A VIEW TOWARDS FUNCTIONAL ART

An art and theater program developed for juvenile delinquents

In the summer of 1979 I was asked by an acquaintance to come apply for a job teaching art in a school he had co-founded for juvenile delinquents in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, Perkiomen Valley Academy (PVA) was begun as part of a county-wide program to develop an alternative school therapy program for teenagers who, for personal or legal reasons, were unable to function in the school system but who had not committed serious enough offenses to be imprisoned.

PVA was a small school run out of an old farmhouse in a typical Pennsylvania country town. We had about 25 students enrolled and that was at capacity. There were four full-time teachers (2 male, 2 female) and two full-time administrators (female). I was hired part-time to develop a creative program and because the school needed more male energy. I had just begun orgone therapy and this experience, coupled with years of research I had personally done into the roots of the creative process, seemed to indicate to me that the time had come to test out on others that which up to now I had only applied to myself. When I graduated from school in 1973 (B.A., B.F.A., M.F.A. in Sculpture, U. of Pennsylvania) I had sworn to myself I wouldn’t teach art. Teaching antiquated techniques and discussing ideas about art seemed to me to be the most boring, insipid way possible to use the direct experience gained from actually working and solving the aesthetic and technical problems. Furthermore, I felt no one directly out of school had the experience to really teach art. The beauty, for me, of getting an art education lay precisely in the fact that it gave me freedom to explore and to make decisions based upon my own needs as a person – needs which when I accepted them gave me the incentive to master practical techniques. At this time, I had never encountered the notion of self-regulation proposed by Reich. What I learned of it emerged directly from my own process of rebelling against the authoritarian family and teaching system. Learning how to make art undercut all the long-winded intellectual rigmarole of my undergraduate education by providing practical problems in handling materials and establishing criteria for success in terms of craftsmanship. It was essential for me that since I had rejected an imposed system of values, I find one I could respect: through my work and in myself. My work became a compass or a frame of reference for orienting myself in the world of action and idea. This process begins very practically in terms of self-mastery of the body. It continues through accumulating the necessary skills and coordination necessary to function as an artist, and then gradually extends itself into the realm of aesthetics, I might conjecture that, in orgonomic thought, developing a healthy personal aesthetic involves both recognizing and feeling the limitations of one’s armor and understanding, one’s capacity to respond to the life energy in relation to the work one is producing. More on this later.

For the moment, I feel it is enough to express the fact that my attitude towards my own work was that it could measure my growth, that I could use my work to establish a personal criteria for success in contacting and liberating the life energy in myself. Perhaps this will seem painfully obvious to anyone viewing an artistic process from the outside? but when you confront the simple fact as an artist that your work is yourself, and when you contact what you see there, the implications can be simply staggering. One suddenly realizes how much energy and time is involved in avoiding the obvious and fleeing from the necessary. Therefore, when I approached the possibility of teaching “art” it was no simple matter, I felt my deepest: responsibility to my students was to convey this awareness and not just to provide entertainment. Real self-knowledge is like a vise slowly tightening against self-indulgence. As far as I was concerned, if I couldn’t simultaneously convey this to my class as I grew with it myself, the notion of teaching art should be abandoned as a personal objective. Actually, I felt tremendous joy in being engaged in this type of struggle rather than just mechanically bound somewhere to the work ethic as a drone. To ultimately be able to make money at it, too, seemed to me to be a real triumph of the human spirit. I wanted to see if it was possible to get something of this across to people who had no preconceived ideas about art, and whose life experiences had all but invalidated any prospects for self-regulation. As I shall attempt to describe later, this was a process loaded with both incredible moments of insight and burdened with enormous frustrations. As anyone familiar with orgone therapy must know, it is hardly limited to an intellectual pursuit. I feel what I have learned is valuable to students of orgonomy just because it was so simply conceived and pursued on a trial-and-error basis, and because it involved as much growth and adjustment on my part as anyone else’s.

Furthermore, there exists great resistance within the art world to determining a therapeutic function to art. I feel that to do so constitutes a serious threat to the heavily entrenched economic concerns that must restrict art to mechanical and mystical processes in order to make it pay. Though this concern does not fall properly within the framework of this particular article, it deserves mention precisely because it is these forces more than anything else that prevent young adults who have touched upon the beauty of the artistic process from continuing to apply later on. As anyone who has experienced emotional plague can attest, intimidation plays a key role in bottlenecking creative growth. Censure, judgment, fashion and intellectual snobbism are some of the tools employed by the mercenary interests behind the art world, even at the college level and below, to externally regulate artistic freedom. They substitute the natural excitement of true creative exploration with the fear and loathing resulting from competition for wealth, fame and status. The most deeply entrenched resistance I found among my students was trying to establish a basis for their own work in themselves and not for some derivative source such as records, TV, etc.

I suspect that this media fixation, stemming as it were from the head (eyes and ears), may be substitute sexual gratification which allows them to feel potency in the head without having to go through the emotional, upheaval necessary to experience it throughout the body. Thus, any attempt to approach this problem through teaching the tools of creativity is met with both incredible yearning and contempt.

Attaining a truly intimate contact with the art process produced intolerable feelings. These emotions caused irrational behavior and exposed issues in other areas of school life that were being suppressed and had to be dealt with by the staff as a whole (and, in some cases, included the staff). The way in which these feelings were armored against was extremely revealing to everyone. Gradual understanding of how this all worked helped my program orient itself better and become more effective. I feel that with continual growth, real transformations in the learning process could be effected in the whole school, mainly due to the extraordinarily receptive attitude of the staff. Hopefully, this information will be useful for persons with a similar potential in other schools, as well as artists seeking the means to apply their gifts there.

When I began teaching at P.V.A. it was with doodling. I assumed no matter what these kids could do they could do that. I’m sure it was something of a shock to suddenly have to do something in class, as work, that they were used to doing in place of work. I was able to demonstrate how difficult even that could be when you had to do it long enough. I noted where each gave up or started losing control. That was their point of resistance.

Eventually I selected only those students who could manage themselves in my loose classroom. The idea was that doing art was a reward £or good performance elsewhere, though initially 1 brought everyone in to explain what I was doing. Next, I showed them samples of bronze belt buckles I had made from doodle drawings, and how I went from the drawing to the finished product. I told them I had made a lot of money this way, just from turning a doodle into a functional object, and showed them the color catalogue for proof. This made sense to them. I wanted to ground the art process in the daily world and show how it can be used to fulfill normal needs. With every subsequent phase we entered, I used any means possible to anchor what we did creatively in some functional process, be it self-discovery or manual skill.

Several persons liked the idea of making ornaments so we took their doodles and transferred them to plexiglas, which I then cut out on a band saw and lumped over a heater to make bracelets and pendants.

