Me and the Orgone*
Orson Bean**
Excerpted from Me and the Orgone
The American College of Orgonomy

Then, on Tuesday, a terrifying thing happened: I began to feel paralyzed. I had been doing my breathing and kicking routine when I noticed that my face and lips felt funny and my fingers began to flex like they had a charley-horse in them. I felt an almost painful sensation like someone had plugged me into the wall and turned on the juice. Then I couldn't move my face or arms at all, and Baker stopped everything and began rubbing my hands, and gradually I returned to normal. "What the hell was that?" I asked.

"You built up more energy than you could tolerate at this point," he said, "so your body contracted against it."

"Maybe it was too much oxygen from all that breathing," I said.

"No," said Baker, "that's what classical medicine would say it was, but you'll see . . later on in your therapy you'll be able to breathe as much as you like without contracting."

Tuesdays came and went, and, when Baker felt that I had built up enough energy in my chest, he began work releasing the chronically tightened muscles which controlled my eyes. This is the first segment of armoring which has to be freed in all patients.

To start freeing my eye armoring, Dr. Baker held a pencil in front of me and told me to keep looking at it. He then moved it around quickly in random patterns which forced me to look about spontaneously. This would be kept up for what seemed like fifteen or twenty minutes and the results were amazing to me. My eyes felt free in my head, and I could sense a direct connection between them and my brain. Then, he would have me roll my eyes about without moving my head, forcing them to focus on each wall in the room as their glance lit upon it. All the time I was doing this, I would have to keep breathing deeply and rhythmically.

He would tell me to grimace and make faces (I felt like a fool). He would have me try to make my eyes look suspicious or attempt to get them to express longing. All of these being used again for the first time in many, many years, and it felt wonderful.

One day in the midst of expressing longing, I suddenly thought about an old dog of mine. His name was Homer, and I had gotten him from the Animal Rescue League in Boston when I was nine or ten. I had taken him home on the subway, and we had fallen in love. He was a large, ungainly, half-grown shepherd. I had rescued him from a cage and from death, and he seemed to know it, and no two creatures on earth had ever felt so close. We were together constantly, and I always felt deliriously happy when I found him waiting for me after school. I would tie a rope around his neck and take him for long walks, and then we would come home and spend what seemed like hours staring into each other's eyes. But Homer was a nervous dog, and my parents were constantly afraid he would bite one of the neighborhood children. One day he nipped at my mother and my father called the Animal Rescue League, and they sent a truck and took him away. I ran to my room and threw myself on my bed and sobbed for an hour. Then, I made a vow that no one would ever make me cry again, and I never did cry not even when my mother died when I was in high school, until that day in Dr. Baker's office. Tears began to roll down my cheeks for the first time in twenty-five years. I lay on the bed there crying, and then the hour was over, and I walked through Cart Shurz Park and thought about Homer, and cried some more.

On the following Tuesday, instead of a pencil, Dr. Baker pulled out a fountain pen flashlight. He turned out the lights and shone it in my eyes and moved it around. It had a psychedelic effect. I followed it with made patterns in the dark, and the effect was startling. I could actually feel the unlikely sensation of my brains moving in my head. Baker waved the flashlight around in front of me for about fifteen minutes and then he turned on the lights and looked deep into my eyes and said, "They're coming along nicely." Everything about the way he worked with me and the way he passed judgment on how I was responding was not mechanical, but was the result of one human being's ability to put himself in touch with the feelings and energy charges of another.

"Make a face at me," said Baker, and I turned on him with a stupid leer. "Now, accentuate it," he said. I twisted my face into a hideous gargoyle's expression. "What does it make you feel?" he asked.

"I dunno," I lied.

"It must make you feel something."

"Well, I guess-contemptuous."

"You guess?"

"Yes."

"You don't know?"

"Alright, contemptuous."

"You feel contemptuous of me?"

"Well, I must, I suppose."

"You suppose?"

"Alright, Goddamnit! I do!"

