When I first learned about the movie Antichrist I was intrigued because it starred Serge Gainsbourg’s daughter Charlotte.  She was both scrutinized and recognized for her gritty role.  The movie, is indeed sexually and emotionally shocking and graphic.  On the surface it looks like a type of sexual horror film with some interesting cinematography about a couple that loses their son and in order to get through the ordeal they head up to their cabin, where the wife and husband both try killing each other-the husband being ultimately successful.  That’ the synopsis.

The Core:

In orgonomy it is said orgone therapy is in danger because too many people- who are not properly trained medical professionals- are entering into a realm of  treating people. This is an unethical practice, as one cannot begin to imagine the Pandora’s box of pain, emotions and rage locked beneath both mental and physical illness.  The movie Antichrist illustrates this in its most vivid raw form.

When Helping Becomes Hurting

Just as I found in my own autism case studies parents were too sick and repressed emotionally to reach out to heal their children no matter how matter how defensively and strongly they insisted they wanted to, so does the film Antichrist illustrate that the best intentions can be not only useless but harmful and fatal.  The truth is, in the path of orgonomy- unlike modern Freudian and Jungian psychology- one must always remain in active orgone therapy in order to effectively help and heal others.  That is from a professional stand point, but even more so necessary in the microcosm of a family, where a Mother (and Father) must remain freed up and emotionally open in order to properly attach, love and reach out to their children.  This is to prevent future psychosis and all types of physical and emotional diseases (also see my information on Waldorf education and the metabolic effects of early schooling and intellectualization*)

Antichrist, portrays a very committed husband who also happens to be a therapist, boldy taking his wife off medically prescribed psychological drugs (anti-depressants, etc) in order to heal her profound grief from losing their son.  She is diagnosed as having atypical grief, meaning her grief expressions were over and above “normal” armored human grieving processes.  Her grieving process also includes a type of sadistic and rageful sex with her husband which is connected to the fact the couple was having sex at the time of their son’s death.

The husband believes part of her healing journey begins and possibly ends at their cottage, a place in which the wife has now become intensely afraid of.  What causes all of this fear and excessive grief?  It was her intense guilt and shame from putting her two year old sons shoes on backwards while spending an entire summer at the cabin the year before.  This is caused the boy considerable pain and eventually led to the deformation of the bones in his  feet-which was revealed through an autopsy.  At the discovery of this strange sadistic twist, the fall out of the fact (revealed by pictures and memory stills) caused the wife to become what Reich had described as “blind with rage.”  She therefore, became full-blown, completely delusional and in her desperation to psychologically flee from this truth, she sexually assaults and mutilates both herself and her husband, subsequently leading to him finally killing her at the end.

This movie illustrates how tightly bound our armors and defenses are and why they are there in the first place. This seemingly loving mother becomes a sadistic monster but not different from many other armored mothers that spank infants, circumcise, wipe the genitals forcefully and  enforce early potty training-etc.  I admit,  the fact she was putting these shoes on backwards indicates a type of knowledge and understanding that what she was doing was going to hurt the child and cause him pain-but in her psychological defense,  she could have been blocking in the eyes and rationalizing her actions as so many mother’s do when their newborn baby boy is taken out of their arms after birth and led down a lonely hallway with strangers and then tied down and brutalized genitally.  Perhaps, at the time this mother/character thought she was helping her child by causing him pain…as so many parents do.

That repressed veil or occular block was removed from her eyes at the moment of her son’s tragic death.  With another layer of the armor revealed later, where it suggests she knew her son was in danger and was going to die but did nothing to stop it- she knew the window was open and that he could get out of his crib. But this is not confirmed as fact and you don’t know in film if it is just guilt producing this memory in her head or if she actually was at least semi conscious of it.  The excessive and sadistic grieving therefore was helping to cover the rage and hatred she felt for herself, husband and dead child.

