Character Analysis @ richardeward.com

Character Analysis
by Wilhelm Reich
from Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Customer Reviews:

• Avg. Customer Rating: 4.0 / 5.0

• A walk on the Wilhelm side
  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... more info

• Deep insights, muddy presentation
  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... more info

• A superb book for anyone interested in Reich
  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... more info

• occasional sparks of brilliance....
  ....mixed in with a reductionistic theory whose centerpiece implies that the cure for neurosis is having sex more often. At times I wished the author had taken his own advice in lieu of writing such a long and drawn-out book...or that I had taken his advice instead of reading it all. Scattered useful clinical concepts.

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