[Stub]Body-based characterology (Reich, Lowen)

Your body … is your personality. Your personality … is your body. Your childhood … is your adulthood.

Your childhood shapes your body and your life

In this article I’m ignoring for simplicity all matters of genetics and focussing only on childhood developmental stages.

We feel ourselves to be unique individuals, and we look round the world and think no two people are alike. But in fact we fall into archetypal patterns based on childhood developmental stages. It’s really useful for our self-understanding to know which pattern or patterns we belong to.

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Everyone belongs to one or more of these archetypes and every archetype contains both both characteristic hurts and characteristic inner treasures. Since the patterns arise from childhood adversity, they are naturally more associated with the hurts, but the treasures are equally real. Within each pattern there’s a spectrum. At the contracted or hurt end a person mostly feels the characteristic wounds and painful emotions of the pattern. At the healed or trusting end a person mostly feels the characteristic alivenesses and inner treasures of their patterns. We cannot change the patterns we belong to, but we certainly can move from a hurt, contracted version of ourselves into a more fully alive and healed version of ourselves.

Many names for the personality types

The different stages have many names. The Freudians originally called them by the horrible sounding terms Schizoid, Oral, Psychopathic, Masochistic, Rigid-hysterical and Rigid-phallic. These categorically are not the pathological terms we see in the media. We all belong to one or more categories, and they are not pathologies. Many nicer terms exist and here they are, with the ones I’m going to use (due to Ron Kurtz) in bold.

Sensitive-withdrawn (Sensitive-analytical, Away, Schizoid)
Dependent-endearing (Collapsed oral)
Self reliant (Compensated oral)
Charming-manipulative (Seductive psychopath)
Tough-generous (Dominating or overbearing psychopath)
Burdened-enduring (Masochist, holding)
Expressive-clinging (Rigid hysteric)
Industrious-overfocussed (Rigid phallic)

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