| Title | : | Character Analysis |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0374509808 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780374509804 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 576 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 1933 |
Character Analysis Reviews
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Led Zeppelin, Lou Reed, Charles Bukowski, Ernest Hemingway, William Burroughs…they all leave me with a feeling of emptiness. Don’t get me wrong, I think they are all brilliant, and I enjoy them all (with the exception of Led Zeppelin). However, I can only take them in small doses. Why is that? I’ve come to the conclusion that they, among others, are masculine-centered. There is nothing wrong with masculinity or delving into your gender experience, but it does end up being one-sided. I would feel the same way about a book that excluded the male experience, as well. It leaves me with the feeling that something’s missing and makes me sad. I don’t think this should deter people from experiencing their art, though. It is one aspect of the rich human experience. You just have to be in the right frame of mind for it.
Reading Wilhelm Reich’s Character Analysis left me with a similar impression. He was brilliant. Wilhelm Reich was one of the first western scientists to contribute to the study of mind-body medicine. His methods and insights are thought-provoking. I hadn’t read a book this wonderfully challenging for a long time. There were vast sections, however, where I yearned to hear how his theories apply to me, as a woman. There is only so much penis talk you can take!
Although I wished for more coverage of women’s struggles, I kept reading. I kept reading, because it was strongly evident that Wilhelm Reich was on a quest to heal all people. He says, “Accordingly, the fear of orgastic contact constitutes the core of the fear of genuine, direct psychic contact with persons and with the processes of reality.” Reich wanted people to connect with and release their armor that no longer serves them. He wanted us to connect genuinely with each other. “Contemporary society, with its sex-negating morality and economic incompetence to guarantee the masses of its members even a bare existence, is as far removed from the recognition of such possibilities as it is from their practical application.” He was fighting against the malaise that continues to inflict the people of our world.
Like I said, this book was a challenging read. I think it was written for the professional psychoanalytic audience. While it’s not necessarily intended for the layperson, if one has an interest in getting to the root of their motivations and repressions, and a wish to experience full vitality, this makes an enlightening read. Wilhelm Reich was calling us to fight, too, to fight for our lives. -
Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957) was one of the most important thinkers of the 20th century though his ideas have yet to receive the broad recognition they deserve. Why? A combination of two complimentary factors : his accurate diagnosis of a species-wide form of psychological disorder he called “the emotional plague” was extremely confronting, and his claim to have discovered a cosmic energy called “orgone”, which could heal people if they sat in “orgone boxes” and could make it rain if you pointed a “cloud buster” at a cloud, made it easy to dismiss him as a crackpot.
The challenge of reviewing one of his books is how to deal with the whole “orgone energy” issue. Reich was not a biologist or physicist. He came from the Freudian school of psychoanalysis, which was never based on the strict discipline characteristic of the hard sciences. He arrived at the concept of this cosmic energy from the basis of the physical experiences of himself and his patients. Some may be tempted to interpret what he says in the light of other, more recent, discoveries. A friend of mine suggested that what Reich describes as the flow of orgone through the body corresponds with the pathways by which we now know that the chemical oxytocin travels through the bloodstream. Reich believed that the orgone flowed most strongly at orgasm and orgasm produces oxytocin. Did sitting in orgone boxes help to heal people of their psychological or physical ailments? It seems likely that there would have been a placebo effect. Beyond that I’m happy with my ignorance. There are Reich supporters who claim the accumulators and cloudbusters work, but orgone energy never gained any currency amongst biologists or physicists.
Those who dismiss Reich on the basis of the grander claims make a big mistake. He arrived there by studying human behaviour, and it is in that field that his importance lies. Character Analysis was originally published in 1933 and then greatly expanded in 1948. It’s a book with a split personality which illustrates how much it’s author’s therapeutic ideas had changed over that time. In the main body of the work he introduces two of his most important ideas - character armour and body armour. The basic frame of reference here is still Freudian psychoanalysis, though Reich is already a heretic. He makes the case that Freud’s “death instinct” represents a denial of the responsibility of the psychiatrist to address those aspects of our culture which make us sick. Why does a mentally ill person hurt themselves? Because they have a self-destructive instinct? Today we might blame it on something else internal to the individual - a chemical imbalance. Reich argues that we need to be aware that religious institutions, schools and parents who teach children to fear the natural erotic processes of their own bodies can be the source of the neurotic impulse for them to hurt themselves. We shouldn’t make personal what may be political. The sections that were added later bring in discussion of orgone energy, but also widen the discussion of what constitutes psychological health and introduce the concept of “the emotional plague.”
