I think it might have been 1971 when I invited a woman friend to come with me to the cinema to see Dusan Makavejev's WR Mysteries of the Organism.
And then I have to go back three or four years to 1967 when I first heard of Wilhelm Reich in a review (and celebration) of his written works by R D Laing in the journal New Society. She decided not to accompany me to the Academy Cinema in Oxford Street so I went alone to see the movie. When I watched the clip (above) I was surprised to feel how moved I was, how it took me back to that time and the hopes that were inspired. I remember the smile on my face that emerged as I watched the film (in the seventies) and which continued to inhabit my face for some time afterwards as I wondered back to the tube station.
What is possible?
One afternoon (it could have been 1974) I was with a couple of women friends in Hyde Park when they invited me to join them for a threesome. I turned them down: it was rather sudden and I was due back home to my then wife. I think now how they must have thought about it, discussed it and planned it and I have regrets that I didn’t take them up on their offer – unfortunately it wasn’t repeated.
What was (and is) the tension between fidelity and love and pleasure and happiness; Reich had his opinions about these things. He saw the possibility of new ways of being which certainly inspired me a further couple of years on to do a Reichian (or neo-Reichian) psychotherapy training. Not only that but one of those two women who invited me to an afternoon of pleasure went on to become a sex therapist. Perhaps she still is though she must be in her seventies; somewhere in Canada, I guess. Sadly I lost touch. And I lost touch with those Reichian ideas in my thinking and practice as a psychotherapist, instead I found a home in a psychodynamic approach.