Eva Reich was the daughter of the psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich and a proponent of his controversial theories as well as a developer of infant massage techniques. Reich, a physician, derived enough recognition from her famous father to become a popular public advocate of alternative therapies and a sought-after lecturer on her father’s work, but not so much as to be tainted by the more lurid aspects of his career. His belief that libidinal energy could be harvested and measured was considered highly theoretical at best and, at worst, dangerously subversive by the scientific establishment. His work even landed him in jail. His daughter, however, was in aesthetic synchronicity with the New Age movements of the 1960s and 1970s and she focused on therapeutic massage techniques that were unthreatening and touchy-feely.

Eva Renate Reich was born in 1924 in Vienna and emigrated to the US in 1938. A graduate of the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania, she became Wilhelm Reich’s close assistant, participating as both subject and researcher in his often sceptically received experiments, which probed the frontiers of sexual and cosmic energy. After her father’s death she toured the lecture circuit, sharing his ideas.

According to the not-for-profit Gentle Bio-Energetics Institute in Asheville, North Carolina, which has a website and espouses her therapeutic model, Eva Reich paid particularly close attention to her father’s gentle touch with children and infants. Possibly, she sensed that this area of inquiry held more commercial and clinical promise than measuring the male orgasm. This was, after all, long before the age of Viagra.

Once a prominent psychoanalyst and a disciple of Freud, Wilhelm Reich was suspected by some colleagues of having suffered a psychological breakdown in mid-career. Much of his work was based on “orgone”, which he called a “primordial cosmic energy” that was a source of emotional health. He built “orgone accumulators”, energy chambers that might well have inspired the memorable “orgasmatron” in Woody Allen’s film Sleeper. On the strength of earlier, legitimate scientific accomplishments and credentials, Wilhelm Reich met Albert Einstein at Princeton and tried, unsuccessfully, to persuade the physicist of orgone’s quantifiable properties.

Wilhelm Reich became the subject of an investigation by the US Food and Drug Administration that earned him two years in prison, where he died of heart failure. He had disobeyed an injunction against distributing orgone accumulators across state lines, and had undertaken his own legal defence. But his work enjoyed a resurgent vogue in the late 1960s and even today pockets of internet activity attest to the staying power of ideas that many experts call pseudo-science, if not outright crackpottery.

By contrast with her father, Eva Reich had the aura of a sane and earthy soul. She and her husband, William Moise, an artist, settled in Hancock, New Hampshire, in 1952, where she established a rural practice. While working in Harlem Hospital in the 1950s she used a delicate touch to soothe premature babies. This “butterfly touch therapy” was later applied to adults and children, “melting the armour” of trauma and promoting medical and emotional wellbeing. She taught philosophy, theory and techniques in workshops and seminars for midwives and others from the 1970s until her retirement 15 years ago. After her divorce in 1974 she travelled the world to lecture about her own and her father’s work. In addition to her father’s orgone experiments, Eva Reich had helped him with his inquiries into UFOs, and on the development of “cloudbusters”, devices meant to deploy natural energy to affect weather patterns, providing rain to drought-stricken regions, for example. She contributed to such volumes as The Orgone Accumulator Handbook: Construction Plans, Experimental Use and Protection Against Toxic Energy, but also the more pragmatic Baby Massage: Parent-Child Bonding Through Touching, a handbook which, superficially, would seem to advocate the obvious. Butterfly massage has been called pioneering, but infant massage in some form had been a routine practice in India and other countries for centuries before Dr Reich made it a therapeutic technique. Still, books and how-to tapes, mostly sold on the internet, kept Eva Reich’s ideas in circulation, and surely still help to quieten the colicky babies of the open-minded.

She is survived by a daughter.

Eva Reich, therapist and advocate of alternative medicine, was born on April 27, 1924. She died on August 10, 2008, aged 84