The validity of Reich’s discussion of character armour is something which each of us can test through our observations of our own behaviour and that of others. Our personality consists of a more or less rigid character structure - a way of looking at ourselves and a mode of operating in the social world. The purpose of this structure is to protect us from threats internal and external. If we are criticised, it is to our character armour that we cling. This explains why even the most well-argued criticism of someone’s political views, for instance, far from leading them to change them, is liable to lead to them asserting them all the more strongly. Existential anxiety, sexual desires or repositories of repressed anger are examples of internal threats which may make us feel the need for our armour. This concept is a very important one because it focuses our awareness on the role of perceived threat on unhelpful intransigence. If we want to help someone to improve their behaviour we may have more luck if we first do what we can to make them feel safe, e.g. from judgement or criticism, and only then appeal to them through reason.
Body armour is the physical manifestation of character armour. The archetypal example is “the stiff upper-lip”. Our anxiety about certain physical sensations can cause us to chronically stiffen parts of our musculature. This may be a response to fear of erotic feelings, “orgasm anxiety”, but it may also be a way of repressing feelings of grief or the anxiety of trauma. Reich developed his own massage methods to deal with this. His discussion of blocks in the flow of “orgone energy” through different parts of the body is very similar to the Eastern concept of chakras.
It is with the concept of the “emotional plague” that Reich links the neurotic frustrations of the individual to the politics of society as a whole. In 1933, when the first part of this book was published, Reich was forced to flee Nazi Germany. What leads to such collective madness? According to Reich, there are three modes of psychological being. We may be healthy, in which case our body’s natural desires to love and be loved and engage in productive activity are being met. Or we may be neurotic, in which case the failure to satisfy our primary biological drives gives rise to secondary drives of a destructive nature which make repression necessary. In this case we may be a resigned, self-destructive, neurotic. But the other possibility is what he calls “the emotional plague” - a form of destructive social behaviour in which the sadistic secondary drives express themselves in behaviour which may range from gossiping about people to supporting an authoritarian political order to murder. Essentially all manifestations of the dark side of human behaviour can be understood as expressions of this form of disorder in which a natural drive is distorted through having to make its way through the character armour and is expressed as some form of hostility. Reich has given us a holistic framework for the process by which the human animal, whose primary biological orientation is toward love - not excluding its bodily erotic expression, comes to be capable of war, torture, rape, etc. From such a viewpoint we can see that we will make little progress in solving our problems by political means unless we also learn how to free up our character armour and reconnect with our original loving nature.
This is not a book to accept or reject as a whole. Some ideas may be well-founded, others may not. Reich, like Freud and Jung, had conservative attitudes to homosexuality, for instance. But if you are looking for answers to the big questions of human behaviour, you’ll find at least some of them here. -
Ζόρικο βιβλίο αλλά το απόλαυσα , ειδικά αν σκεφτεί κανείς ότι είναι γραμμένο 90 χρόνια πριν... Διαβάζοντας το πρέπει να έχεις στ μυαλό σου ότι η ψυχιατρική επιστήμη έχει προχωρήσει πολύ από τότε που γράφτηκε το βιβλίο αυτό.. Αν κάποιος έχει την υπομονή, το χρόνο και το ενδιαφέρον να δει τις απαρχές της ψυχιατρικής ας το ξεκινήσει με πλήρη συνείδηση του τι ξεκινά να διαβάσει.
