Character Analysis

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Character Analysis

The English edition
Author Wilhelm Reich
Original title Charakteranalyse
Language Originally German, translated into English
Publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Media type Print
Pages 545
ISBN 0-374-50980-8
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Psychoanalysis
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Character Analysis (German: Charakteranalyse) is a 1933 book by Wilhelm Reich.

Reich finished the manuscript in January 1933. He submitted it to the Psychoanalytic Press in Vienna, presided over by Sigmund Freud, who initially accepted it for publication. However, Freud cancelled the contract, wanting to distance himself from Reich's politics. Reich borrowed money and published the book privately in Vienna.[1]

In the book, Reich argued that character structures were organizations of resistance with which individuals avoided facing their neuroses: different character structures - whether schizoid, oral, psychopathic, masochistic or rigid - were sustained biologically as body types by unconscious muscular contraction. In September 1933, Reich published how fascists come to power in The Mass Psychology of Fascism.

Harry Guntrip wrote that Freud's The Ego and the Id only gained practical importance when Reich's Character Analysis and Anna Freud's The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence were published, as these books first placed ego-analysis at the centre of psychoanalytic therapy.[2]

References

  1. Kevin Hinchey, The Legacy of Wilhelm Reich, M.D., First International Congress on Wilhelm Reich, 30 October 2010
  2. Guntrip, Harry (1961) Personality Structure and Human Interaction, London: Hogarth Press, quoted in Boadella, David (1985) Wilhelm Reich: The Evolution of His Work, London: 54.

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