tives such as dreams) was often not fruitful. He gave up direct interpretation and tried,
instead, to make the unconscious conscious by the elimination of the resistances put up
against the repressed material.
Reich directed attention not only to the then familiar forms of resistance that
directly impeded the flow of the patient’s associations, such as his or her skipping over
thoughts as irrelevant or too embarrassing, going “blank,” being late for sessions, and the
like. He stressed the resistances which, in his opinion, were all the more insidious because
they did notstop the flow of material. What they did do, Reich was to argue vehemently and
in great detail, was to prevent fantasies, memories, and impulses from emerging with strong
emotion. Using examples taken from his own treatment failures as well as those of his col-
leagues, Reich showed that a great number of analyses, as currently carried out, degenerat-
ed into “chaotic situations.” A welter of memories, dreams, and unconscious ideas was
unearthed in helter-skelter fashion, but no strong feelings were released, and the patient
showed little improvement.
The first of the resistances on which Reich focused was “latent negative transfer-
ence,” not in itself a new concept. Freud had pointed out that the patient transferred hos-
tile as well as positive feelings to the analyst, feelings originally directed toward parents and
other significant figures in the patient’s childhood.And it was known that both negative and
positive feelings were often concealed. What was new was Reich’s emphasis on negative
transferences and the technical implications he drew from these.
Reich noted that analysts tended to focus on the patient’s positive transference and
to overlook subtle signs that the patients were angry or afraid of them. As he put it some
years later: “Analysts shied away from bringing out, listening to, confirming or denying
opposing opinions and embarrassing criticism from the patient. In short, one felt personal-
ly insecure... .”^5
Reich also called attention to another, still more pervasive kind of resistance. He
noted that certain characteristic modes of being of the patient—what Reich termed “defen-
sive character traits”—could also block the affective impact of analysis. In Reich’s view, such
traits as rigid politeness,evasiveness, apprehensiveness, and arrogance had originally devel-
oped in childhood as a way of warding off strong emotional stimuli from within or without,
stimuli once associated with pain,frustration, and guilt. In analysis, they continued to func-
tion as a way of blocking strong emotional experiences, now provoked by the unsettling
process ofanalysis itself. The defensive character traits, which in their totality Reich termed
“character armor,” served to protect the individual against pain, but also served to restrict
severely the capacity for pleasure.
It should be emphasized that Reich’s contribution did not lie in the formulation of
“character traits” that opposed the process of analysis. For example, Karl Abraham had
noted that some patients showed “pathological deformities of character” that interfered
with the process of free association, and he had called for the development of a “character
analysis”to treat these patients^6.
Reich argued that allpatients had defensive character traits, and that there was no
6 : Reich’s Early Work on Character Analysis: 1920-1926 77