Character Analysis
Further information: Character Analysis| Part of a series of articles on |
| Psychoanalysis |
|---|
| Concepts
Psychosexual development Psychosocial development 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 Otto Rank · Sandor Rado Wilhelm Reich · Joan Riviere Isidor Sadger · James Strachey Ernst Simmel · Harry Stack Sullivan Susan Sutherland Isaacs Donald Winnicott |
| Important works
(1899) The Interpretation of Dreams (1901) The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1905) Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1920) Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1923) The Ego and the Id |
| 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 |
| Psychology portal |
From 1925 to 1933, Reich worked on the ideas that he published as Charakteranalyse: Technik und Grundlagen für studierende und praktizierende Analytiker (1933), revised and published in English in 1946 and 1949 as Character Analysis. Robert Corrington writes that the book, regarded as Reich's masterpiece, sought to move psychoanalysis away from the treatment of symptoms toward a reconfiguration of character structure.
For Reich, character structure was the result of social processes, in particular a reflection of castration and Oedipal anxieties playing themselves out within the nuclear family. Les Greenberg and Jeremy Safran write that Reich proposed a functional identity between the character, emotional blocks, and tension in the body, or what he called muscular or body armour. (He blamed Freud's jaw cancer on his character armouring (Charakterpanzer), rather than on his smoking: Freud's Judaism meant he was "biting down" impulses, rather than expressing them.) He argued that dissolving the muscular armour would bring back the memory of the childhood repression that had caused the blockage in the first place.
Read more about this topic: Wilhelm Reich, 1930–1934: Germany, Denmark, Sweden
Other articles related to "character analysis, characters, analysis, character":
... Ramesh is a middle-aged shopkeeper, born in India but a long-term resident of the Glasgow suburb of Lenzie ... He has been the proprietor of the local convenience store Fags, Mags Bags for over 30 years ...
... Huston accepted that the two characters had their similarities, but went on to contrast the two by noting in particular differences in origin, motives, and personality ...
... Reich had arrived in Norway, he opened a seminar in character analysis ... was admitted to this despite not having undergone any such analysis himself ... due to Raknes' advanced age, the restructuring of his character, that is the apprentice therapy, was cumbersome and lasted for almost three years, three sessions a week ...
Famous quotes containing the words analysis and/or character:
“The spider-mind acquires a faculty of memory, and, with it, a singular skill of analysis and synthesis, taking apart and putting together in different relations the meshes of its trap. Man had in the beginning no power of analysis or synthesis approaching that of the spider, or even of the honey-bee; but he had acute sensibility to the higher forces.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)
“Crime seems to change character when it crosses a bridge or a tunnel. In the city, crime is taken as emblematic of class and race. In the suburbs, though, it’s intimate and psychological—resistant to generalization, a mystery of the individual soul.”
—Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941)