, he would help you explore what came out when you started to express what was under the psychic armor. Now as brilliant as Jung's phenomenology was, Jung's map of the psyche with its archetypes and complexes and collective unconscious, it was just that. It was a map.

It's a frustration that I have with Jung and Jungian literalists to this day that they want the psychoanalysis to be, or depth psychology type psychoanalysis from Jung to be preserved in the same way that it was when the master made it. I don't really believe that that's true. Jung could tell you about your shadow. He could tell you about your anima, your journey towards individuation, he could interpret your dreams, he could analyze your paintings, he could trace your mythological patterns back to ancient Babylonian mythology. If you were into astrology, he would bring your astrological chart into the room and talk about how it was a metaphor for your life. But what then? And how does somebody interpret a map of the soul or techniques from such a map?

You'd lie on the couch having professed You know profound insights that didn't necessarily change anything. I think that Jungian psychology probably changed a lot more than the Early psychoanalysis, but it still was just analysis. It was intellectual, it was prefrontal cortex. It didn't really make use of the precuneal insight in the brain that Jung had observed and diagnosed correctly. So understanding your mother complex intellectually doesn't really release it from your nervous system. It doesn't really change the autonomic

nervous systems response to emotion. It doesn't really change the polyvagal system. I mean, maybe you bring it up enough that the window of tolerance shifts, but that's a big if. Even though if that's true for a lot of people, it's not true for all of them. And it also costs a lot of time to talk about these things for so long that you become exhausted by them, and then let go of them, and then feel them a different way. And even if you do have enough money and enough time to do that, it doesn't change for everybody the same. So Jung had given us probably the most complete map of the soul that anyone had ever drawn, but he hadn't given

us a vehicle to really travel it. And it was psychoanalysis, it was depth analysis, but intellectual analysis, and it didn't use the body, it was depth analysis, but intellectual analysis, and it didn't use the body, it didn't engage the brain stem. It didn't work with parts of the brain where trauma actually lives. So Reich had found this vehicle, but he had driven it straight off a cliff into UFO territory, it wouldn't be rediscovered for another 50 to arguably 100 years. If somebody put it together, Jung's map, Reich's method, it would take several disciples talking, it would take a whole lot of psychoanalytic conferences, and these seeds take root in California. So Reich's ideas don't die with him. They went underground, they emerged in the

Californian sun. You know, Alexander Lowen, Reich's student, he develops bio-endrogyetics. You know Alexander Lowen, Reich's student, he develops bioenergetics. He took Reich's character armor concept, he refines it, mapping how different character types held tension. The schizoid splits from their body, the oral collapsed into the chest, the psychopath inflates above the diaphragm. Maybe some of these are overly broadly painted generalizations, but a lot of these things core energetics, biodynamic analysis, somatic experiencing, Hakomi therapy, they're not cranky and they work and they work to treat trauma. These things are going to be put together with

experiential therapy. Jung is more of a map, Reich is more of a somatic practitioner. But it isn't at a loss when there's people in California that are watching these Eastern ideas come in for the 60s that notice that these things look like chakras. They look like other things that are perennial philosophies about somatic medicine that have been discovered in another place.

And they look very similar to somebody who came up with the same ideas in a different way. Cut to 1969. Fritz Perls, the founder of Gestalt Therapy, is at Eastland and he's doing a demonstration. The crowd watches. Fritz Perls has a cigarette dangling from his mouth and he works with a volunteer. What are you aware of right now? He has a thick German accent. The woman mentions her nervousness. Good, be nervous, be more nervous.

Show me nervous with your whole body. She trembles and she shakes and then she breaks into sobs that seem to come from the center of her being. Half the audience thinks that they're witnessing a miracle. And the other half think that they're witnessing this circus act in the psychoanalytic community that wants to have these complicated Conceptualizations in the late 60s leading into something like Becker, you know They they need this intellect to save them and they think that this is complete Just Exploitation and nonsense the other half thinks that he has found this cure someone shouts