"Feel what?"

"Contemptuous! Jesus!"

"What's the matter?"

"I told you what I felt."

"But I didn't feel it from you."

"Alright, damnit, it's a lot of crap-lying here rolling my eyes around."

"Stick your finger down your throat," said Baker.

"What?" I said.

"Gag yourself."

"But I'll throw up all over your bed."

"If you want to, you can," he said. "Just keep breathing while you do."

I lay there breathing deeply and stuck my finger down my throat and gagged. Then, I did it again.

"Keep breathing," said Baker. My lower lip began to tremble like a little kid's, tears began to run down my face, and I began to bawl. I sobbed for five minutes as if my heart would break. Finally, the crying subsided.

"Did anything occur to you?" asked Baker.

"I thought about my mother and how much I loved her and how I felt like I could never reach her, and I just felt hopeless and heart-broken," I said. "I felt like I was able to feel these things deeply for the first time since I was little, and it's such a relief to be able to cry, and it isn't a lot of crap. I was just scared."

"Yes," he said, "It is frightening. You have a lot of anger to get out, lot of hate and rage, and then a lot of longing and a lot of love." "Okay," he said, "I'll see you next time."

And I got up and got dressed and left.

"Yell," said Baker one day as I lay on his bed of pain in my terrible Fruit of the Looms.

"What do you mean?" I said.

"Just yell," he said, and I let out a feeble croak and then giggled. "Is that the best you can do?" be asked.

"Awk!" I replied and laughed again. He grabbed hold of the back of my head with one hand and pushed my chin down my throat with the other with all his might. I was sure I'd look like Andy Gump for life.

"Jesus," I said when he finally let go.

"Now, let me hear you yell," said Baker. A loud sound came out of me that I was sure someone else had made.

"Again," he said, and once more the marvelous ventrillo worked and a big noise came out of me.

"Turn over," he said, and I flopped over, and he began prodding at my back around my shoulder blades. He found a spot he liked and began to press it. He pressed it hard, and I let out a howl. He squeezed and he pinched at it, and I lay there and screamed. It occurred to me that I had never really screamed before, except maybe when I was a baby, and I'm not even sure that New England babies scream. Screaming was something that actresses do in the movies. But the muscle that Baker had found did the trick. It wasn't that it hurt so much-although it did-it was that he had found the "on" button, and I had no choice. At least it seemed that way. The muscles he was loosening were the very ones which I had tightened up on so many years before when it had suited my purpose never to scream again. I had kept them tight for so long that the condition had become chronic, and now Baker was unlocking them and all the stored-up screams were pouring out. Finally, the governor sent a reprieve, and Baker stopped gouging.

"Now," he said, "make a fist and hit the bed." I scrunched my hands together and pounded feebly at the sheet.

"Harder," said Baker. I felt like a wimp. Suddenly he began gouging at that sore, knotted muscle again, and he didn't stop, and then I really hit the bed. I began pounding hard with both fists, lying there on my stomach, yelling and screaming and biting and having a tantrum. I tried to beat my way through the bed to get away from his hands. I sobbed uncontrollably. I cried harder than I ever had before. Then Baker let me alone, and I just lay there sobbing deeply. Every time I took a breath, it felt like it went right down to the base of my spine, and then I'd cry again, wracking, convulsive sobs. I cried for about five minutes, and then I lay there with my face buried in the sheet for another five, involuntarily breathing those deep, deep breaths. Finally, I recovered and turned over on my back.

"How do you feel?" asked Baker.

"I feel fantastic relief," I answered. "It's just great to be able to cry again after all these years, but there seems to be something missing. The feeling is incomplete. I also noticed that there are very few tears when I cry."

"The hard emotions have to come out first," said Baker, "the rage and the fury and the hate. Only when they're released can you get through to the tender feelings-the love and longing and sadness. Your crying is angry crying right now."