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Wilhelm Reich'ın Karakter Analizi, her türlü nevrozun kökeninde bastırılmış içgüdüsel istekler ile egonun bunları savuşturan güçleri arasındaki çatışma olduğunu anlatıyor. İçgüdülerimizi dizginlemek için geliştirdiğimiz savunma mekanizmalarının karakterimizin mayasını oluşturduğunu vurguluyor. Örneğin şiddetle bastırılan bir cinsel arzu karşısında karşılaşılan yasaklayıcı tavırla birlikte kişinin geliştirdiği savunma mekanizması o arzuyu belli bir biçimde (bu biçimin çeşitler çok) reddetmek ise bunun ileriki yıllarda kendini belli bir karakter ve davranış biçimi ile gösterdiğini söylüyor. Bu yüzden belki de bilinçdışında ne tür mekanizmalar işlettiğimizi fark etmek yetmiyor, farkındalığın üstüne bir de uzun, hem analitik hem içsel bir yolculuğun gerçekleşmesi, bilinçdışının zaman içinde işlenerek dönüştürülmesi gerekiyor.
Kitaptan kişisel olarak çok yararlandım. Ama bir romancı olarak da karakter yaratırken nerelere bakmak gerektiğiyle ilgili aydınlandım. Bir karakterin psikolojisini kurarken, olay örgüsünde neden sonuç ilişkilerini inşa ederken yararlanılabilecek iyi bir kaynak olduğunu düşünüyorum.
Bu arada kitabın psikanaliz alanındaki pek çok tartışmaya ışık tuttuğunu, Reich’ın kuramsal bakışının Freud’un ölüm içgüdüsü teorisine itiraz üzerine kurulduğunu da ekleyeyim. Meraklısına…
#okudumbitti #bookstagram #bookoftheday #psikanaliz #wilhelmreich #karakteranalizi -
Büyük yükümlülüğümüz şudur : "Beşeri hayvanın, kendi içindeki doğayı kabullenmesini, bundan kaçmayı bırakmasını ve halen o kadar korktuğu şeyin keyfini çıkarmasını sağlamak"
Kitapta altı yüz küsür sayfa boyunca cinsellik psikanalizi üzerine teoriler üreten ve döneminde oldukça ses getiren William Reich'in yine bu çerçevede bir terapi esnasında psikanaliz seyrini değiştirecek ve temellendirecek yol haritalarını içeriyor diyebiliriz.
Reich, doğal bir ihtiyaç olan cinselliğin, olagelen tabu ve bastırılmış yüzüyle mücadele ederken açığa çıkan nevrotik ve psikomatik hastalıkların çözümünün, hastanın doğal sevisel yaşamına vurduğu ketleri aşmadan çözülemeyeceğini öne sürer. Hatta bir terapiye başlamadan evvel kişilerin düzenli olarak cinselliği yaşayıp yaşamadığının bilinmesinin bile önemli olduğuna, terapi yaklaşımından belirleyici unsur olduğuna değinir. Bunun ötesinde, mazoşizm, çocukluktaki fobi ve karakter oluşumu, duygusal veba, orgon terapisi, şizofren bölünme, temas yokluğu gibi bölümler oldukça açıklayıcı ve ilgi çekiciydi. Özellikle şizofren bölünme bölümünde bir örnek hasta üzerinden seansların detayları paylaşılmıştı. Duygusal vebada, doğal hareket etme becerisini doğumundan itibaren olanaksız kılınan kişinin yapay hareket etme becerisi kazanmasına, kendini de terapistini de bu yapaylığa iknasında oldukça iyi olmasına değinir. Ağırlıklı olarak sosyal yaşamda eylemle, eyleme verdiği tepkisi ölçüşmeyen nevrotik bir davranış şeklinde açığa çıkar, der.
Bu ve daha birçok psikanaliz teorisinin tartışıldığı, müthiş bir kaynak kitap diyebilirim. Okumamı bilinçli şekilde yavaşlattım ve uzun bir zamanımı alsa da oldukça doyurucu bir okuma oldu benim için. -
Wilhelm would have been great psychoanalyst and research if he hasn't gone insane with this whole "orgone" energy thing. Another case of seeing what you want to see, rather than what is. I do understand where he came from though...our society intolerance of honest discussion of all things sexual is still persisting and damaging us all.
