approach rather than the virtues, which are always harder to achieve. More recent therapeu-
tic approaches, such as the encounter movement, that have been influenced by Reich often
err in the direction of sadistic attacks on the armor of patients and of raising false hopes
about the beneficial effects of releasing stormy emotions. They spend less time studying and
practicing character analysis in its true sense: the careful working through of resistances,
with precise attention to where the patient is at any given moment.
Just as Reich’s personality influenced his psychoanalytic orientation, so the reac-
tions to his character-analytic work gave him support for his endeavors and at the same time
introduced new stresses. The reactions also reveal some destructive organizational process-
es within psychoanalysis which Reich encountered as his work became more controversial.
Many of the young analysts, like Sterba and Fenichel, welcomed Reich’s contribu-
tions. In addition, Sandor Ferenczi, one of Freud’s closest associates and a renowned
Hungarian analyst in the early 1920s, thought highly of Reich. On his trips to the United
States, he recommended Reich as an analyst to Americans planning to study psychoanalysis
in Vienna. As a result, a number of analytic candidates from the United States, including
Walter Briehl, M. Ralph Kaufman, O. Spurgeon English, and John Murray, were analyzed by
Reich or supervised by him during the 1920s.
This kind of recognition must have supported Reich’s feeling that his work was of
value and that he was on to something important. At the same time, many of the older
Viennese analysts became quite unhappy with Reich’s character-analytic efforts. Theodore
Reik, for example, felt that Reich’s “schematic” approach to resistance analysis interfered
with the free play of the analyst’s intuition. The analytic “art” could not be confined to such
rules as “no interpretation of content without first interpreting the resistance.”
Other senior analysts reacted by saying that Reich’s proposals were “nothing new”
since Freud had already laid down the principle of analyzing resistances. Reich’s reply that
the principle was not new but the consistent application of it was rare constituted an implic-
it indictment of many older analysts’ practice. Reich spoke ominously of the frequency of
“chaotic situations”in analysis,of therapy shipwrecked because the analyst made all kinds
ofdeep interpretations without first dealing with the resistances in the way of the patient’s
meaningful use ofsuch insights.
Not only the content of Reich’s criticism was provocative but also its form. To
judge from his own metaphor of himself as a shark in a pond of carps, he did not mince
words in stating his disagreements with others, and indeed at times he may have sounded
quite arrogant. In a letter to Paul Federn, dated February 12, 1926, but not in fact sent, he
wrote that his active participation in the Society had its drawbacks: at times he was too
aggressive, a trait he regretted, and tried to correct.
Reich went on to say that he never intended any personal offense but only said what
he felt to be true without regard “for the age or position of the criticized person.”^14
It is interesting that Reich brings up the issue of age; at the time he began making6 : Reich’s Early Work on Character Analysis: 1920-1926 83