On Tuesday after Tuesday, Baker jabbed at me. He found muscles where I didn't know they existed, and they were all tight, tense and knotted. He knew just which ones to look for and what they were holding in and what to do to make them let go. It hurt like hell, and it became a way of life with me to be absolutely covered with black and blue marks. I'm sure that the people at the theater, when they saw me change in the dressing room, thought I had fallen into the clutches of a sado-masochistic weirdo. As Baker jabbed and pinched and dug, I howled. I screamed and ranted and shrieked and clawed at the bed. I sobbed and pounded and beat. I rolled my eyes and shook my head and carried on like a lunatic. And every time, the sessions would end with my breathing impulses going deeper and deeper down my body until I could feel them in my feet.

I would leave his office with the energy coursing around in me like the lights on a pinball machine. The bald guy with the Life magazine would look up and say hello now, and I would go out through the lobby of the building, past the man at the reception desk who looked at me strangely, and out into the air. Baker's building was smack down on the river, and, if you had to be in New York, it was as nice a place as you could find. That's why old man Gracie built his mansion there in 1799 and that's why the mayor lives in it now. When I came out of the office, I would always look up in the sky to see if I could spot the tiny dancing points of light which Reich had said were discharges of orgone energy. The way they moved in and out and around each other seemed almost playful to me, and it always made me smile when I saw them. On Tuesday nights, I could always count on staying up till close to dawn because the energy in me was like a hundred cups of coffee.

I started to get those insanely delirious streaming sensations again. They were like a soft Spring breeze blowing through me, and they made me feel an awareness of my body in 3-D. They seemed to be restricted mostly to the upper part of me, but they felt wonderful and I was grateful for them. Dr. Baker kept on trying out different methods of having me get rage out. One day, he handed me a sheet folded and rolled up like a baseball bat and asked me if I would like to hit the bed with it. I sat back on my heels and used the rolled up sheet like a carpet beater, smacking the be-Jesus out of the bed. It felt great. He told me to make different sounds as I hit, so I did. I growled ferociously or made sadistic grunts or various noses that sounded vaguely sexual to me. I would smash and smack at the bed until I felt completely exhausted and just couldn't go on anymore. Then he would have me do the old bicycle kick and the arm pounding, lying on my back and flailing about like an infant having a tantrum in its crib. The breathing and the rhythmic pounding would transport me, and I would become an infant again and get the old tantrums out of my system. As the freeing of my armor proceeded systematically down towards my pelvis, I began having deeply meaningful dreams at night, which I would describe to Dr. Baker, but which I found I was very often able to spontaneously analyze myself. I no longer worried about getting paralyzed, since my system could now tolerate its increased energy level with no difficulty.

Deep feelings of heartbreak and longing started to pour out of me, which I had never been able to get anywhere near in my ten years of psychoanalysis. Baker would tell me to reach out my arms longingly, and just the act of doing so could bring back a flood of deeply tender memories of my mother and of the frustrations I had felt as a child.

My crying now began to change in quality. Having worked through my stored-up rage, fury, and hatred to the point where I could express them fully and get them out of my system, the deeper layer of soft feelings emerged. My anger at the childhood affronts (real or otherwise) which I felt I had suffered at the hands of my parents went away. My feelings of hatred for my mother, which came from the feeling that I had been rejected by her, faded, and what I now felt was tender, longing love. But, since she was no longer here and because I'm not a kid anymore anyway, the love turned to heartbreak. One day, lying on Baker's bed, I thought about my mother's dying and I sobbed and sobbed. I felt for his hand, and he let me hold it, and he stroked my arm and comforted me. When I had finished crying, I got dressed and walked out of the building and crossed over to the river and stood for a long time looking down at it and realized that I had finally, twenty years after my mother's death, bid her goodbye.

* Excerpted from Me and the Orgone by Orson Bean, with permission of the publisher, St. Martin's Press, New York.

** Actor and television personality. Founder of the Fifteenth Street School in New York City.

© 2008 The American College of Orgonomy. All rights reserved.