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Character Analysis
Wilhelm Reich
PART ONE: TECHNIQUE
1. SOME PROBLEMS OF THE PSYCHOANALYTIC TECHNIQUE
2. THE ECONOMIC VIEWPOINT IN THE THEORY OF ANALYTIC THERAPY
3. ON THE TECHNIQUE OF INTERPRETATION AND OF RESISTANCE ANALYSIS
3.1. Some typical errors in the technique of interpretation and their consequences
3.2. Systematic interpretation and resistance analysis
3.3. Consistency in resistance analysis
4. ON THE TECHNIQUE OF CHARACTER ANALYSIS
4.1. Introduction
4.2. Character armoring and character resistance
4.2.1. The inability to follow the basic rule
4.2.2. Where do the character resistances come from?
4.2.3. On the technique of analyzing the character resistance
4.2.4. The technique of dealing with individual situations as derived from the structure of the character resistance
4.2.5. The breaking down of the narcissistic defense apparatus
4.2.6. On the optimal conditions for the analytic reduction to the infantile situation from the contemporary situation
4.2.7. Character analysis in the case of abundantly flowing material
4.3. A case of passive-feminine character
4.3.1. Anamnesis
4.3.2. The development and analysis of the character resistance
4.3.3. Linking the analysis of the contemporary material to the infantile
4.4. Summary
5. INDICATIONS AND DANGERS OF CHARACTER ANALYSIS
6. ON THE HANDLING OF THE TRANSFERANCE
6.1. The Distillation of the genital-object libido
6.2. Secondary narcissism, negative transference, and insight into illness
6.3. On the handling of the absistence rule
6.4. On the question of the “dissolution” of the positive transference
6.5. A few remarks about counter-transference
PART TWO: THEORY OF CHARACTER FORMATION
7. THE CHARACTEROLOGICAL RESOLUTION OF THE INFANTILE SEXUAL CONFLICT
7.1. Content and form of psychic reactions
7.2. The function of character formation
7.3. Conditions of character differentiation
8. THE GENITAL CHARACTER AND THE NEUROTIC CHARACTER (THE SEX-ECONOMIC FUNCTION OF THE CHARACTER ARMOR)
8.1. Character and sexual stasis
8.2. The libido-economic difference between the genital character and the neurotic character
8.2.1. Structure of the id
8.2.2. Structure of the superego
8.2.3. Structure of the ego
8.3. Sublimation, reaction formation, and neurotic reaction basis
9. CHILDHOOD PHOBIA AND CHARACTER FORMATION
9.1. An “aristocratic” character
9.2. Overcoming of childhood phobia by the formation of character attitudes
10. SOME CIRCUMSCRIBED CHARACTER FORMS
10.1. The hysterical character
10.2. The compulsive character
10.3. The phallic-narcissistic character
11. THE MASOCHISTIC CHARACTER
11.1. Summary of view
11.2. The armoring of the masochistic character
11.3. Inhibited exhibitionism and the passion for self-deprecation
11.4. Unpleasurable perception of the increase of sexual excitation: the specific basis of the masochistic character
11.5. Observations on the therapy of masochism
12. SOME OBSERVATIONS ON THE BASIC CONFLICT BETWEEN NEED AND OUTER WORLD
PART THREE: FROM PSYCHOANALYSIS TO ORGONE BIOPHYSICS
13. PSYCHIC CONTACT AND VEGETATIVE CURRENT
Preface
13.1. More about the conflict between instinct and outer world
13.2. Some technical presuppositions
13.3. The change of function of the impulse
13.4. The intellect as defense function
13.5. The interlacing of the instinctual defenses
13.6. Contactlessness
13.7. Substitute contact
13.8. The psychic representation of the organic
13.8.1. The idea of “bursting”
13.8.2. On the idea of death
13.9. Pleasure, anxiety, anger, and muscular armor
13.10. The two great leaps in evolution
14. THE EXPRESSIVE LANGUAGE OF THE LIVING
14.1. The function of emotion in orgone therapy
14.2. Plasmatic expressive movement and emotional expression
14.3. The segmental arrangement of the armor
14.4. The emotional expression of the orgasm reflex and sexual superimposition
15. THE SCHIZOPHRENIC SPLIT
15.1. The “devil” in the schizophrenic process
15.2. The “forces”
15.3. The remote schizophrenic expression in the eyes
15.4. The breakthrough of the depersonalization and the first understanding of the schizophrenic split
15.5. The interdependence of consciousness and self-perception
15.6. The rational function of the “devilish evil”
15.7. Anorgonotic regions in the catatonic state
15.8. The function of self-damage in schizophrenia
15.9. Crisis and recovery
16. THE EMOTIONAL PLAGUE
Index
(c) Farrar, Straus and Giroux
NEW YORK
ISBN 978-0-374-50980-4
Library of Congress catalog card number: 70-163663 -
An Immense work, (to say nothing of its size, the book is enormous) and a critical contemporary to freud's Psychoanalytical revolution. This book was an exciting read for me in order to further flesh out my palette of psychoanalytical concepts. Though Wilhelm Reich became quite demented in his later years after suffering under the United States body politic, his earlier works stand the test of time as some of the most original compositions in the canon of Freudian and post-freudian literary achievements.