Is this therapy or theater and then pearls yells back and a quote that probably haunts him. Yes, it is Pearls trained briefly with Reich he absorbed his ability to notice what the body was doing But he combined it with his Experiential awareness that emotions are the sort of arc that gets stuck, that arc has to be completed, and that when you tell somebody to go through the thing that they are saying is the symptom, a lot of times that it is the symptom that heals them. That sort of conventional wisdom that the only way out is through is something that someone like Pearls understands pretty early. Pearls's early career is marked by things like the theory of dental

aggression and very horn-eye and Winnicott-like neo-Freudian ideas and then later he splits from that community and starts to see that the way that you cure depression is by making people so depressed that they think they die but they don't and then you tell them to go deeper and then you force them through the depression and you force them all the way through and on the other side of that is the realization that we can live through it and the cure was within me all along. You also associate pearls with things like chair work that you get a whole bunch of chairs if someone's afraid of their dad

instead of talking about dad while they smoke cigarettes on the couch and then analyzing their sexual fantasies you put an empty chair next to them and you say, hey, here's dad in the chair, tell him that you hate him. And then the person looks at dad and they yell and they go through all their anger. They go to the very bottom of the emotion, the very bottom, they're like, you know what? I just wanted you to fucking love me. Why didn't you love me, dad? And then they cry and then they've cured themselves because they've found that love and they've

found the root of their suffering internally. He will define modern therapy. Those Jungian archetypes that everyone was analyzing to death, put them in chairs, talk to them, be them, don't talk about them, just experience them. It's a very early way of understanding emotion as an arc of understanding polyvagal theory, autonomic response. It's a very early way of understanding something like the shadow in an embodied way. You want to give a voice to your pain and in giving a voice to your pain you will see what it wants and then you will explore parts of self and then parts based therapy from

the fusion of experiential and somatic medicine will be this inevitable thing that places people places like Harvard will explore with internal family systems through Richard Schwartz and multiple others. Let it speak So suddenly 20 years of analysis could happen in 20 minutes Half of the community is really interested in this as an innovation The other half of the community is really threatened by the fact that it doesn't take 20 years And now they have to come up with a reason why this isn't thorough This is you know there there is still in psychotherapy this distrust of anybody that has a shortcut. Because if you're doing it faster than me, you're probably not doing it wrong.

It's not that I'm bad at it, it's that I'm being more thorough by wasting the patient's money and time. Not always the case. Some things take time, but that's still something that you see in this profession. So, there was this breakthrough that everyone had been waiting for, this fusion. And you take Jung's profound understanding of the psyche's depth, and you add Reich's semantic awareness of it. I mean, admittedly, through lots of inferences that come after Reich, and then you mix in Perl's experiential techniques and this result was this kind of alchemy in the 60s and 70s where this laboratory happened and you got to realize that not everyone is doing the same thing in psychotherapy. It takes people 10 years to get trained and over identify with a model and then think that it's the cure for everything

and then get insecure about the fact that it doesn't really work that well and then talk to somebody else and be honest about what they're actually seeing in the room and then learn a new thing. Like that takes a lifetime. It takes 10, 20 years for these things to kind of mix together, but they are mixing from the 60s to the 80s. From the 60s, 70s to the 80s, like they're mixing a lot. Virginia Satir, she took family dynamics.

You know, those archetypal patterns that Jung describes. She becomes the basis for a lot of family therapy. The Minnesota school would split and Salvador Mnuchin would fight somebody else. But she noticed those patterns. And, you know, Sue Johnson and Salvador Mnuchin would fight about should you follow the emotion that Satir pointed out or should you follow the structure that she pointed out. You know, like most things, the answer is usually sort of in the middle and the extremes

are not always helpful. But this, you know, you look at the tyrant father, the martyr mother, the scapegoated child, find new positions, find new possibilities, new ways of being. Arnold Mendel takes process work or process-oriented psychotherapy as it's sometimes called. And he combines Jung's ideas about the unconscious, speaking through symptoms with Reich's body awareness, you know, backache might be an unlived life, a slip of the tongue might be your true self trying to emerge, followed this dreaming everywhere. And he has this idea that is still incredibly progressive of

realizing that there are different types of memory that you don't have every sort of memory associated with every sort of trauma and You also don't record all of trauma or memory like a videotape Some of it is somatic some of it is auditory and relational Some of it is like sort of interjective and reflexive internally reflexive modern neuroscience bears this out Even though a few people will admit that these people were the reason for it They want to see it like in a lab on an fMRI, but like it's saying the same thing And then how and Sidra Stone developed voice dialogue therapy Which is sort of a precursor of IFS that I think is a little bit more intuitive than IFS is. You know, you could talk to these parts directly. You get the chair work and then you put them around but they're not your

