Orgone Therapy for Babies
Peter Jones RM
This
text is available as a printed booklet. Enquiries to info@orgonecore.org.uk
Orgone therapy with babies is based on Reich’s three basic discoveries
– armouring, orgone energy, and orgonotic pulsation. (See C O R E’s booklet An
Introduction to Orgonomy for more information on these.) They are summarized
briefly below. As you may know, if you have read any of Reich’s therapeutic
writings, orgone therapy with an adult can take years. With babies and infants
it can be very effective in a short time and can greatly help a parent improve
their emotional contact with an infant. Orgone therapy with babies and younger
children lends itself very well to a demonstration in a day or weekend workshop.
C O R E can run such a workshop for you, if you can collect a small number of
interested parents. These workshops are very enjoyable and a very interesting
and approachable way of learning about orgone therapy.
The
Principles of Orgone Therapy
A brief recapitulation of the three discoveries mentioned above will remind readers how orgone therapy works;
Armouring
means chronically tense muscles that form ‘character defences.' They protect
us against the pain resulting from thwarted primary needs, ‘forbidden’
feelings such as anger and sexuality, unpleasant feelings from within, and also
against either perceived or real threats, physical or emotional, from outside,
such as physical or emotional violence, humiliation, neglect, or coercion, to
name but a few examples. The muscles form collections of tensions in groups that
function together, eg, those involved in crying, smiling, speaking, breathing,
embracing. The armouring’s ’job’ is to keep under control powerful,
usually, but not always, painful feelings.
Orgone
Energy is the charge behind the feelings that the armouring is trying to
control. (See chapter III of The Cancer Biopathy for a history of this
discovery.) This discovery is still not acknowledged by medicine or science at
large, though it is a simple matter to help a fairly healthy young adult feel
the movement of this energy within themselves. (See C O R E’s booklet What
is Orgone Energy? for how you can try this yourself with a friend.)
Orgonotic
Pulsation is the pulsation throughout the body of the organs and systems
charged by orgone energy (hence orgonotic). While investigating the
energy cycle of sexuality Reich observed the four-beat orgasm formula, which
follows the sequence of:- mechanical tension ®
energy charge ®
energy discharge ®
mechanical relaxation. The study of the effects of armouring on physiology
convinced him that the organs also functioned according to the same formula at
different rates according to the individual’s needs and inner and outer
circumstances and that this was the life-formula itself. (The cycle can be
observed in protozoa under the microscope – see C O R E’s booklets Orgonomy
in the Laboratory for a description of this and An Introduction to
Orgonomy for a fuller explanation of the orgasm formula and orgonotic
pulsation.) It is also possible to observe orgonotic pulsation in a young baby.
Armouring is
not just a contraction of the muscles, (its most obvious and palpable aspect).
It disturbs the free pulsation of the separate organs and the organism as a
whole. Psychologically the main aim of orgone therapy is the dissolving of the
armouring; the overall aim is the restoration of the capacity for orgonotic
pulsation throughout the organism. Reich concluded that this was a state of
complete health. Orgonotic pulsation is an aspect of his work often neglected by
psychologically minded therapists. I emphasise it here, because an understanding
of and feeling for it is vital to an understanding of armouring and orgone
therapy with infants. The process of pulsation is easy to sense in a healthy
baby. You do not need to appreciate the finer details of this pulsation to do
simple orgone therapy with your own child. You do need a real
understanding of it, if you hope to do remedial therapy with babies with
specific health problems.
This
orgone therapy sees no clear divide between physiology and emotions, sees them
simply as two aspects of the same energy functions, expansion and contraction,
charge and discharge, pleasure and unpleasure or anxiety. Nowhere is this unity
more obvious than in the very young baby, before distress becomes rationalised
and masked with words, thoughts, and defensive behaviour patterns. Orgone
therapy with adults can bring them back to these early states, as it works with
body sensations, physiology, and energy movement, not just words. This is why it
is possible with an orgonomic understanding to talk of the psychology of the
new-born baby and psycho-therapy with young infants. Orgone therapy can work on
a pre-verbal level.