Character Analysis is a book that gives a rough template of some of the ramifications of freudian theory as it relates to bio-physical socially adaptive processes. It outlines complex anxious behavior from within the sexually repressed and dreary outlook of Victorian society. Though at times this book falters in its oversimplification of sexual economy and certain typical Victorian generalizations, it stands as one of the most significant challenges to Freud's theorization of the "Death Instinct" to date.
In this work Reich attempts to establish to the reader the intimate connection between Anxiety, Sexuality, and Social Power Struggles as they manifest in the smallest arenas of social hierarchy and the highest arches of Political movements. It is apparent that Reich's method of description may seem quite dated to us, carrying a certain pictorial charm only too familiar to the early 20th century. It binds together concepts of Social and Sexual Economy as the primary factors in the generation of Mental Illness and widespread human misery.
Reich establishes the concept of "Character Armor" as the agonist upon which most every Neurotic behavior set manifest and exist within. These Behavior sets are the result of specific relationships to authority borne out both during and after adolescence. Reich's Revolutionary work sets out to distinguish the fundamental relationship in nature that exists in the extensions of Sexuality as more than just a reproductive phenomenon, but as a Stress regulation mechanism intimately related to unconscious conflict arbitration.
As a standalone work, it represents a powerful reference in the larger canon of work concentrating on the anthropological basis for, and expression of socially determined habit formations. For those interested in the man, and not the Mystic, Wilhelm Reich, this is the Magnum Opus. -
Reich's psychotic break is on full display in the third section; there's some interesting if eccentric ideas in the second section; the first section is one of the most valuable sections that I as a therapist-in-training have read, containing a useful model of how to implement a certain type of psychoanalytic psychotherapy. Would recommend the first and maybe second sections to anyone learning to be a clinician.
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Thank you, Wilhem.
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Great Precursor to Bioenergetics. Teaches you hopw to read trauma from posture and behaviour.
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La coraza caracterológica
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Reich is an interesting guy. I could say so much more but the truth is you will either be in awe or in horror of this guy.
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Teaches you a lot where we are and where we could/would be.
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Reich'ın vakalarına ait süreçler işleniyor. Klasiklerindendir, Reich'ı anlamak için kilit bir kitaptır
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A must read to anyone interested in how their inner complexes manifest in everyday life. Real comphrehensive through the many aspects of Chracter analysis, and the origins of the emotinal plague, steps to restore patients to n orgiastic stte instead of hve them suffer with nouroses, become psychotic, or whtnot. Describes many case studies in detail, and also includes the brilliant essy on the Schizhophrenic Split, a malady even Reich never got to the bottom of. That being said, it is real sad to see this brilliant psychiatrist toady being pretty much forgotten in the litterature, all the while a number of poeple are getting very well by rebranding his techniques, and calling it their own "discovery" while omitting several crucial components while deling with the puzzling nature of the human mind.
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When I read it as a student in Tübingen in the 70s - I wrote 2 notes in this book: Lordose page 382 and Orgasmusreflex page 388 - besides I underlined many sentences and even whole paragraphs and pages - in short, it reflected exactly my thinking and described my feelings etc... (dali48)
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Y aquí descubrí que el psicoanálisis no es lo mío. Rly.
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I don't think I have all the knowledge needed to fully understand this book but Reich never seems to convince me, although there are some interesting parts in his work.