To expand the notion of abstract art I presented the class with a book titled, Adventure of Modern Art, by Oto Bihalyi-Merin (Harry Abrams, Inc., N.Y.) which was subtitled, “Similarities and Differences in Art Images, Primitive, Ancient and Modern”. This excellent book contrasted modern art to natural forms and primitive art. Explanations were practically unnecessary, for the process of super imposition of images spoke for itself. This gave strength to my attempts at developing a visual language. As an aside, I might note that our educational system is extremely impoverished visually. Our capacity to see seems to become replaced by mental images of what we want to see, for instance vans, autos and homes being “re-done” in garish colors, fake fur, chrome and plastics, which is perceived as an image of “luxury”, when in fact it is extremely aesthetically displeasing and unnatural. This also finds reflection in our ‘two-dimensional world. Much standard architecture and design seems stymied by total involvement with perpendicular planes. Houses, furniture, autos and appliances rarely involve curvilinear surfaces to any degree that imply the third dimension. Since we cannot “see” around a truly three-dimensional object, like a tree or a sculpture or a living form, we have to “feel” the third dimension, with our hands, our body, our orgonomic senses, in order to understand it. These feelings provoke and stimulate the observer, while an environment of carefully organized right angles poses no threat whatsoever, so nothing is concealed from the imagination.

The next step I can recall taking was to ask some of the higher energy individuals to assemble a collage of images drawn from old magazines, and paste them onto a large piece of cardboard. The theme was to create a journey, their journey. I asked them to describe where they came from and then trace a route through what they experienced to where they wanted to go. I can assure you the results were overwhelming, and I’m certain the images selected would be extremely revealing to any medical orgonomist. This particular technique has many excellent side effects. It enabled me to begin to discuss some personal problems in a light way via the images themselves, and not as an assault on the students private worlds. Actually, it helped several people to articulate their problems to themselves, and made them think about their own goals, possibly for the first time.
In some cases, where I had trouble bringing their attention under control, I challenged them. I told them all they talked about was freedom but here, where they were free to make their own decisions, they couldn’t do a thing except complain and disrupt others. I told them what they really needed was for someone to tell them, what to do. If trouble persisted, I kicked them out and told them to go back to the safety of regular class.

One really extremely volatile individual who could never be reached verbally in group meetings and stubbornly resisted all criticism began asking me to come to art class. He had recently been in some trouble and everyone in the school had to vote “whether to kick him out or give him another chance. Everyone voted to give him another chance except me. I said why bother when he says he doesn’t care anyway. That’s when he wanted to come to art. He was so hyper-intense I really didn’t think he could concentrate at all. During his stay in the art room, he constructed a magnificent three-dimensional collage which he continued to evolve, layer after layer. I left him alone and unsupervised, even gave him permission to scout the grounds for discarded objects of interest. It became slowly obvious that as he exhausted his energy in the project, he became more accessible and cooperative in other areas of school life.

Unfortunately, I was not available on a regular basis to try to organize this experience as a feature of his education, and so he easily resorted to his old ways. What I was able to do was transfer this understanding to an appreciation of what it meant to learn how to play the guitar, which he began to do later in class, with much enthusiasm. Later on, he was involved in quite a lot of trouble involving drugs; his mother was smuggling them in to him at his group home. Eventually, he was terminated from the school. P.V.A. operates on a contract basis with each student, which involves a projection of goals. If the student breaks his contract too often, they get terminated.

In another experience with collages, I encountered a very tough, verbally abusive and torn boyish young girl o£ 13 who, much to my surprise, constructed a picture entirely filled with the images and words of Christ. Externally, none of this ever showed up in her behavior. In fact, she was so thoroughly negative and acrimonious we had to occasionally adopt a policy of completely ignoring her except for the rare good moments, which were applauded and reinforced. She was a victim of sexual abuse within her family and of constant beatings from her mother. On the basis of the collage, I arranged some private religious counseling through the church which was associated with our school. Here, she became docile, quiet and overly cooperative and attentive.

There has probably been no single individual into whom P, V. A. poured more energy for such frustrating results. I found when I began my writing workshops, that when she wanted to she wrote voluminously in the most extremely articulate, honest and passionate way, betraying a whole vast world of feeling she knew but could not express positively through her behavior. One poem, reproduced herein, was so beautiful my brother and I wrote a melody for it and produced it for her to listen to as a song. At these rare moments listening to the depth and beauty of her own feelings put to music, her whole face would drop its angry, defensive contortions and for a moment display a sad, beautiful grace which for an instant became a quiet longing for something she may never know.

At this point, I began dividing up my time between orienting people into whatever art area they seemed to respond to best, music, visual arts or writing. The writers loved telling their own story, or writing newspaper reports. We later started a school paper, to print some of this material. Others couldn’t write at all, or preferred poetry. In one case with a tiny black kid who couldn’t write, I can recall grabbing him and tickling him until he shouted out a word or a phrase. These words I recorded as they emerged, and became a fine little poem. Others needed no prompting. One young girl of 16 was extremely precocious in all areas of art, to the point of becoming a prima-donna. She thought all she had to do was exist and art would come out. I gave her a lot of rope, but severely criticized her work, which she hated. The school tried to get her to prepare a portfolio to present to an art school, but of course she was above that. When she finally went to visit one, she was intimidated beyond belief and remained uncharacteristically silent for days. Later she decided her best talents lay in acting. Of this, more later.

For those interested in continuing visual arts I offered drawing classes and introduced the aqua-tint process. This was very well received due to the ease with which cards could be made for special occasions. I brought in an old set of press stamp letters I had, and put several people to work designing the newspaper covers or printing out words and anecdotes on their pictures. We had some poster paint, and a few people actually tried to design color field paintings. I encouraged large scale for this, because one really experiences the effects of color much more dramatically when it is life size or bigger. I would add that while I did not get around to doing it, paper making, or remaking it from scrap paper, is a wonderful exercise to do at this point, as is paper marbling. Both are quite visually fascinating and require little or no equipment.

One of the biggest problems I had in class was picking up on where I was being manipulated by the students. They often took advantage of the class to smoke or just put in minimal effort to escape work elsewhere. We operated on a point system where each individual had to earn a certain number of points each day to progress in the system. At certain predetermined totals, he or she would be elevated to a higher phase, with increased privileges. Since I was only there part-time, it was easy to fool me into thinking they were ahead of where they actually were. I felt, at the time, my chief duty was not to police them but to create a positive learning experience, and thus I often didn’t put enough energy into calling their numbers. The unfortunate result of this was that I often over-extended myself, and other members of the staff had to encourage me to work with fewer people at a time.

My first year, I was extremely impressed with the efficiency of the school as a whole in dealing with the problems of the student body. Like Mrs. Rogove, I could see that a strong administration produced a more effective learning environment. As I mentioned before, P.V.A. has an extremely open-minded staff which allowed my efforts to expand and orient themselves virtually without obstruction, at no little cost to its own order and effectiveness, I might add.

