2. Reich's Redefinition Of Character

In Freud's formulation (see page 372) the character was the result of the operation of defenses; the ego defending against drives and drive derivatives. Thus there was an attacker (the id drives and their derivatives) and there was a defender (the ego). Now, however, in Reich's addendum, where is the attacker and where is the defender? Put another way, if character is the result of the operation of defenses, how can it then itself be a defense?

Note, further, that defenses were an intra-psychic phenomenon. They served variously to decathect ideas, memories, or the affective component of those idea or memories; to handle conflict between the id and the superego; to placate the id with compromise formations where the id got some of what it sought if not quite at the moment it sought it or in exactly the form it sought it; and to protect the ego either from emerging memories or affect from the subconscious or to protect it from un-fulfillable demands of the id.

Footnote 80. The word "cathect" can be translated as "attach to" and to "decathect" is to unattach.

But the character is not itself an intra-psychic phenomenon; rather it is the result of intra-psychic phenomena. To say that character is a defense is to redefine, without notice, the concept of defense. That the unrecognized redefinition of words is a hallmark of Reich's thinking hardly needs elaboration. One can find it all through his writing.

How, then, can we reconcile Reich's redefinition of the word "defense" with its normal and accepted meaning?

The answer is that Reich was using the word "defense" in a metaphorical way rather than a literal way. The answer becomes clearer when we recall that Reich came to the centrality of the issue of character both by way of normal free-association psychoanalytic practice and by his early (and life-long) focus on resistance. He saw, not inappropriately, that the major form of resistance to therapy could be found in the character of the patient as opposed to the well-known form of resistance in psychoanalytic practice: silence or the refusal to accept the therapist's interpretations.

Unfortunately for conceptual clarity, instead of retaining the label of "resistance" for the character, he borrowed the word "defense" and in doing so redefined the word.

3. Reich's Use Of Redefined Concept Of Character

Defense now became, in Reich's terms, not an intra-psychic process but an inter-personal process, one that could be seen in the therapeutic process. Evidence for this is found in Reich's writings as well as in logic. In saying that the therapist had to first interpret the character before interpreting the associations, he was saying that the first issue of transference to be explored was form rather than content. Since the associations contained defenses and since the form of the associations was contained in the character, therefore character was itself a defense. It was a metaphorical use of the word "defense." Defense now stood not just for the way the ego operated under attack by the id or the superego, rather it stood for all interactions between the patient and the therapist.

In saying that character was the main defense, Reich was actually saying: character is the main resistance. To make such a claim is not, in itself, inappropriate or theory-defying; to relabel it as a defense, however, is to seriously muddle the issue and to invite the kind of criticism to which Reich was subjected.

Had Reich spoken of character as the main resistance instead of the main defense, there would be no issue; but he was following closely in the footsteps of his mentor, Freud. Thus Reich, silently and probably unrecognized by him, was redefining a word without notice and using it in a totally theory-defying manner.

All of this Reich laid at the feet of repression. Then the other body therapy theorists followed Reich into this confusion. But

Freud's use of term "repression" was so sloppy that to this day no one is able to say what the term means. No doubt you, my reader, have a personal definition of repression. You think you — perhaps from reading, perhaps from personal experience, perhaps from both — know what repression is. There are, however, two big problems with that knowledge. One is that it is not what Freud wrote in defining and using the term. The definition in use by trained professionals is Freud's attempt at a definition, not your personal one. The second big problem is that your definition is colored by your character. Since character (and temperament) underlies everything, it also underlies your personal definition of repression and that definition, being personal, is not public.

Nor does it solve the problem to say you are using Reich's definition. Reich never explicitly defined repression, he simply used the term in an uncritical acceptance of Freud's use of the term and, as mentioned, Freud's use of the term was so sloppy and inconsistent that to this day no one is able to say what it means.

Footnote 81. See: Madison, 1961; Erdelyi, 1990.

4. Defenses And Their Role

a. A cognitive theory of defenses

The concept of the defense mechanism, while it started out as virtually a synonym for repression, was gradually elaborated over time and over non-compatible theories to become a general method whereby the ego (in Freud's last revision of his theoretical system) protected itself from demands by the id and/ or the superego.

Once Freud started out on the path of energy buildup and discharge, of cathexis and counter-cathexis, he was trapped in his own Helmoltzian quagmire. As Webster (1995) shows with majestic prose and wide erudition, Freud's attempt to surmount religion was actually an unrecognized and thus covert expression of his Judeo-Christian ethos. The Judeo-Christian split of good and evil, of fallen and saved mankind, was recast in the form of the evil id and the struggle to surmount the inherently untamed and fallen id by the rational ego whose job it was to resolve the conflict between the devil in the id and God in the superego. God, the father, became god the male parent whose praise and love we sought by taming our fallen base nature in identification with our father god.