As
you by now, I hope, will have realised, if you have taken in the above, the
human body and physiology, when undisturbed by armouring, behave and move in
certain ways. By observing a person carefully, particularly a baby, we can
detect the presence of armouring. If we actually try to move a baby’s body as
a whole, or just a part, the armouring shows itself even more directly and this
is the basis of orgone therapy with babies. With an adult, when the armouring
has been present for years, the person often identifies with it and the aspects
of their personality that it represents. Therapy is, therefore, a long-drawn-out
process and the permanent dissolution of armouring takes a long time, even
years. An infant, on the other hand, feels her armouring as alien, burdensome,
and distressing, and is usually only too willing to abandon it.
This
booklet can only be an introduction to orgone therapy with babies. A complete
guide to this work with babies would itself need a whole book and would demand a
large amount of basic anatomy and physiology. I shall give here examples of what
one does to show how one recognises armouring in babies and younger children.
Sometimes an armoured attitude in an infant, say, a fixed frown or blank eyes,
can disappear as the result of lively, emotionally genuine contact, in other
words spontaneous behaviour that meets the baby’s basic needs, the frustration
of which has probably produced the armouring in the first place. It is thus
difficult to draw a clear line between sympathetic behaviour and ‘therapy.’
Suppose, however, that this does not work with the above-mentioned brow and
eyes. The defensive attitude has been present long enough and conditions in the
baby’s life have been bad enough for the defence to become established. Now
something more active is needed.
Before a therapist can do anything with a
baby, he has to make friends with her and gain her trust. This is easier than it
sounds, even if we have not met before. If, baby willing, we lay him on his back
on a comfortable mattress or blanket, kneel down in the position we would be in,
if we were changing his nappy, with his feet by our knees, we can gently start
playing with his feet and legs while maintaining eye-contact. Usually he starts
to enjoy this and is then happy to let the ‘therapist’ extend the play. In
many cases the baby ‘joins in’ with delight, as if the therapy were some
enjoyable game. On occasions, when I have interrupted the therapy to explain a
point to parents, a baby has made a clear, non-verbal request to me to carry on.
Gentle kneading of the musculature of the
forehead with one’s fingertips is normally quite pleasant to a baby. (To see
why, get someone to do this for you on your own scalp muscles.) If he accepts
this, I can spread my kneading upwards and backwards over the front and top of
the head, (taking care not to press directly on the fontanelles), and also round
the sides of the head over the temples and ears, all the time maintaining
eye-contact, which reassures the baby. I always ask the mother or baby or other
familiar carer to kneel down beside me, within sight of the baby, so that she,
too, can make eye-contact with him, if he wishes. The kneading of these muscles
is as much diagnostic as therapeutic. The baby’s reaction to this gentle
kneading tells us if any armouring is present. If armouring is present,
he will react negatively in some way – withdraw physically or become
distressed.
As does an adult, a baby can ‘hold
back’ by stiffening her neck and hunching her shoulders. I have occasionally
seen outbursts of anger when loosening armouring in this area, which is what
happens with adults in orgone therapy, where we frequently find anger
‘bound’ by armouring in the neck, shoulders, and chest. Gentle kneading of
the muscles at the back of the neck and upper spine will again be neutral or
pleasurable for the baby if no armouring is present. To find out if there is any
armouring in the shoulders, or to release it, if present, I take hold of the
upper arm close to the shoulder and slowly rotate the whole joint, using the arm
as a handle. It is important to rotate the right shoulder clockwise and the left
one anti-clockwise, so that the joint is moving forwards as it comes ‘over the
top.’ In an unarmoured baby, there will be no resistance to this rotation, the
joint moving easily and smoothly, like a well adjusted wheel. If armouring is
present, the baby may flinch, show signs of distress or withdraw the arm that I
am holding. If this happens, I stop. This therapy must never be forced on an
infant. A much gentler approach must be adopted, probably on another occasion,
when I would start by very gently stroking the armoured area with my fingertips,
until the baby had decided that, whatever else is happening, this is pleasant
and that this person wishes him no harm. Frequently this gentle stroking is
enough to help the baby to release the armouring and we may well be able to do
the same diagnostic movement with the shoulder joint and feel the change,
rotating it freely without eliciting any resistance at all.