I realize in writing this down, that my procedure implies a sort of felicity or ease of transition from observation to observation, technique to technique. Actually, it did not seem that obvious at the time, and it was all too easy to make assumptions about a person’s abilities or character that simply did not bear out in the long run. Oddly enough, the problems became more complex and the resistances tougher, the more I approached the third dimension, though I was only partially aware of this at the time. You may have sensed that I was developing what I felt was a geometrically expanding approach to teaching, as opposed to a linear, non-energetic approach. Orgonomically, this might be interpreted as introducing tasks which involved higher and higher tolerance to anxiety, or requiring greater orgonomic contact. At the time though, I only saw it as cumulatively reflecting my own creative process. It was, simply, finding out what could I get them to do, how could I get them to do it, just like making art.

Three-dimensional expression involved first sculpture, then mask making and finally sound and movement exercises, often called impulse work or improvisational theater techniques. I found that when I introduced plastic materials, wax, clay and plaster, a lot of resistance surfaced. Some students had incredible displays of frustration over just being asked to form a simple pyramid or block, using measuring tools to make it uniform. Though I could have gone back to making ashtrays and things like that, I felt such tasks would only have reduced the experience to the level of everyone’s own shtick, or personal ego projection. I wanted to push the expanding aesthetic awareness, so, among other things, I had people bend wire screen into forms, secure the ends, and then dip them in plaster to harden. It was here I began to notice how easily these objects became “accidentally” broken or purposefully distorted.

From my own experience as a sculptor, I knew how much energy of restraint must be employed at times to keep from smashing to bits one’s own work, so much does it become a mirror to the frustration and impatience in oneself. Perhaps in some fashion one’s energy field creates a model for itself through aesthetic projection into a material or movement, and the resulting glimpse of one’s psychic condition becomes intolerable. It would be interesting to find out if this yearning for creative action, be it in work or art, actually releases some of the DOR when the muscles are innervated into the blood stream, thus almost insuring a reaction of resistance, or contraction, when the blood reaches the brain.
Later on, I brought some chemical styrofoam to school; two solutions which when mixed together form a chemical reaction, producing styrofoam 30 times larger than the liquid mass. The kids loved this because all they had to do was pour a little in a cup or box and it would mushroom all over the place and then get hard It involved very little effort or skill, yet it was exciting and sexual. Some clever people made faces, carving holes through boxes or cans for nose, ears, lips, etc. Suddenly, instead of facing resistance to participating, I had people mauling each other to get a chance to do it. These objects were highly coveted, protected, and even ritually painted. Rarely have I ever seen such expressive creative fury. I look at this experience now as a kind of hiatus in the whole process, where suddenly many different elements coalesced to produce a blend of all the best and worst aspects of everything we had done to date. When, later, I began doing mask making in paper maché I again found the destructive element rampant. Someone would leave their mask to dry, and the next day come in to find it smashed.

These experiences and others began to alert me very strongly to the fact that the art experience was becoming a testing ground for unresolved emotional issues. As we shall see, this bore out more and more as I moved into work directly involving the body.

One last comment about this period, before 1 move on to the sound and movement work, concerns the appearance of guests. I felt in the long run these kids would not fully understand what I was trying to do, or if they did it would be many years down the road. What I felt I needed to do to offset this, was create some memorable experiences that would be retained for their sensational value and uniqueness alone. To this end, I invited many friends, from vastly different walks of life, to visit the school. I felt that if the kids couldn’t really relate to the work, or retain it well, they could easily relate to the creative individuals and retain them as a memory of something quite different which they got from school. Remember, this wasn’t New York City. Many of these people came from farms, highly sterilized suburbs, or small town ghettos. There was little or no involvement past one’s peer group, family or probation officer. To see and talk with artists was to make a dream accessible for some of the people, even possible, one would hope. This type of input I considered, above all, the most important.

As I have already implied, my art program gradually underwent a transformation into a theater program. My two primary considerations for doing this lay in determining a means for using art to strengthen life skills. Of these, poor reading and writing skills, and the inability to respond in a sensitive manner to others and realistically communicate one’s needs lay at the root of much failure in school life. Students who were fascinated by their bodies and tremendously articulate about their sexual feelings could scarcely greet each other in a normal way, much less sustain positive friendships.

One day the school invited a local sex-education organization to come in to talk about birth control, pregnancy, etc. These highly creative individuals actually staged hypothetical situations, using the kids themselves, such as arguments between pregnant girl and boyfriend who refuses to get married, to flush out feelings which could then be discussed by the group. This created a highly electric atmosphere with full attendance and attention. I was extremely impressed with the lack of restraint with which the students threw themselves into the roles, usually totally identifying with the characters.

I saw in this a tremendous opportunity to move my work forward. Later, other visits to a drug-rehabilitation center where ex-junkies and students got together and talked confirmed this. At these sessions, which were segregated (men with men, etc.), the kids seemed to relish the opportunity to discuss openly their complicated sexual problems. What was important to me was the great willingness to approach these topics and the need to gather better information on their own struggles.

In response to this, I introduced a number of sensitivity training exercises used to train actors. Before I describe in detail how this went, I would like to offer a little background information. Impulse work, as I will call it, was the result of the need of actors and producers in the late 50’s and early 60’s to eliminate plays which were merely a reflection of society. To this end, they stripped the theater of all its cultural affectations, including sets, directors, the stage, the script, everything but the actor, and his capacity to make sounds and movements. The results of this are theatrical history and will not be elucidated here. What is important is that techniques were discovered that brought the actor back to the point where he was responding to primary impulses, impulses that were not strictly the product of social conditioning or learning. Scratching your nose, blinking, and coughing might be considered normal examples of such impulses. For the most part, these are barely conscious, hardly ever considered. On the other hand, most conscious behavior was a reaction against input of some kind, and how you responded depended upon your own structure of awareness. Impulse work simply involved becoming aware of this differentiation, and in learning how to articulate and “take possession of” one’s primary impulse as an alternative to being constantly led around by the nose by habitual responses.

To say the least, the potential of this type of work is staggering for anyone who penetrates to its core. It instantly brings one into contact with their emotional muscular rigidity, which in theater terms is called “resistance”. Some of the kids grasped the notion that what they encountered as resistance to structure .in themselves was only a resistance to negative conditioning. When I separated this type of resistance from the fear of experiencing life more fully, I was able to establish a life-affirmative teaching environment, albeit of short duration at best. This did have the rather liberating effect of saying to them that it was not the core person who was “bad”, but the person who had absorbed society’s distortions, and now mirrored them, who was at fault. At brief but poignant moments, the exercises which I will describe perfectly illuminated this scenario in a simple, totally non-verbal way. For a year I labored at the process of using these techniques to build this awareness, at which point I tried to get the students to translate the information back into an understanding of their day-to-day experience and construct from it a play which would address this dilemma in some manner. For my trouble in trying to engineer this noble bit of idealism, I was to encounter endless but highly picturesque grief.

