Wilhelm Reich Characterology

The Wilhelm Reich character analysis

Reich character analysis was created by Wilhelm Reich, he is considered the Western originator of the science of Body Mind Psychotherapy. Freud and early psychologists discovered that there is a childhood developmental process that is now known to be windows of plasticity in the brain where the developing child has their beliefs, feelings and attachments to parents, others, and objects influenced in a positive or negative way. Wilhelm Reich explored, analysed, and first proposed working archetypes of 5 key types of individual personality groups develop from this process, where developmental arrest occurs. Reich explored how the early patterns of relating and attaching to others, if problematic, interrupted, or subject to trauma, can get “wired” into the brain and the body, and then repeated as recreations in adulthood. The literal posture, body shape, muscular and fatty deposits as held in the body, as well as sense awareness organ functioning (e.g. eyesight), are affected in this process, and there develops an outcome of a correlating body structure/shape to a personality with its emotional and mental defences or adaptations towards life. This is what Reich called Characterology.

The section on Reichian Segmental Armouring explains more about armouring and the inter-relationship between the 7 segments that exist in the human body.

The 5 Reichian character structures

There are 5 primary Character Structure Types, each with sub-types, as no person is one character type. We are a blend of all of them at some level, but typically one or two of them pre-dominate and reveal our primary bodily, emotional and mental personality defence or posture towards life. More information on each of the Character Types can be found in each of these sections.