62 of 63 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Neglected masterpiece, September 2, 1998
This review is from: Character Analysis (Paperback)
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.
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41 of 44 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Neglected masterpiece, August 29, 1998
This review is from: Character Analysis (Paperback)
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.
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22 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Deep insights, muddy presentation, July 8, 2005
This review is from: Character Analysis (Paperback)
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.
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