Abstract
I entered the field of psychotherapy through the gate marked ‘humanistic’; but Wilhelm Reich, who developed the style of therapy that I was taught, worked within the psychoanalytic tradition. Although he is often claimed as one of the founding parents of humanistic therapy, Reich himself—unlike Perls and Berne, for example, who also started as psychoanalysts—never announced himself as ‘humanistic’; his break with the analysts was primarily about the use of bodywork and about his left wing politics, and in many ways Reich's technique remained firmly psychodynamic.