There is another answer to the human condition. But not just another answer; more an answer that recognizes the immense and arguably beautiful complexity of human behavior. One that, while recognizing the presence of defense mechanisms (I'll rename them shortly) also recognizes that we are neither fallen nor risen up but that we, each of us in our own time and way, does the best he can to cope with the life he finds presented to him by evolution, by his unique genetics, by his culture, and by the happenstance of his life.

Footnote 82. It is widely noted that Freud developed his concept of energy movement and blocking from the physicist, Herman von Helmholtz. The concept of energy employed by Freud and accepted by Reich was modeled on the way that water flows. That is the water has a certain energy, direction, and obstruction.

The term "defense mechanism" is hallowed by age and use. It has now a history of over 200 years. Yet, I submit, still it should be abandoned since it carries with it the baggage of Charcot's manifest errors and Freud's elaboration on those errors. It carries with it the idea of unmeasurable and unobservable energies that are subject to laws of movement and stagnation, of push and counter-push, of flow and blockage, of build up and release; all the while subjugating humans to be but little more than passive objects of these energies which we can, at best and often unsuccessfully, attempt to channel in constructive ways.

I suggest in the place of defense mechanisms, the phrase: "coping mechanisms." As humans we have potentialities and limitations, we find ourself as babies, toddlers, youngsters, teenagers and adults in an ever-changing environment presenting new and unlearned challenges with which we cope, with greater or lesser success. We, each of us, do our best to find a path through the labyrinth of life that leads to other than another dead end. Through all the challenges, we have but one constant companion, we have but one companion that gives us some surcease from the challenge that the events of each day present: our magnificent mind, our ability to think, conceptualize, analyze, learn and understand, view with awe, with amazement, with pleasure, and, often and unfortunately by our nature, with failure. We seek, each in his own way and to the best of our ability at any given time, in success and failure, in health and in sickness, in celebration and dejection, to puzzle out a way to cope with what life has thrown at us.

Footnote 83. Freud was very heavily influenced by the French physician, Jean-Martin Charcot. For a discussion see: (Ellenberger, 1970; (Macmillan, 1997; Sulloway, 1979).

But for all the wondrous scope of our minds, our ability to look back 13.7 billion years to the beginning of time and see how time and evolutionary adaptation have brought us to this pinnacle, still that mind is burdened with the remnants of that heritage. Evolution does not discard, it modifies. So we find a frontal brain that can lay plans for a lifetime and a primitive amygdala (to pick just one of the many residues of evolution) that engenders inappropriate and unnecessary fears. The point is, humans are a magnificent mess. One of us can create a statue of David while another can create a Koran that proclaims hatred and death. One of us can secrete himself for years in an attic to solve Fermat's Last Theorem (math problem) while another figures out how to kill and maim as many as possible with a personal bomb.

Freud's postulation of an id, an ego, and a superego is not a bad metaphor. If the structures as such do not exist, their function does in the form of many structures communicating over 100 billion neurons and synapses; and from that melange comes our greatness and our pathology.

The psychology of coping provides a way to not just discover — something that would in any case be a first step in the process in that for good thinking facts must proceed theory — but actually to logically derive the coping (nee: defense) mechanisms. I will not take you through the whole process here for that would be more tedium than enlightenment; but I will deal with just one to display the process.

The human mind, by its nature, seeks coherency. As one neuroscientist put it "Humans are pattern-seeking animals."

Where explanation is lacking, an explanation will be supplied. It is that brute fact that accounts for the fact that in every culture ever studied we find religion. If I find rain and lack of rain, I will invent a rain god that prevents or brings on the rain. If I find death, I will invent a spirit or soul that does not die. If I find people whose behavior is inexplicable, I will invent daemons that have invaded the person and are causing the strange behavior.

As a child you are presented with a multitude of incompatible concepts and told that all these incompatible concepts are true.

When you are very young, you just accept because your mind is not yet sufficiently developed (that is, matured) for you to clearly recognize that the ideas are incompatible. But by the age of between seven and ten (7, 8, 9) you do start to recognize logical incompatibility.

For discussion purposes, we will label two concepts as are A and B. You are told by the all-knowing adults that both are true. But you have reached the age where you recognize that both can't be true. They are incompatible. The mind goes to work to solve the conundrum.

Now A and B can not, in logic, both be true at the same time. How can that child cope with the contradiction? One way is to dismiss (deny) either A or B. We have the coping mechanism of denial. Another way is to say that A is true for me but B is true for you. We have the coping mechanism of projection.

In this way, and adding a bit of learning theory, all the coping mechanisms can be derived from logic and the simple proposition that the human mind is cognitive. We have no need of unobservable energies, of cathexis and counter-cathexis, of energy build-up and build-down; no need of all the definitionally and logically sloppy paraphernalia of Freud or Jung or Reich or Lowen. Human beings make sense and, in the process, we can retain our all too human admiration for the adaptability and the inventiveness of this crazy animal, the human (Kagan, 2006).