Character Analysis: Third, Enlarged Edition

Reich's classic work on the development and treatment of human character disorders, first published in 1933. As a young clinician in the 1920s, Wihelm Reich expanded psychoanalytic resistance into the more inclusive technique of character analysis, in which the sum total of typical character attitudes developed by an individual as a blocking against emotional excitations became the object of treatment. These encrusted attitudes functioned as an "armor," which Reich later found to exist simultaneously in chronic muscular spasms. Thus mind and body came together and character analysis opened the way to a biophysical approach to disease and the prevention of it. TABLE OF CONTENTS: PART 1: Technique. 1 Some Problems of Psychoanalytic Technique. 2 The Economic Viewpoint in the Theory of Analytic Therapy. 3 On the Technique of Interpretation and Of Resistance Analysis. 4 On the Technique of Character Analysis. 5 Indications and Dangers of Character Analysis. 6 On the Handling of the Transference. PART 2: Theory of Character Formation. 7 The Characterological Resolution of the Infantile Sexual Conflict. 8 The Genital Character and the Neurotic Character. 9 Childhood phobia and Character Formation. 10 Some Circumscribed Character Forms. 11 The Masochistic Character. 12 Some Observations on the Basic Conflict Between Need and Outer World. PART 3: From Psychoanalysis to Orgone Biophysics. 13 Psychic Contact and Vegetative Current. 14 The Expressive Language of the Living. 15 The Schizophrenic Split. 16 The Emotional Plague. Index