Much sound and movement work is best introduced as a game. First of all, a game has rules, and if you want to play, you have to accept the rules. People who don’t want to play, can be invited to observe. To define the space in which these two activates occur is very important, and can be done in a room simply by separating the two areas with a piece of masking tape. Once you have convinced an individual to play the game by the rules, no matter how absurd they may be, you have in effect equated success in having fun with the necessity of maintaining a structure. One cannot underestimate the importance of this in dealing with people who are constantly trying to understand and define their own boundaries. The second important step is to introduce the game as a challenge, so that accomplishment can be measured and understood. The third step, which goes hand in hand with the second, is to avoid, if at all possible, making value judgments as to what takes place while the work is in progress. Ideally, the instructor will not praise or criticize, only point out problems and refer the situation back to the student in order to get him or her to establish their own criteria for success. This removes the instructor from assuming an authoritarian position in relation to the work, which is, after all, a great measure of its ultimate success. You would be amazed at how difficult this is, so conditioned we are to either being leaders or being led. Naturally, such a situation does not mean one encourages license, but in a game situation like this, when disciplinary attention must be drawn to an individual, it is done so because they are interfering with the fun of the whole group and making it impossible for all to continue the game. With juvenile delinquents, this can be very much the ideal, and very rarely the practical reality. When confronted with this problem over and over, I often found it necessary to reduce the size of the groups to a level where I could successfully control the dynamics of the situation. I do know people, however, who are good enough at this work to walk into a whole room of 250 NYC junior high school students and get it functioning within minutes.

The first exercise I started with was called the Tibetan stick dance. Though not strictly impulse work, it is forceful and appealing to watch and the presence of the stick in the hand deflects much initial self-consciousness. This is performed by clicking two sticks with a partner and then turning. It can be done to music, and gives one instant gratification in the sense o£ acquiring a skill and looking good in front of the group. This is important if you’re going to get the people interested and keep them from putting down the later work where there is more risk of self-exposure at stake.

Next I introduced the Walking Exercise. Though extremely simple in concept, it is very difficult to execute properly. Professionals spend hundreds of hours perfecting it. Delinquents perfect avoiding it in no time. Participants are asked to simply, “fill space”, that is, to walk in such a manner as to head toward whatever section of the space no one is in. Gradually the participants start sensing themselves as a group and you encourage them to notice each other (eye contact), to notice how they walk, but not to speak or interject their own personality into the game. Everyone should begin to concentrate more, and this produces a feeling of harmony and syncopation between the walkers. Any tendency away from this must be identified by the director as “drift”, i.e. loss of contact with the goal, and then corrected, again pointing out its detrimental effect on the group’s success. Next, you can introduce the notion of 360° perception, “seeing by feeling” one’s field. You ask the walkers to notice the relationship between breathing and movement, stressing deep breaths and relaxation.

Variations of this include, starting at a point of zero activity, passive observance, called “neutral”, where all impulses are checked. One may ask the group to begin by sitting on the floor, in neutral, then try to learn how to get up together (i. e., catch the impulse) and begin walking. Then, the speed of the walk is increased to a point just below running and then slowly brought down again to zero, when again as a group, everyone sits down. You might say, do this all in the space of two minutes and time them to see how accurate their intuition is. Another variation of this is to create sudden perpendicular turns while walking, to break up the rhythm. Walking then becomes like marching. Attention is drawn, to problems of balance and weight shift,

It is important for the director to note where resistance enters an exercise like this and to determine whether to try and “push” the group through the resistance or switch to another exercise. The notion is to develop receptivity to breaking through walls of resistance without actually being an outside force pushing this on the group.

In the next phase of this work, I spread pieces of colored paper on the ground and placed crayons on chairs around the room. I asked the group to stop walking when I clapped and to pick the first crayon they saw without hesitation and make a mark on the paper nearest to them and then keep walking. With this I introduced the dilemma of going with your first impulse and not thinking about what to do. This gave them quite a change, because it was actually quite difficult to execute such a simple action without deliberation, so used were they to challenging everything. From this, you switch to making a gesture at the sound of the clap, always emphasizing the first impulse. Next, add a sound to the movement. Or, you can have each person take a number, and call out, “even”, “odd”, “two, three, six”, etc. I ask them to freeze the movement and sound for an instant and then continue walking.

It is very easy to spot what is a genuine impulse and what is a. contrived response. For one thing, most people do the same sound and movement over and over again. Gently pointing this out allows the people to gradually acquaint themselves with the extent of their own inhibitions. For some, it is an intolerable experience and trying to force them to do it through intimidation can result in extreme anxiety or hysteria, which is not the point. Extreme care must be exerted not to push too hard or too far. When people get used to the work, believe me, they push themselves, because the effects are quite electrifying. If you’re working with problem kids, don’t expect too much, because this is very difficult work for adolescents to grasp, albeit they do respond to it well initially.

On one occasion, I began with the walking exercise, slowly adding sounds and movements. There was excellent concentration in the room. I began to increase the frequency of the claps, to the point sound and movement and walking were about equal. Then I slipped on a jazz tape, and the rhythms crept right into the movements. I increased the clapping to the point it became practically all impulse work, and the room was electric. This lasted about a minute and then the bell rang. Everyone stopped, and I said “Look, you’ve just been doing Modern Dance!” which was greeted with great hoots of derision by the boys who. would have never touched the topic of dance in a million years if it was done up front.

Pointing out how our natural impulses have become lost or over-turned by secondary or learned impulses is fascinating to the kids, if they can grasp it at all. One notices a surge of energy in the group as this simple method of embracing freedom is felt. Again, it is helpful to isolate a person’s resistance in terms of the inability to be free, encouraging overcoming it rather than running from it.

Variations on the sound and movement exercise while walking include making big impulses and little impulses (more or less sustained), saying a color instead of a sound, identifying an object in the room and pointing at it, and so on, ad infinitum. The great thing about this work is that with experience you can create exercises to meet specific needs or attack specific problems. One example of this is to ventilate anger by having two opposed individuals stand behind a line o£ tape across the room and shout at each other in numbers. Then, when they exhaust themselves, have them express affection in numbers, or apologize. Another is take the show-offs and have them stand in the middle of a circle and boast about themselves, only later to do the opposite, describe their faults. All this provokes heightened sensitivity and communication, laughter and of course anxiety which must be overcome by action.

