Reich's classic work on the development and treatment of human character disorders, first published in 1933. As a young clinician in the 1920s, Wilhelm Reich expanded psychoanalytic resistance into the more inclusive technique of character analysis, in which the sum total of typical character attitudes developed by an individual as a blocking against emotional excitations became the object of treatment. These encrusted attitudes functioned as an "armor," which Reich later found to exist simultaneously in chronic muscular spasms. Thus mind and body came together and character analysis opened the way to a biophysical approach to disease and the prevention of it.

2019 Reprint of 1949 Edition. Full facsimile of the original edition, not reproduced with Optical Recognition software. Originally published in the Annals of the Orgone Institute, Number 2, 1949. In Ether, God and Devil, Reich describes his process of thinking--which he called orgonomic functionalism--and shows how the inner logic of this objective thought technique led him to the discovery of the cosmic orgone energy. According to Reich, "The cosmic orgone energy was discovered as a result of the consistent application of the functional technique of thinking. It was these methodical, rigidly-controlled thought processes that led from one fact to another, weaving--across a span of about twenty-five years--seemingly disparate facts into a unified picture of the function of nature; a picture which is submitted to the verdict of the world as the still unfinished doctrinal framework of Orgonomy." Wilhelm Reich, (from Chapter One of Ether, God and Devil)