family in voice dialogue therapy. They're pieces of you. So go ahead and talk to your inner critic. Go ahead and talk to your vulnerable child. Go ahead and talk to your pusher self. The pusher just wants you to do one more thing. It wants you to be obsessive. You haven't done enough. You know, the inner critic feels like you need to feel bad, that shame will motivate you, even though you know intellectually that's not true. This part of you still does. The vulnerable child just wants to hide in the corner. Maybe the inner critic and the pusher team up, they yell at the vulnerable child. Let's not make it about dad. Let's not make it about mom. Let's not make it about what happened to you, let's just go ahead and voice the internal systems that are inside of you

right now. Who cares where you got them? These are things that are huge and change, but they come from Jung's map meeting semantic and experiential medicine. Rolf Massage, holotropic breathwork from someone like Stanislav Grof, or you know what's his name, Ken Wilber, you know, perinatal matrices, primal therapy, all of the from the relatively accepted now to the very weird and forgotten, they come out of this fusion. And for a huge part they come out of California

Psychoanalysis can't really keep up with the pace of what's happening So what it does is it gets very insecure and it stays in New York and there continues to be this fight At this point largely in the Gestalt therapy community about whether or not psychotics the the the new about whether or not the new application of psychotherapy that we're seeing should be a medical procedure that is done by an expert in a chair, which is the New York perspective, or the California perspective, which should be a new way of life that we understand everything

in politics and religion and it changes you. Maybe it should be a religion, not a medical procedure. That fight is still probably alive. You can see it on Instagram pretty loud or sometimes on LinkedIn Whether or not you identify as primarily wanting to be seen on LinkedIn versus Instagram may tell you now Which side of this debate you still fall on? Do you think that your psychotherapy is a religious experience or do you think that it is a medical procedure? Do you think that it is a business or do you think it is a new transformative way of life?

So by July 15th, 1979, Jimmy Carter addresses the nation. The threat is nearly invisible in ordinary ways. He says, it is a crisis of confidence. It is a crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will. He later gets crucified for this and it probably ends his political career because you're not allowed to tell Americans to question the hero myth or the infinite potential of West bird expansion. You know, a hundred years after West bird expansion and the frontier are over, you still have to be using that language or else you're out. Vietnam.

Watergate. Oil embargoes. Stagflation. The American Empire wasn't reflecting power anymore back at the people that were part of it. The systems weren't working. Or maybe we needed to come up with a new way of envisioning how systems should work, but don't worry, we never did. What we did was the same thing that all empires have done throughout time.

When empires stop making their citizens feel special, these citizens go looking for power elsewhere, mainly internally. Personal power. Mystical power. The kind that Jung had been pointing towards all along. And I don't think that he would have liked this era of history, I don't think that was his point, but he was available in the country, fucking grabbed it. So you have all of these people who no longer feel like the government represents my interest.

Left or right, I don't agree with what the government is doing, and so I feel alienated and therefore I have to go inward and come up with my own esoteric philosophy that gives me a sense of personal power that leaves me dissatisfied but fulfilled in a way that doesn't happen during times where the empire reflects your ego back at you. Does that sound familiar? Left and right, extreme left and right, don't feel like the government is doing what they want, even if they're holding power at that time. So Joseph Campbell reads Jung and then he writes, even though he doesn't give him credit, The Hero with a Thousand Faces in the 50s.

No one reads it. He thinks that maybe that is a red herring, he tries to do some like other stuff with myth, and then all of a sudden his royalty checks jump all the way up in the 60s. All these people think he's great, he's making money as an academic, which is something that's not supposed to happen. And Here With a Thousand Faces is not like the best articulation of Campbell's thought, it's pretty early and it's kind of a boring read. But anyway, he's like calling these people Why are you buying my books? Why are you reading this stuff? And they're like because we're taking LSD and the LSD is telling us that the mythology is inside of us

And it's making us realize that we need to look at myth and you're the only one writing about that and and Campbell's like, huh I've never tried LSD. A young George Lucas in California reads Campbell. He writes Star Wars. Suddenly, every screenwriter in Hollywood has a Campbell copy on their desk. There's still, I think, like the screenwriter's room in Berkeley is named after him, or library or something, some building, I don't know. If you go to Berkeley, email me. But this hero's journey that we go through these processes of making mythology and that informs the way that we want to have stories served to us through popular media, like comics, like movies. When those things follow this model, they're successful, and they don't have to follow it as much as be in conversation with it.

It becomes this idea that culture still hasn't gotten away from. Even something like Rick and Morty is Dan Harmon being exasperated that he has to be in conversation with this model and making fun of it, but he's still talking to it. We haven't figured out a way to get away from the hero's journey. If you're not familiar with it, you may need to look it up. Again, I can't explain every single thing that I reference in a 2-3 hour thing, but this culture was ready for magic. Star Wars is not a science fiction. It is fantasy set in space. Star Wars is not Star Trek. It's not about, oh like the creature is attacking us.