Extensive experience of therapy with
babies has taught me that they will willingly and cheerfully ‘give’ an
unarmoured body part, or even their whole body, in an attitude of relaxation and
surrender to an adult who wants to move it, as long as one’s touch and
movements are gentle and slow. This ‘giving’ is in itself a sign of the
absence of armouring. An armoured baby is often reluctant to be touched and
played with physically. The shoulders and arms are obviously frequently involved
in voluntary movements, the muscles tensing as the baby moves the limbs. Any
diagnosis of armouring must therefore be provisional and checked with at least
one further examination, preferably more, on different occasions. While we are
gently rocking the shoulder, it may suddenly feel rigid, when all that has
happened is that the baby has noticed something exciting and wants to reach
towards it, as does any lively child when she sees something that delights her.
I must stress this point, in case some thoughtless reader with little
spontaneous feeling for armouring and energy movement is tempted to make
inaccurate, quick-fire diagnoses of armouring and then to foist unnecessary
therapy on a perfectly healthy baby. One cannot ever do orgone therapy with a
baby or adult without a sensitive feeling for the dynamics behind a movement or
expression and the context of anything that we are using to build up a
diagnosis.
Work to find and or release armouring in
the pelvis shows well the practice of this therapy. If the baby is lying in the
position described above and we flex the legs at both the knees and the hips so
that the thighs come up against the baby’s stomach, we can gently take hold of
the knees and push downwards towards the stomach, slightly abducting (pulling
outwards) the thighs. If you observe this from the side you will see that this
movement lifts the pelvis off the floor, causing it to swivel on an invisible
axis. As with the shoulder, if there is no armouring present, the pelvis exerts
no resistance and moves as if on a well-oiled hinge. The baby usually makes
obvious signs of pleasure and ‘asks’ me to go on. The movement often elicits
sounds of delight and the quality of this sound is a good pointer to the
presence or absence of armouring in the throat. An unarmoured baby’s voice is
full, round, smooth, and often slightly deeper than the sound we associate with
babies, perhaps because we hear so much shrill crying from distressed babies.
Students of orgonomy who know about armouring and the reasons for it,
(frustration of the infant’s primary needs), may wonder why one should find
any armouring in the pelvis at such an early age, when pelvic armouring is
usually thought to originate in toilet-training or the suppression of the
child’s emerging sexuality. In practice one does find pelvic armouring in
quite young babies. A baby who has felt very unhappy continuously for a long
time, (say a few weeks), may adopt the ‘no’ position so graphically
described by Reich,6
with the shoulders and pelvis pulled back and the head hunched. The withdrawal
of the pelvis in this situation is simply a part of a total withdrawal from the
pain of rejection, a widespread contraction throughout the organism. I have seen
a baby a few days old holding this position, though I did not get a chance to
examine him physically. His posture already looked very rigid indeed. Doubtless,
if orgone therapy with babies and children were done more widely than at
present, we would be able to build up a much more precise, refined picture of
when, how, and why babies form armouring, and, more importantly, more exact
information on how it can be prevented. I present these two examples here, the
pelvis and shoulders, to give readers some idea of what I might do when actually
working with a baby. I always like to have the carer who has brought the baby on
hand when I am working with him, and would never do anything with a baby that
this adult was not completely happy with.
If these diagnostic movements do reveal armouring, what do we do next? As
explained, I would on different occasions repeat them to confirm that the
armouring is there all the time. It seems that light armouring comes and goes
all the time, and only becomes established if the frustration causing it
persists. At this point I need to find out more about the baby’s history. If
the armouring is present as the result, say, of a difficult birth and beginning
to life, involving time in an incubator and the loss of all emotional and
physical contact with her mother, then the situation that caused the armouring
is over, and all we need to do is to release it, which in itself is not too
difficult. The parents can learn some of the basics of this therapy and do it at
home with their baby. Even intuitive massage and a deliberate policy of giving
the baby as much physical contact as possible can work wonders in this
situation, as I know from meeting babies with such histories who have come to my
workshops with their parents. Some knowledge of orgone therapy can only improve
the situation.