The husband who “loved” her so much and was going to heal her is actually more of a cocky-obsessive clinical character. She becomes a scientific experiment to him and he continues to push her over the edge to get her to find out what she is afraid of and motivate her to move on and feel better. He was completely unaware of the depth and power of the human psyche and how far someone will go to protect their biggest armors or in layman’s terms their biggest secrets.  What she was afraid of was looking at how she abused her son, which then caused a type of delusional psychosis where she talked of Satan and all types of mystical theories which cause people to commit heinous acts of violence.

A significant part of the movie, was the connection to the abuse and death of her child the year previous, when she was working on her thesis paper with her child there in the cabin.  She was trying to prove that there was something in men that caused them to cause acts of violence against women. T

This was an attempt at deflecting violence onto someone else in order to make herself feel better. Eventually, she comes to believe that there is something evil inside of women that cause themselves and men to cause violence.  With this new belief comes evidence of her emotional armor dissolving into madness-as her writing becomes misconstrued over time, to the point of illegibility.

What We Learn from the Film Antichrist

To me, the character of the husband was an archetypal Christ figure.  In the beginning of the film he wanted to reach out and heal his wife at all costs.  However, he becomes more and more of an Antichrist and it becomes obvious that his own armors and guilt are what driving him to help his wife by tearing her psychosis out of her body, like a painful splinter that has encased itself in a protective deep layer and has resisted and avoided removal.  In any situation where there is a relationship and lying, in all its various forms-to oneself or others,  there’s a lot more at stake than just getting someone to “come clean” but also care needs to be given to the individual attempting to reach out to the other partner that they must both protect that person’s armors and defenses until that person is ready to look at it on their own and also, questions one’s own motives and emotional illness, ascertaining why this is important to them and what they hope to gain from it.

Recognizing anger and rage coming from within is a very significant part of the film and an aspect of mental health and orgonomy. A big part of the emotional plague, armoring and the human psyche is the blocking of feeling from within and therefore attributing actions and motives to other people or mystical things, ie. the “devil made me do it” outside of oneself-a hallmark of schizophrenia. Hence, when the woman finally recognizes the feelings within, instead of honoring those feelings and working them through and out-her emotional armoring (perhaps from early childhood shaming and guilt) distorts and diverts them. The internalized feelings are now the “devil inside” and thus, contributes to her ultimate demise and tragic psychosis.

I do not believe in pharmaceutical drug use, however, I do recognize in certain cases it is indeed necessary. In the

last chapter of my book “Beyond Natural Cures” I discuss at length naturopathic psychotherapy and healing oneself of mental disease and emotional disorders through orgonomy.  Having said that, I recognize, for the majority of the population who are unable to look at their armors and open themselves up to heal-pharmaceutical drugs are often the best and only choice.  In the case of the woman and man characters from Antichrist, if she would have continued to be drugged they probably would have stayed alive and married for many more years.  Alas, one has to question, if that state is truly alive and married or “existing together on the earth realm.”

When Love Feels Like Hate

I am remembering my Orgonomist’s advice several years ago, that often what we accept as love is actually veiled hate and that many couples will find out in orgone therapy that they are married to someone they hate and that the word love and the fuzzy actions and repression that surrounds it-is just an armor that needs to be removed. This is a major contrast to modern marital counseling, which seeks to keep couples together through repression, rationalization/blocking and even medication. You ultimately choose, to stay awake or asleep-not many of us are prepared or open enough to truly awaken.

The shocking nature of the film, isn’t shocking when you look at how the inability of humans to properly armor themselves because of dead orgone energy within the last 50 years, this has caused a dramatic increase in violence and spontaneous “lashing” out with uninhibited rage and deviant self expression-touching all of us on some level, most recently, my family with my daughter being attacked at school in a classroom with the teacher present, road rage and “going” postal. People simply cannot contain themselves, therefore adding a “new aspect” to the emotional plague that Reich spoke of. – Dr. Aurore, Bodymindayurveda.com,

Contact Dr. Aurore for an in-depth body mind assessment and specialized Ayurvedic organ decongestion detoxing.