The next phase of sound and movement work is to do repeat and change. Once a person has become familiar with taking possession of an impulse, you ask them to transform it. This is very difficult because it must come naturally from within, from the whole body, and not be forced by the head. To facilitate this, partners are secured and two lines are formed with the actors facing each other. One person begins a sound and a movement, repeating it as it comes out and letting it change until it becomes strong and definitive. At this point, one” gives it away” with one’s eyes to the partner, who begins to imitate it exactly. When the first person sees the partner has succeeded in duplicating the sound and movement exactly, then he stops, and the second person begins their transformation, and gives it back. This can be done in dozens of variations, in circles, lines, couples, etc. Often, in a line, one person will take possession of an impulse and the whole group will imitate it. That first person will “walk” the impulse down the corridor created by the two lines, and select a partner, who then changes places with him and who now creates a new impulse which is copied by the group, and walks it to another. The point of this exercise is to begin to grasp impulses, transform them and give them away very quickly. When this is accomplished without a lot of interference, one suddenly realizes their capacity to act and react independently of any thought process or moral evaluation. This is quite a primal and exhilarating feeling. Most people can’t tolerate it for long,

I’ve heard it from actors who’ve taken this to the extreme that another “self” begins to emerge in order to sustain the impulse. For more information on this, I would refer you to The Theatre and its Double, by Antoin Artaud. This is very deep emotional work, and I do not recommend its use where teenagers are concerned. Even in the theater, I have heard of too many cases where the actors themselves were not able to tolerate the increase of energy and suffered breakdowns and even suicides. It is possible that extended use of these techniques create states of extreme psychic openness, through which any information can be imprinted very strongly on the mind, much like hypnosis. In coming into contact with the cult phenomenon today, I have witnessed how similar effects are achieved by rituals and indoctrination procedures. I would refer anyone interested in pursuing this further to an excellent book titled, Snapping, a Delta book by Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman. These two researchers concluded that stimulation and rituals induced a state of information overload in the data processing function of the eye’s optical nerve, precipitating a state of contactlessness where the controller was free to inject any suggestion unhindered by the person’s normal intellectual or emotional resistance. I was very interested to learn that Mr. Siegelman and Ms. Conway were investigating problems in juvenile delinquent behavior, though I do not know the nature of their research. Personally, the similarities of problems found in cult individuals and the adolescent seem overwhelming to me, but this leads beyond the scope of this article. I only mention this because it is important to be aware of the dangers of impulse work as well as its advantages.

One of the most important lessons I learned was that if I succeeded in stimulating a whole lot of energy in kids like this, and just left them with it, they would go home and get in trouble. I had to devise methods of sealing it off again or at least directing it into constructive areas.

One of the best ways to do this was by finishing up with the mirror exercise. Mirrors hold the greatest potential for pure aesthetic delight, whether as an observer or participant. Mirrors operate around the notion that when two partners face each other, in a position of neutrality, a spontaneous impulse will occur that has its roots in neither individuals will, but in the shared experience. I’ve seen it happen often that simultaneously two people will begin the same movement at the same time, each thinking that the other was “leading”. I have even seen people mirror each other with their eyes closed when deep contact was present.

On a more practical level, mirroring begins with one person making movement, such as sweeping the arm slowly over the head. The partner tries to imitate this gesture exactly, in full detail, even to the point of positioning the body the same way and reflecting the face. The idea is that you are trying to totally become the movement of the other person. This implies a state of full concentration and no resistance. Without ever saying a word, one enters into the most intimate contact, just around trying to achieve the mirrored state. Done enough, it seems to share many of the finer features of love with none of the liabilities. Tremendous streaming can be released, and the streaming then articulates the movement. Often one’s self is perceived as nothing but an obstacle to surrender to these feelings.

I have ‘watched the movement of birds in formation and marveled at the telepathic response of minute changes of pattern. The same effect can be seen in deer or schools of fish. There is no evidence to suggest humans can’t interact the same way. The interesting thing about impulse .work is that it doesn’t rely on training, it is not mechanically based. Success through effort is perceived in terms of surrender to pre-existing impulses, not the molding of one impulse into another. Were some of these notions to lend credence to an idea of “functional art”, this point becomes more than just incidental. Anything less than pure inspiration in the arts has at its roots mechanical learning techniques. Rarely, if ever, does one find a teacher subtle enough to really allow the student to respond to his own impulse, extending them into images and then into words. In this regard, I consider myself to have been quite lucky.

I received my most forceful and articulate sculptural training at the hands of one Maurice Lowe, at the University of Pennsylvania, a highly energetic Australian whose artistic and emotional roots lay deep within the esoteric confines of Tibetan Buddhism. I mention this only in passing, because of the tremendous impact of art upon the Tibetan culture. Virtually no utensil, building, rug or ornament, needless to say artistic masterpiece was spared the imprint of Buddhist thought. One finds an extremely similar process among the Plains Indians of the United States. Obviously, such thorough penetration of cosmic symbolism into daily life could not simply be the result of a scheming theocracy, nor the naive distortion of mystical wish fulfillment. To me, it betrays an essential function of aesthetics itself, though often highly corrupted and distorted by man’s armoring. This function is simply that for many people responding to unarmored or lightly armored moments, to perceive beauty is to create beauty. This would be, in equally simple terms, the goal of all impulse work. It is a goal, which in its final implementation, would eliminate the need for a goal. That the products of these moments should function as a reminder or an inspiration in darker times is only too obvious, especially in an illiterate society. It is a historical fact in many cultures that notions of great beauty have spread at the mass level by a kind of psychic contagion, liberated through artistically induced ritual. I mention, only in passing, the great Troubadour tradition of the Middle Ages and the Ghost dance of the Plains Indians as two phenomena which certainly emulate this process to me.

One of the other salient non-mechanical aspects of impulse work is its relationship to personal effort. Often with students, trying hard to do the work can be as much of a hurdle to overcome as quitting too soon when it starts to happen. In one group, three boys and I sat facing knee to knee on chairs, hands on the knees. It was a quiet, still afternoon when almost everyone else was away at sports. We began by mirroring the person across from us, without moving any limbs – just muscles, eyes, attitude, etc. Then, we began passing an impulse around in a circle, watching it transform. Next we moved into sharing a common impulse with a sound, also letting it transform gradually. In my experience, any time two or more people build a sympathy between each other, streamings will occur. Here, joint sounds and movements made this occur to me. I asked the others if they felt anything. To my surprise, the boy on my right, a chronic passive resistor with an extreme drug problem, who never would contribute anything voluntarily to the group, began to laugh and admit he felt them too. He described a shudder passing from the base of the spine to the brain, flooding the skin with pulsations. The other two reacted with indignation and suspicion. Gradually though, as I increased the speed of the impulses, they began to feel it too. At this point, I had us push the chairs back and stand. I began rolling my arms over my head and, bending slightly at the waist, throwing my hands at the center of the circle on the floor. The others began to mirror this with me. Everyone was quiet, absorbed in the deeper feelings that were emerging. I said that, now the time had come to empty ourselves of everything we didn’t like through our hands. Everyone responded to the idea well, and it continued for about a minute. Then, I switched on a tape of some Beethoven, and the music seemed to amplify the powers all the more.

