Character Analysis

Character Analysis (German: Charakteranalyse) is a 1933 book by Wilhelm Reich.

Character Analysis

The German edition
Author	Wilhelm Reich
Original title	Charakteranalyse
Language	Originally German, translated into English
Publisher	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date	1933
Media type	Print
Pages	545
ISBN	0-374-50980-8

Background

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]

Summary

Reich argues that character structures were organizations of resistance with which individuals avoided facing their neuroses: different character structures — whether schizoid, oral, psychopathic, masochistic, hysterical, compulsive, narcissistic, or rigid — were sustained biologically as body types by unconscious muscular contraction.

Reception

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] Character Analysis is referenced in A Thousand Plateaus (1980), by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.^[3]