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Avg. Customer Rating: 5.0 / 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
Magesterial Anyone with a serious interest in psychoanalysis should read this. But it cannot be understood through intellect alone; these characters have to be lived, experienced. Someone who is trying to understand this intellectually will fail, although if he is sensitive to Reich's ideas will gain a great deal of insight into human psychology. Will become a seminal text in the near future.
Neglected masterpiece Yes, I know, everyone's saying that, but it IS a neglected masterpiece.
The bulk of the book deals with "character armour" and "affect blocking" - the ways in which people suppress and shut down emotions by developing characteristic responses and forms of bodily rigidity. The last chapter, a case study on schizophrenia, is a masterpiece in its own right, perhaps the first example of anti-psychiatry and a forerunner of "Listen, Little Man" in Reich's angry and pointed denouncement of the stupidities of... more info
Neglected masterpiece 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,... more info
