to give some context to my next post:
reich took up freud's earliest and most revolutionary formulations (for instance, his 1898 formulation of the sex-aetiological basis of hysteria) and criticized freud's later formulations, which he saw as reactionary (these formulations would include ideas put forth in f's later works like _beyond the pleasure principle_; _inhibitions, symptoms, anxiety_; _civilization and its discontents_, and so on) insofar as they merely constituted and continued a pattern wherein the psycho-analytic movement could misrecognize the real or actual source of neurosis and hysteria (viz., sexual energy stasis) with the express intent of securing the psycho-analytic movement's rapid popularization and bourgeois significance.
keep in mind that it was around the time that freud began positing things like an inexhaustible death drive that other world-historical events began taking shape ww1had ended and ww2 was looming; hitler was lurched into power in that very country soon thereafter, riding a wave of massive public support; the new deal took shape on this side of the atlantic; the military-industrial complex was just coming into being and a new modus operandi for world-economic flows (together with its juridico-moral rationalizations and legal codes) was beginning to come manifest; edward bernays (a nephew of freud) was peddling his ideas to american corporations and transforming the public relations industry and our very notion of individuality and the person-- bernays himself working to set in motion the “society of the spectacle” which debord will critique back across the atlantic some 30 yrs later, etc.
so again, reich saw the revolutionary importance of freud's early work. . . if it were the case that hysterias, neuroses, and psychoses were results of (or like phenomenologically parallel to) actual disturbances of flows of energy within the organism, then there is a prospect for dissolving hysterias. neuroses, and psychoses IFF the organism's blockages and dammings-up of flows of energy (themselves) can be dissolved-- unhealthy people can become healthy if the actual material-historical bases of their illnesses and disturbances/detours are taken into account, and if their reactionary formations to said bases are taken into account, in the therapeutic process itself. in order to effect the dissolution of these dammings-up of flows in his patients, reich developed bodily (somatic) techniques to free up the bound energy in his patients (this in contradistinction to the freudian method of talking and listening to-- in different and privileged states of elevation from-- the patient).
this basic conviction (that neuroses and bound-energies and that which makes an organism have “character” can be dissolved if actual material and historical circumstances are taken into account) lead reich to a number of biophysical discoveries (this around the same time as the manhattan project was nearing completion) which i don't have the means to reproduce/disconfirm, and which the federal government literally legally banned other clinical scientists from attempting to reproduce or disconfirm as it jailed reich in 1956. (tptw had rather funded what they'd hoped to be a science of mind-control in ewen cameron's horrifying electrode experiments than a science which purports to understand the mechanisms of biogenesis).
this is from the preface to the third edition of _character analysis_, which i linked in the op:
The character-analytic technique was clinically worked out and tested between 1925 and 1933. At that time, [that is, during the development of the character-analytic technique, my idea of] sex-economy was still in its infancy. The individual and social importance of the function of the orgasm had been recognized only a few years earlier
the function of the orgasm is the title of one of reich's other books. in it, he lays bare the historical development of his idea of “sex-economy”-- the “sex-”economic laws regulating flows and interruptions of flows of sexual energy in the organism.
reich's early idea of character (laid out in the piece the author quotes) morphed into that of character-armor when he discovered certain predictable biophysical laws and organizations-- for instance that the musculature of the organism literally binds (stocks) and redirects energy (say, away from the sexual zone at inappropriate times/places or with regard to inappropriate objects-- say, after having been properly educated and scolded and shamed for not having redirected that flow in a certain, prescribed way sometime prior). we can elaborate on this point and add that this is what constitutes “muscle-memory”, and (if you follow cultural anthropologists from here,) that muscle-memory itself is what perpetuates community-- in other words, that ritual and myth only function in tandem with the wave-like movement of the social body, of the social organization of social-bodies (and cannot function without it). has a society of organically ill people with chronic pains and impasses built for themselves a machinic social-body that runs on gas and sucks the space up in front of it, a high horse-power machine that has minimal relations to and means of being impeded by anything like a natural environment, or has this machinic body built them?
the author of this piece, regrettably, i think, has < 0 interest in these clinical, biophysical observations and predictions made by reich. but that's outside the scope of this thread. instead our author wants to view the reichian concept of “character” through debord's thick lenses.
but so a little more symbolic violence will be necessary on my part to introduce the debordian or situationist framework in a short space and in simple terms. debord is most famous for his film/book _the society of the spectacle_ wherein he identifies the material basis of alienation in the lives of contemporary people under our prevailing system of production (viz., why people are miserable in and within our so-called culture). what our author calls the publicity of misery (viz., what is kept invisible by the spectacle of misery) is the existential despair and material alienation and estrangement from the body of society, this pain that modern man feels in his life, but which he literally cannot see there existing, since all that is visible is that which is kept visible by the spectacle of misery. modern man can only see the moving images involved with the meaningless and mindless-- automatic-- circulation of commodities, in the movement of everything [even the formulations of a hegel, or a marx, what have you] as a commodity. what debord calls the "spectacle" is itself this immense accumulation of images which mediate our relationships-- commodities which commodify our relationships-- and which penetrate our very person so as to prevent us from transgressing one another in a deeply human way, or even feeling anything at all at times even at those increasingly rare moments when humans are forced anymore to interface.
it's this something which makes sense of marx's concept of alienation under prevailing relations of production that i want to lay bare itt.