Character Analysis

This is a challenging book especially for a lay person such as myself. Reich may have been on to something but he may also have been going mad. The first two parts of "Character Analysis" cover Reich's move away from classical psychoanalysis as he decided his patients were sustaining their "mental" illness by means of chronic muscular tensions: the "character armor". He decided that talk therapy was unproductive: due to resistances people were not reporting genuinely. So he turned to direct physical activities. The third and final part of "Character Analysis" is as extraordinary as it may be baffling. Reich believed he had found a cosmic life force, "orgone energy", the disturbance in the flow of which in a person led to neurosis or psychosis. He believed that an invention of his, the "orgone accumulator", might help a person by providing orgone energy to them. He provides details of the body work he conducted with a psychotic patient in the intense chapter "The Schizophrenic Split". He concludes with his concerns about "emotional plague" as an explanation for mass movements such as Fascism. Reich appears to be struggling in this third part of the book, at times he seemed brilliant to me, at times he seemed quite disturbed. To what extent he was reaching to find ways to express important findings is unclear. He seems to have overreached but that may not invalidated some or much of what he presented. It's hard to tell. Although Reich's use of the "orgone accumulator" led to his imprisonment, body work based on his ideas and techniques has continued. Alexander Lowen developed the psychotherapy Bioenergetics based on Reich's findings. Charles Kelley created Radix, a personal growth practice, also based on Reich's work. Lowen has published exercises for one or two people The Way To Vibrant Health: A Manual Of Bioenergetic Exercises which may be used to become familiar with the kind of body work Reich pioneered. Reich believed that some form or other of character armoring was common among many people, not just the mentally ill: at least some of what he presents in "Character Analysis" may be useful for anyone.

The first 300 pages of this book represent Reich's major contribution to Freudian psychotherapy. Reich argues for a new practice of "Character Analysis" that takes the whole personality under examination, superceding the old therapy that focused narrowly on alleviating painful 'symptoms'. Our characters, Reich points out, are not created by chance or heredity, but represent the habitual strategies by which our egos come to cope with external threats, secure pleasure and sustenance, and regulate the flow of sexual energy. They are most definitively shaped by our interactions with our parents in the first few years of life and sexual development. Moreover, Reich argues, our characters are created and recreated in service of systems of social and class domination; thus sexual psychology and class struggle are inextricable. Chalquist's glib distortion of Reich's project in the comment below is typical of the attacks Reich's work was subject to in the vicious campaigns to to quash his influence by Nazis, the Psychoanalytic establishment, and the Authoritarian left alike. Nowhere does Reich suggest that simply having more sex is the solution to social problems. Rather, he asserts that widespread healthy sex-life is both a necessary condition and an inevitable result of successful class struggle and social emancipation. For those interested in what this means concretely for social movements, his book Sex-Pol is highly recommended. The typology of Characters that Reich draws up in the closing chapters is vague and ill-presented, leading me to suspect that the distinctions and psycho-sexual mechanisms he was describing weren't clear even in his own mind. And yet there are occassional flashes of insight into behavior that I immediately recognized as true of myself and my friends and family. Reich's insights have deep ramifications for parenting, schooling, and political organizing, and were formative on the work of the New Left. this book is highly recommended for people interested in such questions. The last sections of the book are concerned with Orgone research, which I haven't investigated myself but which seem pretty wacky.

Wilhelm Reich was many things in his lifetime- a student of Freud, a political activist, a research scientist, and an inventor. His work was decades ahead of its time and is finally being rediscovered and reevaluated by the public. If, like me, you are interested in Reich and his work, you might want to check out a novel called We All Fall Down, by Brian Caldwell. it draws heavily on Reich's theories, particularly Listen Little Man and The Mass Psychology Of Facism. It's a great introduction to Reich's work and the entire novel draws heavily on his theory. It's very interesting watching an author explore his theories in a fictional setting. Well worth reading.

Conventional wisdom has it that the firest two-thirds of this treatise on character analysis improved psychoanalytic technique, focusing on character-based resistances rather than just on interpreting content--associations, dreams, etc. True enough, but the last third, which analysts and critics say represents Reich's slippage into maddness, is even more brilliant and farsighted. Here, Reich moves into the area of bioenergy and body-based psychotherapy. He presages some modern developments in psychotherapy, and in many respects, moves ahead of where mainstream therapy resides today. His bioenergy/therapy integration was also a forerunner of much of today's alternative mind-body and energy medicine modalities. Reich was not always the most trenchant writer, but here is writing his sharp, direct, and provocative. This is Reich's great contribution, still largely neglected.

This important work is sometimes heralded as a landmark in psychoanalytic literature, as Reich changed aspects of analytic technique, focusing on character structure and not just the contents of free association, dreams, memories, etc. But any analyst or psychologist familiar with this work will usually say, but he went mad in the middle, and the last third of the book is nonsense. In fact, the last third--when he focuses on new forms of body-based treatment and theories regarding bioenergy, is even more brilliant. Take a gander at this section and you may recognize a mind way ahead of his times; Reich precedes and surpasses modern day notions of biological energy medicine, body-based psychotherapy, and emotional expression in healing. While his writing is usually uneven, here it is quite sharp, clear, and consistent throughout. We still have a lot to learn from Reich.