Character analysis

What Hacker News says

1. unlmtdMar 2017
   - Character analysis (W. Reich)

   - Meetings with Remarkable Men (Gurdjieff)

   - Courage to Stand Alone (UG Krishnamurti)

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2. cf141q5325Oct 2023
   Burning is not an euphemism here, thanks for mentioning it.

   From Wikipedia:

   >On 23 August, six tons of Reich's books, journals and papers were burned in New York, at the Gansevoort incinerator, a public incinerator on 25th Street. The material included copies of several of his books, including The Sexual Revolution, Character Analysis and The Mass Psychology of Fascism. Although these had been published in German before Reich ever discussed orgone, he had added mention of it to the English editions, so they were caught by the injunction.

   Publishing the Mass Psychology of Fascism had him kicked from the German Communist Party before.

   Another pretty random bit of information, i recently stumbled about his Sex-Pol movement in another context as the Mitrokhin Archive alleges that Arnold Deutsch (Recruiter of Kim Philby of the Cambridge five) was a follower of said movement. Pretty sure thats a great example or the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baader-Meinhof_effect

   >Frequency illusion, also known as the Baader–Meinhof phenomenon or frequency bias, is a cognitive bias referring to the tendency to notice something more often after noticing it for the first time, leading to the belief that it has an increased frequency of occurrence.

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3. what-no-testsSep 2023
   The (un)funny thing about CBT is that it is almost indistinguishable from the totalism and thought reform techniques deployed by the Communists in China, as described by Robert Jay Lifton in his work -- Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of "Brainwashing" in China [0].

   A read through Wilhelm Reich's earlier work [1] and a look at his fundamental dispute with Freud (i.e. - is depression and anxiety a problem in the individual, or in society, and if it's a problem with society then why adjust the individual instead?) will expose the status quo in psychology as simply a way to maintain exactly that.

   [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought_Reform_and_the_Psychol...

   [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_Analysis

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4. corinroyalJun 2023
   > If everyone needs therapy, it’s society that’s wrong.

   This. Pioneering psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, father of character analysis made a similar claim. He was pilloried for suggesting that we should focus on prevention of mental illness over treatment. To do this he said that we should radically reorient our societies so that they meet people's organismic needs. He died in US prison.

   The psych establishment now is a tool to rehabilitate workers who have become unproductive, not a way to help humans fulfill their potential. Therapy has been helpful to me, but woefully inadequate. That is by design. It's not about my needs, it's about my employer's needs.

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5. corinroyalJun 2023
   Reich had been persecuted on two continents long before he went crazy and raved about cloudbusting and orgone. The early psychoanalytic period was a wacky time by modern psychological standards, and his pseudoscience about "bions" didn't help. But what really did him in was his transgression of practitioner neutrality, his advocacy of free sexual expression, his touch-based therapies, and his insistence that a psychiatrist's job is to help reform society to better meet the psycho and the somatic needs of the masses. Only then could we prevent "neurosis" rather than just treat it. Even today the idea of reforming society to prevent mental illness is hugely controversial.

   They burned his books, including "The Mass Psychology of Fascism" and his seminal "Character Analysis" in what has been called one of the worst instances of book burning in US history at the time. Looks like the burning times are back, eh?

   He was jailed for refusing not to proselytize the Orgone box, but that was really a pretext. Orgone boxes aren't in any way dangerous. He was jailed because his theories and practice were a threat to the status quo.

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