WILHELM REICH'S CHARACTER-ANALYTIC VEGETOTHERAPY Navarro invited certain colleagues whom he held in considerable esteem to form a group, and he contacted Reich’s only surviving student in Europe Ola Raknes, who was working in Oslo. He asked Raknes to spend her three months’ vacation as a guest in Naples. Raknes accepted and for three years returned to the Mediterranean during the summer to train this small group of neuropsychiatrists. The Reichian Movement was thus created. With the arrival of Raknes, the movement was transformed into Centro Studi Reich, which he ceased to belong to in 1974 on account of certain misunderstandings. Raknes, who was familiar with the techniques that Reich had elaborated and who had developed certain extended applications of the same, asked Navarro to work on their systemization in an organic way so as to establish a methodology. Navarro eventually fulfilled this request, through reference to his own clinical work and experiences as a neuropsychiatrist. The European School of Orgone Therapy was established in 1979. Shortly afterwards, Navarro moved to Paris, where he lived for about ten years, and where the present Istitut Reichien Federico Navarro was founded In 1987, the Escuela Española de Therapy Reichiana was established at Valencia in Spain. In 1987-88, he founded the Escola de Orgonomia Federico Navarro in Rio de Janeiro, where he lived for some time, commuting between Brazil and Europe. Other schools were set up at San Paolo, Natal and Curitiba (the Orgonomy Center). He later spent a period of time in Buenos Aires (Argentina) and Santiago (Chile). Desiring to return to Italy and his homeland, in 1996 he founded the Istituto Federico Navarro in Naples, while the European School of Orgone Therapy had now separated into two separate branches. He retained the presidency only of the Federico Navarro Institute, where he reunited some of the therapists who had been trained at the European School of Orgone Therapy. Shortly before his death in October 2002, Prof. Navarro passed on to his students a paper he had compiled before 1960 (and thus prior to his meeting with Raknes) entitled ‘Nucleus-Essentialism.’ In this text, quite some before he became acquainted with Reich’s work, he formulated a series of general hypotheses concerning human beings and their potential, which, while appearing to be reflected on the practical level in Reich’s therapeutic techniques, also revealed underlying points of reference of a spiritual kind. A careful and critical reading of the text was undertaken by his follower Sergio Scialanca, supported by Antonio Girardi and Giuseppe Giannini, which led to the formulation of a ‘nucleus-essentialist-somato-psychology’, which would become the theoretical basis of every subsequent methodological formulation produced by the Istituto Federico Navarro. As is known, the second part of Reich’s life (during which Reich travelled to Scandinavia to work with Ola Raknes and later on to the United States) was entirely dedicated to Orgonomy, the science of biological energy formulated by Reich and referred to as ‘Orgone’. It is possible that the development occurred on the basis of esoteric points of reference of which both Raknes and also Navarro were aware, and which were applied in a scientific manner in Reich’s experiments. Navarro would often point out that it was appropriate to use the methodology of character-analysis vegetotherapy simply because a true orgone-therapy had not yet been invented. In fact, although there were instruments for the administration and use of Orgone Energy for therapeutic purposes, the use made of it was mechanistic and it could not comprise the sheer complexity of human beings seen on the basis of a unity between ‘soma’ and ‘psyche’ (i.e., between body and soul: the etymological value of the latter term, referring to the human ‘soul’, now seemingly having been lost!). In any case, following the impetus engendered by Navarro, this was henceforth the direction taken by research conducted at the Institute. Five years after the founder’s death, the Istituto Federico Navarro brought to fruition various projects which Navarro had assigned to his colleagues: the integration of vegetotherapy with the traditional corpus of knowledge of Chinese medicine and homeopathy (Girardi), instrumental somato-psycho-diagnostics (Giannini), and ‘acting’ relating to intrauterine life (Scialanca). Over the fifty years following Reich’s death, physics and biophysics simultaneously made gigantic steps forward, subtracting orgonomy from the sphere of the ‘alternative’ disciplines. It is indeed now possible to explain orgonomic physics in terms of quantum fields, the chaos and fractal theory, biophotons and the theory of superstrings. Consciousness is moreover now treated by biophysics as an emerging quality of the quantum field. It is thus now possible to state that character-analysis vegetotherapy has become an applied methodology of a vaster knowledge of somato-psychic energetics. The therapeutic methodology is nowadays the operative application of this knowledge on the part of an expert (a physician, psychotherapist or psychologist specialised in this field), with the aim of achieving the emotional liberation of a patient and the freeing of affects, assisting in the attainment of a mature ego on the part of the patient and recovery from a psychopathological condition. Knowledge derived from the neurosciences and other forms of treatment such as traditional Chinese medicine and homeopathic medicine is appropriately allocated within the paradigm of character-analysis vegetotherapy viewed as an application of somato-psycho-energetics, More specifically, this scientific paradigm coherently integrates Balbi’s hypothesis of stratified evolution, MacLean’s model of the triune brain, knowledge derived from systems theory, knowledge relating to the thermodynamic evolution of Prigogine’s open systems, the physical model reflecting an understanding of the development of the emotions elaborated by Frolich, and also interesting life phenomena such as biophotonic cellular emissions observed by the German physicist Popp (and studied in experiments conducted by Voeikov) or the functioning of the microtrabecular lattice observed in a living cell under a high-voltage electron microscope. All of the above topics are discussed by Sergio Scialanca in a work (currently in press) entitled Somatopsychoenergetics. The essential points of the organotherapeutic process at the Istituto Federico Navarro are: anamnesis and energetic diagnosis through identification of blocked levels (primitive level, main level and secondary blockage) and instrumental energetic diagnosis (cfr. DEPT, MET, Vega Check and other instruments when more in-depth examination is required). The aim of the work and method is the elimination of symptoms (both somatic and psychic), not through repression but, rather, through elimination of the basic energetic condition that determined the disorder. This is obtained through the progressive (a) recovery of muscular eutony, (b) recovery of the proper functioning of sensory receptors, (c) the recovery of vital rhythms and correct neurovegetative functioning and (d) the recovery or engendering of ‘eu-orgonia’. The use of analytical material occurs in analogical terms, i.e., without the necessity of an interpretation on the part of the therapist. The work focuses on fear, believed to be the primary emotion. It is in fact deemed necessary that this emotion (fear) should be encountered, recognised and transcended if we are to allow for character development in the direction of greater maturity. In the ‘actings’, the methodology of the Istituto Federico Navarro respects the defensive process of the ego on the basis of a rationale whereby the ‘armoured character’ is in any case a response aimed at the preservation of life and one’s individual identity. As the ‘armour’ is an habitual reactive energetic dynamism, the use of ‘actings’ and violent therapeutic interventions is, to say the least, useless, inopportune and harmful. The armour must therefore never be shattered or torn apart: it must be dissolved and transformed, so as to free all bound energy, channelling it towards the vital and developmental processes of the individual.
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