Why don't we reverse engineer the electron drives and we'll overload it. Like putting too much air into a balloon. It's not that. Like it's wizards with swords. Like it is knights. It is a culture rediscovering religion that doesn't believe that the Jedi's are real, but really there's this energy that lives in our hearts like it is Dungeons and Dragons The US government and its infinite wisdom at this port just starts to explore consciousness because Jung has Challenged what we think is possible and so by the 50s You know through the 70s

We feel like the Soviets are researching We feel like the Soviets are researching psychics, so we have to too. Like yeah, maybe the microchip and the fighter jet are not going to be the weapon of the future. They don't know in 1955. A lot of the fighter jets that are not even made until the 80s, the early drafts of them start being made in 1955, 1962. Like a lot of these things take a lot of time to actualize, and we don't always know what's going.

And so the US military industrial complex in DARPA are pretty good at throwing a million irons in the fire, which is pretty expensive and become the basis of our economy, but that's a different conversation. You have people like Uri Geller on TV bending spoons spoons with their mind and most people think that it's real you have remote viewers who are trying to see into Soviet installations because like you get two identical twins and you put one in a room and then you say like well this one looked At a rose and this other one drew this thing that's red. So maybe they could Remote view that was something that we spent millions of dollars trying to do was basically like see things with the mind because we didn't know how far the collective unconscious went and you have you know

reports that they're declassified now largely that you can look up from this era where people are being like maybe there's a quantum field that makes atoms but we also interact with it and certain individuals see this like a wavelength. I mean stuff that's the height of New Age was actually given millions of dollars. You know, there were, you know, things like the first Earth Battalion project. They tried to create these, like, modern, you know, super soldier warrior monks by getting them to stare at goats and then seeing if any of the goats died and had heart attack and then being like oh wow maybe this is like the next generation of the the future wars won't be fought with guns they'll be fought with the

mind it turns out that like goats just have heart attacks and die a lot also some of them faint and then like probably no one was killing them with their mind there's a bad movie that George Clooney made if you want to explore that period. It's not terribly accurate, but it's probably a lot more fun than the actual history there. So if Reich was right about energy, if Jung was right about the collective unconscious, if the mystics were right about these things, maybe the other form of government structure, communism, was going to get ahead of capitalism and we needed to explore them if we really believe what we said that we believed about power and the nature of

you know economy. Enter John C. Lilly. This brings us to dolphins. John C. Lilly was a serious neuroscientist. He mapped the brain's pain and pleasure centers. He invented the isolation tank. But somewhere between the sensory deprivation tank and the ketamine, he'd gone kind of full mystic. There's a million movies that directly say they're based on Lily, and then there's a million movies that don't, but they probably are. Like if you dislike in Star Trek 3 or something, I'm not a Trekkie, where they go back in time to save a whale, they don't directly say that Lily is the reason that they do that, but I'm pretty sure that he's the reason

that's in the screenwriter's head. Lily believes that because cetaceans were also mammalian and they had really big brains, cetaceans are whales, FYI, and they had these sonic abilities to talk through sound, which doesn't really sound that deep when you realize that like language, like this podcast is also through sound, but I don't know, people mythologize like whales a lot in the 70s, that they had cracked this code of consciousness. Maybe we could talk to them or they were just speaking another language like Spanish that you could translate and then you could ask them to work as spies.

Or at least that's how he sold it to the military. And he was like, well, I'll just talk to the dolphins and I'll tell them to tell you where the Russian subs are and then you won't have to worry about like active and passive radar and all these things and they were like, okay So NASA and the CIA fund him a lot or the CIA funds him through NASA or DARPA funds the CIA through NASA the bit all of it goes back whatever anyway, so Because you're in this world now where you have Raichian breakthroughs, you have Jungian visions, you have people that are believing in this sort of like infinite expansive consciousness that we don't really know, science hasn't ruled out all the places it hasn't, it

can't go yet. They haven't decided that these things don't work. Somebody like John C. Lilly can go to the CIA and say, hey, I think one of the reasons why dolphins haven't spoken English yet is that no one gave them LSD. But I think if you give dolphins LSD and they have a pretty good teacher, maybe they can talk to people. And what's more than that, maybe those dolphins eventually will let us talk to God. I don't think he, I think that was like his intention

was the talk to God part, but the discover Russian subs and you can talk to dolphins was probably the sales pitch to get the millions of dollars. Cut to 1965. Margaret Hal Lovett. She's young. She's in her 20s. She's in a bathing suit. She's in a flooded house with a dolphin named Peter and her job is to teach the dolphin English and so she spends months in waste deep water in a specially constructed house in the Caribbean and Peter is given LSD with the other dolphins but he doesn't learn English. Instead, he becomes very attached to her, and he just tries to mate. And so there's not ethics committees and research.