When I began to feel the resistance coming in (that also can mean you have gone far enough with that impulse), I reversed the motion, and had us draw up our arms from earth in a salutation and then let the arms drop slowly backward as though now we were pulling life from the earth up to the sky. I said now we were to bring into ourselves from the earth and the world new energy and new life to replace and heal what we had discarded. This went on for a few minutes, and the streamings were quite intense. When the exercise was over, I asked the boys to come to the window. They were dazed. I asked them if they could see the light coming out from behind all the forms of the world. They replied in the affirmative, adding that they couldn’t believe they were so high, without drugs. They asked me what it was. I said It was the orgone, the energy behind all life. I didn’t try to explain beyond that. Other students were filtering in then, and now they were laughing and talking about being so high to the others. I would like to add that these were just ordinary students, with only slightly more than passive interest in my work, not people who had trained themselves or were deeply committed to the program.

At times I used mirroring and impulse work in disciplinary ways. Sometimes in group meetings I would mimic or mirror someone’s behavior that was obviously intended as a resistance to the business under consideration. This was particularly effective with droopy, numbed, unlively types who slouched or dozed in their chairs. Many of these often had little nervous habits which when mirrored made them highly conspicuous to the group and thus forced their attention to become less dissipated.

In several other instances I had to come up against severe testing by the older girls as to the limits of my patience and kindness. This came very early in the work before I had a chance to develop much skill or understand the effectiveness of these techniques in undermining behavioral affectations. I might also add these young women were masters in manipulating men and never hesitated to show everyone their skill. At one point, when I was growing tired of accommodating the intolerant attitudes of one of our aforementioned prima donna artistes, I began mimicking her every action and gesture, including her hysterical reaction. She fled in tears outside and I refused to pay any attention to it. Later, she came back in, and I invited her to sit and observe while I put another girl, who had a much better sense of humor, through a similar confrontation. Here, the results were much more positive. I was able to make my point about what I was willing to tolerate in the classroom as well as convince her of the advantages of learning a few of these tricks herself. Not only that, but we both had a good time.

Since I was a little concerned about overstepping my bounds of organizing an art program and entering a therapeutic situation for which I had no training, I discussed the former situation both with the staff and with a friend who had taught impulse work for years. The staff felt the way I had handled the artiste was perfectly justifiable and even appreciated it. My friend warned me about a deeper aspect of this work which involves subconsciously finding the person in the group who most resembles yourself, and doing numbers to them as though it were yourself (the double). I gave this a lot of thought and decided to avoid going into this area too much until I felt more confident of my motives.

Incidentally, another very fine way to handle the problem of a precocious kid trying to commandeer lots of attention is to give him an exercise that literally exhausts his ego and forces him to face its limitations. One such exercise involves two people. The first must find a spot on the wall, and without looking around, begin to talk and keep talking, anything, free association, etc. The second must act out everything the first is saying. Usually, they run oat of gas pretty quickly. This is a hard exercise to sustain as it requires great creativity and sustained concentration. The best figure out how to tell a story. Then, you let them reverse the roles. This is all part of helping a person identify and separate his ”shtick” or affectations from his core, which is ultimately necessary if the work is to have more than just superficial impact. By using a person’s games as the substance of a conscious attempt to project a desired effect, you actually turn the game into a tool, separating and isolating that runaway, contactless part of the personality from the core.
One instance I will describe involves these techniques being used successfully in conjunction with other members of the staff in an overall therapeutic situation. A young man had entered P.V.A. under the condition that all violence {he had a history of attacking his mother) must be dealt with at school. This was written up in contract form, which he signed. Well, it wasn’t long before the inevitable occurred. The staff reacted quickly by confronting him with his violence in the morning meeting, calling him a coward and a woman-beater, etc. This precipitated a psychotic episode, in which he began directing extreme verbal violence towards one of the female staff members, whom he now identified as his mother. She handled the attack very adroitly, and soon his outburst deteriorated into huge heaving sobs and tears. Persistent attack of his problems led to a mock suicide attempt (threatening to jump from a nearby silo). After he had been retrieved from the silo, one staff member had him punch out the seat of a van until he was completely exhausted.

At this point, he became highly expanded, acting goofy and dazed. The relief he felt was obvious. He had not been hurt or punished for his behavior. In fact, he had been accepted, in spite of it, in front of the whole school. At this point, I invited him to come up to the art room. Once there, I had one of the girls teach him the stick dance. With this, all his dazed relief turned into exuberance and elation. It was very difficult to get him to stop or even give someone else a turn. He found an extra stick and continued tapping the ceilings, wall and floor wherever he was. I felt the stick dance and some later movement work he did helped him fit his feelings of expansion into a workable structure, a model of how to handle positive energy.

This experience was one of the first instances I clearly saw how impulse work could be used in conjunction with the rest of the program to engineer a successful transformation of energy in a problem situation. Sadly enough, the school’s family therapist had panicked when the initial outburst occurred, and the police had been brought in. This precipitated legal consequences for the boy which led to his departure from the school. Now here was a prime example of a confined kid coming right up against the adult world’s double standards of justice. First, “We’ll help you – trust us – etc; get it out, you’re protected”, then they call the police.

It was a real betrayal, and deeply angered the staff members who had precipitated the whole scene in the first place. One commented to me that had he known the police might be called, he never would have done what he did. Later events propelled the individual who had made the call into a messy confrontation with the school which had all the distinguishing characteristics of emotional plague. This one person alone almost single–handedly succeeded in destroying P.V.A.’s extremely effective and unique program, which had taken years to develop. It was remarkable to witness how vividly accurate are Reich’s observations about the nature of emotional plague and its insidious assault upon life affirmative efforts, even her eat such a humble level. I have heard it said that one teenager commits suicide every ten minutes in this country. It’s not hard to understand why.
It was partially because this situation had weakened P.V.A.’s therapeutic side so much, rendering the school temporarily into little more than a holding company for teenagers, and partially because I sensed a real need for the kids to begin to understand and express their own feelings about their lives more concretely, that I directed the art program into theater and playwriting. We were very fortunate in obtaining some money from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts through a new program designed to bring art to areas of the population normally deprived of such influences. I had in mind, using this as a way of exposing the staff more to impulse work and relating the art training more to the normal classroom curriculum. In addition, I was able to hire two theater directors from New York to assist in the production of the plays. One, Daffy Nathanson, had worked for years in Daytop Village in New Yrok with drug addicts and in street theater with kids, on top of his own creative work. At one point, he was teaching impulse work to prisoners in jail in the mornings, and to police training units in the afternoon. Irene O’Brien had been the community relations director for the Phoenix Theater in New York for years, which had sponsored all kinds of shows of this kind in New York City schools from which a beautiful documentary film had been made. At one point Irene was working in “Fort Apache” at a maximum security prison teaching dance to sex offenders. These two individuals visited P.V.A. to help me develop and produce what came to be four student-written plays. In addition, the director of our school, Pat Murray, a professional actress, also contributed, each of us doing one play.

