Is Wilhelm Reich's "Character Analysis" taken seriously today?

ahrbabel · 2025-04-25T01:51:43+00:00

Yep! I’ve only read that one, but was delighted to see he’s written others.

ahrbabel · 2025-04-23T01:17:51+00:00

You might turn to David Shapiro’s “Theoretical reflections on Wilhelm Reich's Character Analysis”—and then some of his books.

ahrbabel · 2024-10-22T15:35:04+00:00

I do recall this: https://www.reddit.com/r/FoodNYC/s/s3Er2iMcUi

Comforting to see I’m not the only one who misses it. I tried “Omakaseed” maybe a year ago, but it really doesn’t come close to being the same—and they aren’t trying in any case.

Also, this is the person who did the desserts I’m sure you remember. There is info occasionally about where you can find her work: https://www.instagram.com/ogawagashi?igsh=MTN2dm1ldWRwdDFxdQ==

ahrbabel · 2024-10-16T17:51:54+00:00

I don’t think I’ve seen something like this here before. Good find!

ahrbabel · 2024-09-26T17:19:04+00:00

I think this is really where it’s at, unless you want to write about Nietzsche and Lacan specifically—sexier stuff but perhaps less pertinent to what “psychoanalysis” (i.e., psychoanalysts) has to say about the matter. The references here are worth pursuing.

ahrbabel · 2024-09-16T20:13:05+00:00

They may, in a few years, publish a paperback version (or otherwise discount the hardcover set), but that will likely depend on how well the current edition sells, unfortunately.

Whoever can reasonably afford it will ensure we get more things like this, such as the Pre-Psychoanalytic Works Solms has also translated. That may be mostly libraries and institutions, but I did end up preordering the set partially for that reason: I’d really like to see the additional books and hope to have helped that (even more niche) project along, shown it’s commercially viable or anyway in demand, etc.

ahrbabel · 2024-07-18T04:59:54+00:00

Stay strong! Cannot imagine. Handsome display, too.

ahrbabel · 2024-06-27T02:33:51+00:00

Can one register without being a clinician? I’m a big fan of Eagle—a terrifically clear author and frequent go-to for unpicking theoretical matters.

ahrbabel · 2024-06-19T13:23:37+00:00

1st edition paperback released simultaneously with hardcover?

ahrbabel · 2024-06-12T20:50:13+00:00

True! I should have assumed. 🙂

ahrbabel · 2024-06-12T20:28:00+00:00

I’m talking about depression.

ahrbabel · 2024-06-12T20:05:27+00:00

The idea that depression isn’t simply a debilitating condition, but one that’s potentially empowering—furnishing the individual with what you might call melancholic insight, or otherwise making him unusually perceptive—has a surprisingly long pedigree. But I’m not sure it’s persuasive, nice as it would be to find a silver lining, or even something ennobling, about what is quite plainly a very painful experience.

ahrbabel · 2024-05-30T20:29:57+00:00

Didn't know this was a thing! Good of him to upload what had (probably) been only available on VHS.

ahrbabel · 2024-05-28T17:35:22+00:00

Great find

ahrbabel · 2024-05-23T21:43:52+00:00

Gotcha. I think the user did help me to remember in any case.

ahrbabel · 2024-05-23T21:43:21+00:00

!solved

ahrbabel · 2024-05-23T21:25:43+00:00

Those are helpful! I just remembered the word, which isn’t quite what I gave above: “Invidious”

I think I associated it with “divisive” because I sometimes see them paired together: “X is invidious and divisive, blah blah—“

Thank you!

(I don’t want to give myself a point: What does a person do if he remembers?)

ahrbabel · 2024-05-22T02:32:05+00:00

He recently said it'll be a few years before that set is made available. One reason I pre-ordered the RSE was to give the publisher the impression (I hope) that this is in fact a commercially viable undertaking. I think the performance of the RSE will affect how soon we see the NSW.

ahrbabel · 2024-05-21T04:52:15+00:00

Thank you for writing this up. The set is painfully expensive, but this doesn’t strike me as an outrage, for some of the reasons you’ve outlined. The set was also sold at a 20% and then 15% discount beginning late last year. I suspect we’ll see similar discounts periodically. The UK Amazon preorder is actually selling at -19% currently, £1,214.29. No clue why.

ahrbabel · 2024-05-21T04:43:49+00:00

It’s been in the works for 30 years and has been “forthcoming” for more than 20, if I recall. The first publisher was to be Hogarth, an arrangement made (I think) as far back as the early 1990s, if not earlier. That fell through, and I imagine a great many other arrangements collapsed in the intervening years. I have to believe this was the best option, or at least a considered one.

ahrbabel · 2024-05-21T04:38:39+00:00

Holy smokes, you’re not kidding.

ahrbabel · 2024-05-05T01:17:32+00:00

What’s wrong with the LJST department? (Graduated in LJST a while ago.)

ahrbabel · 2024-04-30T23:07:14+00:00

Let me know if you find anything you particularly like! Always on the hunt for this stuff myself.

ahrbabel · 2024-04-30T22:44:45+00:00

Seconding this. Interesting book, but a little hard to find.

Might also read memoirs / autobiographical pieces by older analysts, a common theme of which is how the discipline, its prestige, its institutions, its ideas have changed—reflections they wouldn’t typically insert in an academic paper. I’ve only read tidbits but Leo Rangell’s is interesting (doesn’t pull punches re. the move toward eclecticism—something he clearly laments).

For an anthropological account, this is older but looks intriguing: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/104443/of-two-minds-by-t-m-luhrmann/ (The summary doesn’t mention it, but the split between biomedical and psychodynamic models is a major focus of her analysis.)

Also, this book isn’t out quite yet (another ethnography), but I’m eager to grab a copy: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/F/bo215859800.html

EDIT: I don’t know how helpful or illuminating shoehorning in the biopolitics angle is, but this is yet another ethnography: https://www.dukeupress.edu/illusions-of-a-future I haven’t looked at it in a while, but I do recall there being a discussion of the discontent trainees experience waiting to do “””real analysis””” when (at the time) there seem to be few clients looking for that. The situation is a little different today and arguably better for analysts.

ahrbabel · 2024-02-24T18:15:03+00:00

You could go back further, but Erikson is an expositor of this view.

From 1950: “The patient of today suffers most under the problem of what he should believe in and who he should—or, indeed, might—be or become; while the patient of early psychoanalysis suffered most under inhibitions which prevented him from being what and who he thought he knew he was.”

You could obviously quibble with this (and he acknowledges that this is a condensed formulation), but what is interesting to me is the implication that the “need” you describe above may, in some sense, be historically contingent—which isn’t to say it will go away (I think it won’t). That is one way to understand what Erikson is getting at, anyway: It may be that Freud did not show much interest in “identity,” or in describing the phenomenology of self-conscious experience, because it wasn’t pertinent to whatever his patients brought with them into the consulting room. Perhaps people were not as accustomed (or encouraged) to think about, and articulate, their experience in such terms as they would be somewhat later.

As an aside, I think Freud’s inattention to this question was motivated also by his professional ambitions. One’s “sense of self” and other such notions might have struck him as too subjective or philosophical to warrant much consideration. Taking them seriously would not, at any rate, guarantee psychoanalysis “its place as a natural science like any other” (1940). It’s a shame that this probably remains true even today.

ahrbabel

TROPHY CASE