We can draw real parallels between different political ideologies and the different layers of the armoured personality. The liberal/democratic consensus, denying the reality of oppression and exploitation. corresponds to the outer layer of false 'niceness' and 'civilisation'. Extremist ideologies of the right and left, with all their talk of 'smashing', 'liquidating', 'seizing' and 'fighting', correspond to the middle layer - the welter of hateful and distorted feelings created through the frustration of our need for love and pleasure. Like all symptoms they have a double nature, expressing both the sadistic rage of a suppressed individual and the compulsive obedience instilled by the authoritarian parenting which suppresses them.

And the healthy core? It corresponds to a way of life which exists so far only in our dreams, one which is not 'political' in the usual sense, because all power remains with the individual and the community, where people control their own lives and work, without needing neurotically to give that control away to 'specialists'. This is the social version of natural self-regulation within the individual.

Of course, it is perfectly possible to 'struggle' and 'fight' for this sort of society by means which are neurotic and distorted! Over and over again, in the public sphere, wonderful visions of freedom and healing have resulted in totalitarian or chaotic societies. It seems pretty clear that it is not possible for armoured characters like ourselves to create a healthy society: either we end up giving our power away to another bunch of brutal authorities, or else we are unable to focus enough creative energy to get anything done at all!

So is there any alternative to doomed attempts at pulling ourselves up by our own bootstraps? Reichian therapy seeks to intervene at the other end of the process of political oppression: to expose the precise distortions created in our individual energies, and to dissolve them so that energy can move freely again.

Reichian therapy makes people less easy to control! They become at least partially immune to manipulation through guilt, shame, anxiety and greed, because these secondary emotions have dissolved back into their primary sources: love, anger, grief, fear and joy. Energy is on the move, and will no longer fit into constricting and damaging containers: bad relationships, bad jobs, bad belief systems. Without any ideology being imposed from outside, the natural forces of the human organism create change in the political situation of the individual; a process of re-empowerment

However creative, this falling-away of a familiar context can be very painful for an individual. Established support systems and friendships often become unsatisfying, no longer able to meet the need for new and different sorts of emotional feeding, Increasingly, we are seeing the need for support networks, ways in which people can validate and aid this sort of change in each other.

But it would take a very long time to change the world through individual or group therapy. We must clearly recognise that therapy becomes a real need, or even a real option, only when basic needs for food, housing, security and so on have been met. In this sense, therapy does tend to be a middle class, privileged activity (though by no means ail our clients fall into this group). Thus it is a good thing that, however messianic we become at times, this work is only one tributary of a much greater streaming of change and rebirth. What we see happening over and again is that people move from therapy with us into other areas of transformative activity; above all, they begin to change their own lives into an environment where they, and everyone around them, can flower.

Therapy also has a valuable input to make into other forms of working for change. It helps people to examine their motives in taking on such tasks; helps them let go of the compulsiveness about 'helping', the workaholism, the hidden authoritarianism or the oral demandingness ('give us our rights!') which can blight so much radical work. Therapy insists that we can and must enjoy ourselves; that pleasure and fun are just as much part of changing the world.

It can also suggest new structures and procedures for meetings, co-operatives and so on, based on recognising and giving space to each person involved; paying attention to atmospheres and unspoken agendas rather than sweeping them under the carpet; creating opportunities for personal, face-to-face contact: giving control of work to the people who actually carry it out. Such structures both grow out of and help to nurture natural self-regulation and being-in-touch.

Reichian therapy has a particular natural affinity for two issues of power: sexism and ecology. Reich was, again, one of the first people to raise issues that now come under the banner of 'ecology'; he perceived the spreading pollution and damage to nature in the early 1950s and linked it directly with the blocking of natural impulses in human beings - only armoured and distressed individuals would permit their environment to be poisoned. Therapy tends to liberate feelings of identification with the natural world, the sense of sacredness which most of us lose in childhood, and which makes it impossible to tolerate the rape and torture of the earth.