In September of 1980 I returned to P.V.A. to begin the project. First and foremost, we had to have plays. This was not as easy a task as it might appear. Of the student body of 14 to 22, many had extreme difficulty in reading and writing. Another factor was a high turn-over, with students going back to high school, further into legal restriction, or off with family members or foster parents outside the area covered by the school. It is highly questionable that any students would appear at school at all if we didn’t personally ferry them to and from. Family instability was another big factor, often making it impossible for an individual to sustain any continuity in his life. I mention these factors, because with my job only involving me five days a month with the students, what in the end we were able to achieve to me seems remarkable.

I began by interviewing each student and asking them to create a character based on whatever they wanted to be, so long as he or she didn’t hurt themselves or someone else. Out of this selection grew the idea of how this person lived, what they did with their lives. I had to give everybody a little fantasy and then let them act the character out. From out of this process, a number of individuals conceived and began writing plays and stories. Much of the material submitted could not be evolved into real plays. Either the student couldn’t handle the work commitment involved, or the necessary maturity level did not exist to refine the ideas. Everyone though, at least, got to participate, and by the time this stage was over, I knew who was- going to write, who was going to act, and who was out. After much deliberation, I had five individuals committed to writing and finishing plays, with me pushing them all the time.

The next stage was to furnish the plays and to introduce theater skills in the form which was primarily the impulse work. Each person involved began to understand, without my direct explanation and in their own individual way, the very complicated and demanding effort necessary to create a play. They realized the difference between using feelings that came out of their body and guts and felt real and those that came out of their heads and were mental or fantasy products with little impact on others.

One interesting example of this emerged when I began working with the two toughest and most blatantly disturbed boys in the school. Their minds were completely saturated with pornographic sexual images and it was impossible to credit any other subject for very long. I decided to utilize this energy and asked them to write a play in this vein. This project was enthusiastically received, to say the least. The final product was really quite amusing, but totally unusable in the context of the work. Rather than drop it here, I tape-recorded them reading the piece, and played it back to them, until the repetitive images began to feel a little flat and overworked. At this point, I asked them to now substitute the names of fruit for all the four-letter words, and later numbers. This was really quite a bit more amusing than the coarse language, and my point was made. Next, I tried to get them to understand the nature of the movements they made when trying to express all their lust. The white kid experienced tremendous resistance to giving his movements any rhythm and quickly retreated into aggressive behavior to defend his lack of mobility. Revealing his impotence in this way was to have serious, consequences later on, as his attitude in school gradually grew more and more blatantly sadistic and deceptive. I became the obvious target for much of his unconscious aggression, which led to physical confrontations more than once. I tried repeatedly to get him to turn this around and use it to impress people positively, but he was too afraid to relinquish his tough-guy image.

In the case of the black kid, there was much more freedom of movement in the body but an almost total lack of ability to comprehend what was taking place intellectually. He could not use any of his own gifts to direct his life. He also grew gradually more sadistic and deceptive, and a great deal of pressure was put on him by the staff to face this, with marginal success. Both of these boys were finally terminated from the school for theft and destruction of other’s property. By this time, everyone on the staff was aware that the drama program was increasing the anxiety level among the students, and this was causing problems that had never been resolved to get flushed out. This was what you would call “ a mixed blessing”.

One playwright, in a more positive context, used the death of a dearly loved aunt to underscore the end of his play, which involved a sense-less killing. He was able to use his deeper feelings to enhance his work, not further complicate his life. Another individual used his personal dilemma to structure a play about a mother who sabotages her daughter’s relationships out of jealousy, and he contrasted the warmth and trust of his peer group with the deceit and cruelty of the adult world. This student finished his play in confinement, and was only able to there because I persisted in encouraging him and was able to work on it with him at the institution, gaining the support of his teachers there. He was not able to see the finished product, however, due to being transferred to a forest camp in the western part of the state.

One playwright went back to high school, and as his plot was a little thin, we dropped it to save time. The one female who reached the final stage of production, wrote the only play with a positive ending. All the others end in death or confinement.

I would summarize the creative process used here as being very non-academic. Probably not one of these playwrights had ever read a play. Few had ever seen one. Instead, to inspire motivation, I had to rely on the students’ desire for involvement with me and the others, and the gradual awareness that this meant increased self-confidence and prestige in the community. First there was seeing (locating) the feelings, then articulating the feelings, then organizing them into a story. With the actors, I worked on expressing the feelings in sounds and movements, taking possession of the primal impulses, isolating them and using them to gradually create the life of the character.

In the case of the boy whose aunt died, I was often faced with a situation where all his feelings got trapped in his body, and he would puff up his chest, stammer, curse, start wrestling matches and throwing furniture around, all out of frustration at not being able to express in writing very well what he was trying to say. At these points, further discussion was impossible, and I would take him alone into a back room and ask him to hit the palm of my hand with his fist. If he refused, I would mirror him until he got so angry he wanted to assault me, and then, relieved, he could easily do what was necessary. As he punched the hand, I would ask him to make a sound, a grunt, anything. He had a lot of trouble contacting his rage; he always had a silly-looking grin on his face to hide everything. When he got angry enough, that would disappear, and we would work the deeper feelings through sound and movement onto the surface. In every case I did this with him, he was able to sit down again and complete the difficult section he was working on, instilling it with feeling.

In 1981, I began bringing the visiting directors down to enhance the workshops and organize the plays. Going from the writing to the acting also proved very trying. Students would panic and not show up to work in the short times we had available. Increased excitement and anxiety would throw open complex emotional issues latent in the students, forcing the staff to confront these problems at the expense of the creative process. Wild fluctuations in attendance made us aware of the precariousness of doing a live show. This, plus the maturity level of the students being so low, made us switch to video-taping the plays and the techniques. This way we could handle problems and insecurities on the set without really damaging the final product. We decided instead take the films (and some of the actors and playwrights) on tour this summer to other schools and institutions where they could show and discuss the end results of this work. In all work of this kind, it is extremely important to have a payoff for all the effort. We promised the playwrights a Smorgasbord dinner, which in one case, definitely was responsible for getting a finished play. We also made a final demonstration tape containing interviews with myself and Irene O’Brien, with the playwrights and with the actors, and a demonstration of techniques. This will give any interested persons a great deal of material with which to begin their own work. We also had these four plays printed and bound like books.