What you would call conventional wisdom is also probably pretty different than what you would call conventional wisdom and research today, or what would be allowed. Anyway, the dolphin becomes very attracted to the researcher, and so Lily says, we'll just go ahead and stimulate him sexually, and maybe then he'll learn English, which doesn't work, but it's one of the things that becomes part of their protocols. John C. Lily, meanwhile, is getting really distracted. He's taking heroic doses of ketamine and sitting in an isolation tank,

and he's mapping what he calls the cognitive multi-state cosmos, which he says he can contact entities that he calls Echo or Earth Consciousness Control Office. So he's like sort of going into his own mind in a way where he's like losing touch with reality. Interesting aside here. John C. Lilly doing this doesn't result in anything cool, but the William Hurt movie, Altered States, not the clothing store for evangelical Christians, but the movie, Altered States, is based on his work. So is the Mike Nichols follow-up to The Graduate, which is called Day of the Dolphin, which is a bad movie.

And then also, like, if you played Echo the Dolphin, where you shoot, like, echolocation on Sega Genesis, like, from the 90s, if you're my age, if you use that in that game you shoot like echolocation at giant quartz crystals to talk to like Atlantean spirits to let you travel through time to fight aliens, which is pretty wild when you say it out loud but games didn't have like it was an implied story at that point because we didn't have like video cutscenes and things like we do now. Those are all based on him and probably a lot more. He also lives long enough that he sees the invention of YouTube and when I'm in early college and YouTube is brand new you can see John Lilly on these like early like video like Windows 3.0 not even 3.1 like XP Programs talking about how like whales have a soul that lets us travel through time or something

I don't know if those have been taken down they used to be up anyway a side over so When this is all happening You know the 70s are rapidly becoming the 80s the crisis of confidence is something that didn't work Where Carter comes out and says maybe America should have like a different myth The 70s are rapidly becoming the 80s. The crisis of confidence is something that didn't work. Where Carter comes out and says, maybe America should have a different myth. Maybe we should redefine progress. Maybe we should redefine our purpose. Maybe we should redefine the American dream as not cutting your grass and eating six servings

of red meat a day and having cheap things manufactured in other countries, maybe there's like a community or something else that we could have or we could, you know, do like an FDR type project or like have a war on poverty or like green energy or something else. That project largely fails or is at least rejected by the American public. I mean, at the same time, there is somebody, I don't know their name, and they probably didn't admit who they were or what magazine they were reading, reads an episode of, I don't know what you call those, I don't subscribe, I swear, but like a story in Hustler that

is based on the work that NASA is funding about a woman who is having relations with a dolphin, and they claim this is true, the person looks it up and they're like, oh my gosh, like, we are paying for this stuff. And they ask their boss at NASA, why are we paying for this stuff? And then NASA says, funding is over. What are you doing jacking off dolphins that are on LSD? We're going to like not pay for this anymore and this point of consciousness and experimentation for the American public at least for the government's

ability to pay for it is now over. Somebody like Aaron Beck has been watching this chaos and he has this different idea. He's seen, you know, in 78, 900 people drink Kool-Aid and die in Jonestown. At Eastland, he's seen these boundaries dissolve between therapists and clients where there's people who are having these encounter groups, but then everyone's having sex later and it becomes this reliving of trauma instead of a treating of it He's seen people that are having psychotic breaks being give LSD and people that are having like legitimate schizophrenia Being encouraged to go into it to like talk to crystals by psychotherapists in California who are saying that it's a legitimate

therapeutic encounter or spiritual emergence. He's seen like Werner Eckhardt, or Erdhardt, I never knew how to say his name, who is probably the proto cult leader for somebody like Keith Renear of NXIVM, you know, lock people up in hotel ballrooms and not let them pee, and then break them down with verbal abuse and then sell them Enlightenment like that's Buddhism He's seen all of the hippies that like had this unlimited potential when they smoked

Weed and like painted bright wings on a rock or whatever they did Like lose their enchantment with that and start to do heroin and start to steal things. He's watching society break down. He sees this beautiful fusion of Jung's map and Reich's method in the worst way, that it's become a circus, that psychoanalysis takes forever, that it's overly subjective, that it makes everything up, and then it's kind of bullshit when people aren't given rules that make it not bullshit. And he's been watching this chaos and he has a different idea. And he says, what if we threw all of that out? Reich's body, Jung's soul, Pearl's experiments, you know, experiments and theatrics. What if we get rid of like, Freud's nonsense?

