Contemporary Orgone (Reichian) Therapy

Four-Year Online Training in Somatic Psychotherapy
Daniel Schiff, PhD

Year one:

Relational and Person-Centered Character Analysis

Addressing Character Through Empathic Contact

The first year establishes the perceptual, emotional and conceptual foundation for all subsequent work, with an emphasis on learning to see and feel what is occurring within the therapeutic process and in the person in front of you with an emphasis on learning how to make contact through deep empathic engagement, the phenomenological empathic stance, as a primary mode of intervention.

Core Theoretical Areas

Students are introduced to the foundational concepts that organize the training:

• The work of Wilhelm Reich and the development of character analysis
• Empathic character analysis
• Functional analysis of modes of making contact
• Functional identity of psyche and soma
• Character formation as an adaptive, somatic, developmental process
• Person-centered therapy and empathic attunement (the work of Carl Rogers)
• Phenomenological method (with particular attention to Maurice Merleau-Ponty)
• Phenomenological understanding of empathy
• The somatic basis of verbal language

Development of Perceptual Capacity

A central task of the year is the cultivation of the therapist’s ability to perceive and track:

• Clients shifts in emotional tone as evidenced in micro-changes in facial expression, alterations in breathing patterns, posture and movement, and the rhythm and prosody of speech
• clients verbal languaging of their experience how their particular language effects their experience
• client patterns of approach, withdrawal, and contact

Students learn to track these processes moment-to-moment within recorded and live clinical material.

Understanding and Utilizing Empathic Dialogue

Of central importance to all of this work is the use of empathic dialogue as a means of making contact. This is not represented or taught as a technique but rather a way of being with clients that:

• Allows for deeper contact between therapist and client
• Reduces client’s need for emotional defenses
• Helps highlight client’s character style and make it part of the content of therapy

Clinical Observation and Analysis

Class time is heavily devoted to:

• detailed viewing of demonstration therapy sessions
• slowing down and examining specific moments
• identifying emerging character themes
• analyzing therapist interventions and their timing

Students are trained to think in terms of process rather than content.

Experiential Component

Instructor led experiential exercises are used to help students:

• develop awareness of one’s own emotional and bodily experience
• explore contact and interruption of contact
• experience shifts in perception and expression

Outcome of Year One

1. Students develop an initial capacity to perceive the therapeutic process as a dynamic, organized field in which emotional, relational, and somatic processes unfold together.
2. Students learn to facilitate that natural unfolding through empathic dialogue.