The actual production and video-taping of the plays was a massive exercise in controlled folly. It seemed every number any kid ever played came up again in the finale. I have seen only too often how artists seem to sabotage their own efforts right at the threshold of success. Here, this scenario was amplified ten-fold. I am never more astonished than when I realize how deep a threat beauty and fulfillment pose to our armored lives.

We had very little time to actually shoot each play, two days maximum. Getting them done was a comedy of errors which defies human description, yet they were done, and you could see how, after months and months of chaotic striving and work, it really amazed the kids to see what they had accomplished, needless to say, us, the staff. Success in this area demands the support of the administration, without it, no matter what is the stated objective, you will certainly fail.

I will relinquish the temptation to describe the finishing stages. If you try something like this, and you get to that point, you will find out anyway, and that is a much better way to learn. I will only say that working with kids like this is an all-consuming process; it can carve years of your life out before you know what happened, so be forewarned. One can only hope the work has some value or purpose in their lives as well as your own, but the endless disappointments and tragedies one sees along the way hardly makes this a foregone conclusion.

In retrospect, I feel the plays were an overwhelming success, though not exactly in the sense I had anticipated. We did not bring the students to the point of executing a live performance to an audience of strange faces. We did succeed in bringing an awareness of the creative process to a wide and ever-growing group of individuals. Many visitors observed the work, including child welfare workers, probation officers and visiting parents and staff. Many more heard about it. Two other institutions, Montgomery Hall and Bridgeport School, assisted in determining the final product. Most individuals who participated expressed a desire to continue this work in some fashion later on.

A structure of visits to other schools is in the process of being setup. All of these institutions have been alerted to the value art and theater can play in a day therapy situation. P.V.A. now has a “product” that validates months of work, in the form of video-tapes and written plays. As an experimental project that was difficult for a school this size to embrace and incorporate into their program, it has received unanimous support from the staff and administration. I feel we have effectively demonstrated the therapeutic value of art for programs of this kind, and have set up guidelines that can save other groups time and energy. In addition, I feel that as a layman I have been able with the films to discover and theoretically test my own growing understanding of orgonomy and practically apply it to teaching methods in the arts. I don’t believe that either my own knowledge of Reich’s work or my teaching experience is broad enough to render a working hypothesis about the nature of impulse work in orgonomic terms. I would suffer you to endure, however, at the end of this long article, a slight attempt in that direction.

Art becomes “functional” in the orgonomic sense when through it one discovers a way to retrieve contact with his core. The creative act then becomes a mirror, reflecting whatever conditioning or freedom the artist contains within himself. Coming to terms with his dilemma, via understanding and evolving his craft and its symbology, becomes the guiding impulse which directs his growth from-the core. Conflict between the accurate response to these impulses and the resistance imposed by the armor may lead the functional artist to explore his work intellectually in therapeutic terms. More than being purely intellectual though, his process is grounded in an awareness of genitality which emerges via the muscular coordination necessary to execute his work. This genital contact is what eventually is reflected in those masterpieces which transcend the artist’s developmental work. In a sense, an artist’s work is the laboratory of his soul, an idea which has intuitively found response in us from antiquity,

Perhaps what we call aesthetics is the language of orgone. Reich spoke of seeing colors streaming from his hands. Kepler spoke of the ”music of the spheres”. Responding accurately to the creative impulse may be simply another aspect of cosmic superimposition, which every artist unconsciously measures by the degree of streaming in his body. Taking these feelings for his guide, he pushes first through his own armor and then against the inevitable consequences of the impact of the liberated orgonomic expression upon society.

To me, the pleasure felt in making a piece of work is no different than the pleasure I experience in love; the former being a kind of mating with life itself. Reich states in The Function of the Orgasm (p, 144, Pocket Books), “The pleasure of living and the pleasure of the orgasm are identical. Extreme orgasm anxiety forms the basis of the general fear of life.” Assuming art is a pleasurable experience, which most artists I know would concede, even if it is the pleasure of struggle, then I would assume that increased tolerance to feeling begins to liberate experiences of severe conflict making up the latent content of the armor. Reich further states (p. 129, ibid.) that, “The energy which held the armor together was usually inhibited destructiveness. This was shown by the fact that aggression immediately began to break free when the armor was penetrated.” Here again one sees mirrored the common excursion into destructiveness most artists face not long after really experiencing the full force of their own creative potential. How can it be accidental that an artist breaking through these restrictions, but confining, the violence to his work, would not stimulate or aggravate the society which is bound by similar forces?

Reich noticed that, in treatment, a neurosis breaks up into individual resistances, proceeding from the one closest to the surface or nearest to the person’s conscious perception. Certainly most artists proceed through distinct periods where certain relevant issues are isolated and explored. More often than not, due to just limited understanding of the process, plus the coincidental possibility of finding a style which will sell, the artist will become trapped in one such mode. However, in some cases, the push carries him through to a plateau of great art. I can’t help but see this as a parallel process to establishing orgastic potency.

In respect to this, I was drawn to Reich’s observation that “…the intensity of a psychic idea depends upon the quantity of somatic excitation with which it is combined. Emotion originates in the instincts, thus in the somatic realm. An idea, on the other hand, is a purely ‘psychic’, non-physical formulation.” He further states, “I understand now that a psychic idea endowed with a very small amount of energy can provoke an increase in the excitation. In turn, this provoked excitation makes the idea urgent and vivid. If the excitation ceases, the idea also vanishes.” (p. 82, ibid.) It was at this point Reich discovered the relation between the physiogenic anxiety neurosis and the psychogenic psychoneurosis.
These observations seemed to objectify for me the straggle I was having in the classroom going from idea (the play, the concept, etc.) into the impulse work (the pure excitation) and back again, in my attempt to harmonize these two spheres of effort for the students. It was a matter of constantly making the ideas of the plays “urgent and vivid” via the exercises, and disciplining the energy exercises into concrete dramatic ideas that were springing from their minds.

To begin to approach this artistic process with the added leverage of realizing its therapeutic function is in my mind to truly be able to draw the line between where art is decorative or entertaining and where it functions as a process of liberation from the trap. Perhaps this distinction accounts for Reich’s deep interest in creativity at the end of his life (the manuscript he was working on about creativity in his cell at Lewisburg State Penitentiary mysteriously disappeared) after cynically denouncing art as “decoration for the trap” as a younger man.

In conclusion, I feel that a great potential exists now to pull art out of the mechanical-mystic axis into which religious and commercial interests have placed it, and to give it back to the people of the world who would like to use it to cultivate the deep pleasure of full emotional freedom. The ultimate responsibility for healthy creative functioning lies with the artists and those exploring creativity themselves to see to it their work and efforts are not abused by themselves or others. To this end, may we all strive successfully.

***********************************

“Reich stated that it is in the arts that man has most preserved the essence of his genitality.”
Prof. Paul Matthews, M.A., M.A., CO.
From “The Genital Character and the
Genital World”