Seeing Morton Herskowitz

I first met Morton Herskowitz, D.O. in 1962. I was a first year medical student and he was my instructor at the Philadelphia College of Osteopathy (now the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine). He taught the introductory course in psychiatry. The course wasn’t about orgonomy or Reich. I was taken with how clear and solid Dr. Herskowitz was. How everything he said, in so many areas, was right-on. I remember he spoke out against circumcision, something that was remarkable for a medical school instructor in 1962.

Back then, I was reading the core of psychiatry, people like Freud, Jung and Adler. I didn’t know much about Reich. I had heard he was crazy. Then I found out that Dr. Herskowitz was a “Reichian” from upperclassmen. Since I connected with so much of what he was saying, I felt there could well be something to Reich’s work. So I decided to go see Dr. Herskowitz for orgone therapy. I was immediately taken with him as a therapist and with the effects of the treatment. After my first session, I knew then and there that I would become a medical orgone therapist.

It was very good to see Dr. Herskowitz this past Saturday at the fall conference of The Institute for Orgonomic Science, the non-profit group he leads. Thank you to the many following my blog who joined me there. The conference was well attended. By my estimate, there were about a hundred people there. Many were grateful patients or those working in the field of orgonomy in some way. I met and connected with a number of new people, some who had travelled to the conference from as far away as Boston and California.

For me, the highlight of the conference was Dr. Herskowitz speaking about Reich. He gave a brief overview of Reich’s biography and made a number of insightful observations. For example, he remarked that Reich was tutored as a child, and that this one-on-one kind of education is really the very best kind, because it has the capacity to be very much driven by the interests of the child. If the child asks a question, the tutor answers it, and if he doesn’t know the answer, the tutor finds out and comes back the next day and tells the child.

Dr. Herskowitz also spoke about how the gossip about Reich has been a continuation of the first malicious and utterly false article that was written about him in The New Republic in 1947. He said further that, to this day, people only mention a few things when they speak of Reich: that he was born in 1897, that he trained with Freud, that he was a paranoid schizophrenic, and that he died in prison. Virtually no one reads Reich!

Dr. Herskowitz said he never felt in any way that Reich was crazy, but that even if someone has emotional problems this does not negate their discoveries or genius. He mentioned that Issac Newton was a believer in astrology, but this had nothing to do with his discovery of the basic laws of physics. I myself think of the inventor and mechanical engineer, Nikola Tesla, a remarkable genius who was extremely paranoid and died in poverty and alone.

Of course, much more was said by Dr. Herskowitz and the others who spoke at the conference, which was videotaped. At some point in the future, it will be available for purchase. I was honored to have Dr. Herskowitz sign my copy of his book Emotional Armoring: An Introduction to Psychiatric Orgone Therapy, and to have my picture taken with him.