If the armouring stems from a current frustration, we are in a much more
difficult situation, which needs family counseling to resolve it. We need, if
possible, to tease out how the parents are, possibly inadvertently, frustrating
some basic need of their child. I am not here referring to blatant, abusive
denial of the child’s needs, but subtle deprivation that can occur in spite of
good intentions, even on the part of parents who know about the principles of
self-regulation as developed by Reich7
and the continuum concept. (See C O R E’s booklet An Introduction to
Self-Regulation for more details.) Self-regulation is the principle by which
the baby satisfies her core needs in ways and rhythms that suit her.
‘Demand’ breast-feeding is a good example of this principle in practice,
though this still ignores the baby’s need for full orgonotic contact with his
mother. This contact will not occur if her armouring prevents her energy field
from reaching out towards her infant. The continuum is the collection of
biological-physiological expectations that we carry within ourselves as
individuals of our species, handed down to us by evolution, generation by
generation, and which we are born with.
It does not mean you are a ‘bad parent,’ if your child has formed
some armouring, merely that as a product yourself of a life-denying culture, you
may have difficulty in perceiving or responding to your child’s basic core
needs, some of which may be quite subtle. Your armouring may be getting
in the way of satisfying contact between you and your infant. This is too big a
subject to go into in detail here. When I run a workshop for parents and babies,
I always try to make plenty of time for problems of this sort, as any amount of
baby-therapy is pointless, if a basic frustration continues and the armouring
reforms again and again. However, one of the very positive effects of this
therapy is very often a greatly improved level of contact between parents and
baby, which is often, though not always, enough to solve the problem.
I repeat here for the sake of completeness a summary of a baby’s core
needs. The baby wants, particularly in the early, non-verbal months, responsive
contact from her carers and to be part of an interesting, changing world. To be
more specific, she needs physical body contact, especially skin-to-skin,
eye-contact, undistracted, calm attention, especially at the breast, and
emotionally giving surroundings, and to have her feelings and needs taken
seriously and responded to appropriately. (See An Introduction to
Self-Regulation for more details.) Many parents seem to find it very
difficult to give calm, complete attention, which is no surprise, as giving this
is virtually unknown in our culture at large. To provide these the parents
themselves need emotional nourishing and support, especially mothers of very
young babies. As often emerges in the workshops, here we run up against the
ignoring of basic human needs in our culture and the fact that in this
life-denying environment we just have to do the best we can with the resources,
inner and external, available to us. Even if your child does grow up with some
armouring, it is still likely that with long-term ‘demand’ breast-feeding,
lots of carrying, and an in principle positive rather than punitive attitude
towards his core needs and blossoming energies that your child will grow up with
much less armouring than you, which is no mean achievement.
If you would like to find out more about self-regulation and the
prevention of armouring and what this involves in practice, see three
full-length books on gentle child-care, as well as C O R E’s booklet.
In presenting any part of the enormous range of Reich’s orgonomic work
to the public we come up against scepticism and ridicule. Orgone therapy with
babies and infants shows indisputably the process of armouring and the sudden
changes brought about in an organism when the armouring or even part of it is
removed. The presence of armouring is often quite visible to someone watching
the diagnostic movements and palpable to anyone carrying or handling the infant.
The changes in an infant when any armouring is released are similarly visible
and palpable. There is no simpler or clearer proof of the reality of armouring
and the truth of orgone therapy than a demonstration of it with babies. When the
therapy proves effective quite quickly we can see a grumpy, pale, unhappy, tense
baby suddenly ‘let go’ in a matter of a minute, or even less sometimes, and
become happy, pink, relaxed and soft. We can see these changes actually
spreading through the organism as we watch.
October 2008.
There was a demonstration of this therapy during C O R E's summer conference. This text is available as a printed booklet. Enquiries to info@orgonecore.org.uk