Character Analysis

Character Analysis
The English edition
Author(s)	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
Outside the Sigmund Freud Museum (Vienna).
Concepts Psychosexual development Psychosocial development (Erikson) Unconscious Preconscious Consciousness Psychic apparatus Id, ego and super-ego Libido Drive Transference Countertransference Ego defenses Resistance Projection Denial
Important figures Alfred Adler Michael Balint Wilfred Bion Josef Breuer Nancy Chodorow Max Eitingon Erik Erikson Ronald Fairbairn Paul Federn Otto Fenichel Sándor Ferenczi Anna Freud Sigmund Freud Erich Fromm Harry Guntrip Karen Horney Ernest Jones Carl Jung Melanie Klein Heinz Kohut Jacques Lacan Ronald Laing Margaret Mahler Jacques-Alain Miller Otto Rank Sandor Rado Wilhelm Reich Joan Riviere Isidor Sadger James Strachey Ernst Simmel Harry Stack Sullivan Susan Sutherland Isaacs Donald Winnicott
Important works The Interpretation of Dreams (1899) The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901) Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905) Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) The Ego and the Id (1923)
Schools of thought Self psychology Lacanian Jungian Object relations Interpersonal Relational Ego psychology
Training Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis British Psychoanalytic Council British Psychoanalytical Society Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research International Psychoanalytical Association World Association of 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 anti-Nazi politics. Reich had to raise money to have the book published privately in Vienna. Reich subsequently documented how fascists come to power in The Mass Psychology of Fascism.

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.

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.

External links

• Reich, W. (1990) Character Analysis (Chapters I-III), 3rd, enlarged edition, trans. Vincent R. Carfagno, Archived from the original on 25 September 2012.