The whole messy mystical tradition. What if we return this to a medical procedure? What if we get rid of like, Freud's nonsense? The whole messy mystical tradition. What if we return this to a medical procedure? What if the mind was just a computer? What if depression was just bad programming? What if we could just debug the psyche like it's software, it's clean, it's measurable, and the 80s is now happening, the stock market is going up, the crisis of confidence is going over, no touching, no screaming, no dolphins. Just cognition leading to behavior that you are in control of and you can change.

Isn't that an empowering hero myth for America to take back after this time? I don't know that Aaron Beck is really the salesman than any of these people were. I don't think he has the insight that half of them did. I think he understands institutions and he understood what was going to work and what was probably inevitable. And even though I don't like CBT, I don't see Aaron Beck really as like a bad guy. I see him as an inevitability and a system that had been given so much slack that it hung itself. So they drained the pools. They sent the dolphins to a park in

Mexico, I believe, where they decided to willfully drown themselves because they wanted to go back to the lady in the LSD and the relationship that they no longer could be a part of. relationship that they no longer could be a part of. Reich had found trauma in the body. Jung had mapped its archetypal pattern. Perls had shown how to work directly with it. And there's a generation of really brilliant misfits who had kind of recklessly, you know, I'm leaving Eric Erickson, or I'm leaving Milton Erickson and people like that out of this, but there's a million examples, you know, had fused the semantic and symbolic creating

therapeutic approach in this way that could actually heal with their own intuition and their own ethics. And then the people who followed them were more reckless. And they didn't learn from the ethics. Because the ethics didn't exist. They were implied. And people are kind of dumb. And when you say, hey, this is cool, it works works then they just treat this stuff like it's a magic trick and they get

people hurt and that's what happened and so America threw all of it away because in our quest to find the bottom of consciousness we found things that scared us that didn't fit in our filing cabinets or insurance forms or in the profit motive or within the capitalist structure that we needed to defeat Russia and we didn't really find the objectivism that we were looking for and so we decided that consciousness didn't have a bottom. We didn't need to find the bottom of it. It actually didn't exist. We're just thoughts. We're just cognitive distortions. We're just inputs and outputs that can be programmed by an

algorithm like, you know, in those days vacuum tubes or in these days Facebook just cognitive distortions, or just inputs and outputs that can be programmed by an algorithm, like you know, in those days vacuum tubes, or in these days Facebook, and that people are just sort of incentive structures, and the body, that's not where trauma lives, the unconscious, that's just superstition. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps, get over it, if you don't get over it, it's not societal oppression, it's not racism, it's not, you know, inherent, you know, things built into capitalism. It's just that you didn't work as hard or pray as much or like have as much faith or have as much gumption or some other made-up concept and

these were easier ways for us to see ourself. But Reich's legacy lived on, and the body does keep the score. But Reich's legacy lived on, and the body does keep the score. Despite what you think about Reich, he was undisputedly the first somatic psychotherapist, and he recognized very early what people like Bessel van der Kolk would later describe decades later. And everyone is an outsider weirdo until their ideas are copied, and people like Reich and Jung had their ideas copied a lot, even if you don't know who they are. Reich had bad ideas and he had good ones, and give him credit where credits do, but

the fear of these depths created the perfect condition for the, say, Tannic panic. They created the perfect conditions for the worst applications of Reagan and Reaganomics and the American conservatism and Wall Street worship that became the 80s and when you exhale the body and the shadow they don't disappear they return in the most twisted forms imaginable and when they do they bring demons. Mr. Rudyard Kipling's famous poem entitled Boots. Those of us who have never been engaged in actual warfare have very little idea of some of its worst horrors.

One of the most terrible being the agonized impressions made upon the minds of the infantry soldiers during the long long forced marches. Soldiers have been known to go absolutely insane with the everlasting sight of marching feet all around them. Boots moving up and down again, there's no discharge in the war, can so damn fine moving up and down again I try to think of something different Oh my god, keep me from going lunatic Move, move, move, move Moving up and down again No discharging I have to think of something different

Oh my god, keep me from going lunatic Move, move, move, move Moving up and down again There's no discharge in the war!