That image of rape brings us to the issue of sexism: the oppression of natural and spontaneous feeling under patriarchy is tied up in many ways with gender and sex. As we have already said, the wholeness of our experience is split in two by the imposition of 'masculine' and 'feminine' categories of behaviour, creating a permanent wound in both genders, but particularly a structural oppression and devaluation of the female gender. It is no coincidence that nature itself is associated with the female: most of us have deep-ingrained connections between 'female', 'natural', 'animal', 'dirty', 'sexual' and 'wrong'. These ideas are not remotely natural themselves, but are the product of a society which glorifies an equally unnatural constellation of 'male', 'technological', 'human', 'clean', 'intellectual' and 'right'.

Sexism is always a powerful presence in therapy because, perhaps more than any other form of social control and oppression, it affects our bodily experience. As we have already hinted, many forms of 'symptom' or 'illness' can be understood as a rebellion against imposed realities - against abuse of one sort or another. As therapists we want to side not with the parental role, either the 'good' or the 'bad' parent, but with the confused and damaged child itself, and with its never-ending struggle for loving contact This can often mean retranslating the 'problem' with which the client arrives into the beginning of a 'solution'; this is especially true when the 'problem' is about someone's inability to conform to sexist criteria of normality.

The therapy session is a very unusual sort of space, very different in many ways from 'ordinary life'. One big difference is that the focus of both people's attention is on the experience of one of them - the client. In one sense this makes the client powerful, central. In another way, it means that the therapist is not exposing her own pain and vulnerability, so she can appear always clear and strong. We regularly draw attention to this as we are giving therapy, and make it apparent - without using the client's time for our own needs - that we too feel weak, confused, armoured, stuck in childhood patterns, and so on.

During the session, we are not being these things. We have made a contract to focus on the client, knowing that we are able in most situations to keep a clear perspective on our own material when it surfaces. But we couldn't do this if we weren't getting support ourselves at other times, opportunities to panic, fall apart, act irrationally, be totally selfish. We have our own moments, many moments, of vulnerability and unclarity in our lives.

We don't try to fool any client about this; in a sense we want to draw their attention to it as part of the human context of our interaction. We will, however, avoid any tendency to turn the spotlight on us during the session, just as with any other avoidance of the client's own feelings and experiences, except when it becomes necessary for both people to spend time sorting out the origins of our own responses to the client

What happens in therapy, although different, cannot be separated off from the rest of life; which is basically a good thing, since otherwise it could hardly affect the rest of life. One aspect of this is that we are almost invariably taking money from clients for the work we do. This is necessary in order for us to live; and it also creates innumerable opportunities for bad power relationships.

For some clients, the financial relationship increases their sense of the therapist's powerfulness. Not only are we seeing into their souls, we're also taking their cash! There is a sense, though, in which by paying us the client is asserting her control: her choice, in the situation - she is acting as our .employer'. This too can be turned into a messy game. We have learnt from bitter experience not to take at face value the client who says (often in utter good faith) 'That was such a good session, let me pay you extra.' What happens a few weeks later when the developing relationship brings up dissatisfaction with a session?

In some ways it might be simpler and cleaner if money did not have to change hands. We don't really subscribe to the convenient notion that 'clients wouldn't value the work if they didn't have to pay for it'. At the same time, though, we live in a world where money is a vital element of exchange and survival, and therapy is to do with recognising reality. Also, there are certainly advantages in having a therapeutic relationship in which the state has no role of subsidy - and therefore of control. We have not yet resolved the tension between our need for a reasonable standard of living and our desire to work with people irrespective of their level of income. Group therapy provides a very partial solution, and we certainly see it as necessary to at least try to offer some cheap sessions.

The issue of money is just one of the many ways in which our practice of Reichian therapy is constantly struggling with contradictions around issues of power. Although we are looking for contact with our clients, and not aiming to withhold ourselves, we still set up very definite boundaries - of time, of disclosure - and some people find these very unsatisfactory. Although we see our work as having a 'public', political dimension, we are still working in 'private' and professional structures; still involved much of the time with the need to generate income, to attract punters!

These contradictions are not going to disappear; like so many other problems in life, we are going to have to live with them. It feels important to admit that they are there, yet in each situation still to work concretely to move away from 'power-over' and towards 'power-for'.

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