What strikes us is the same disregard for feasibility which pervades the entire drive for actualization. Other demands on self may not be fantastic in themselves yet show a complete disregard for the conditions under which they could be fulfilled. The inner dictates operate with a supreme disregard for the person's own psychic condition. The more a person lives in imagination, the more likely it is that he will simply spirit away difficulty. Thus the inner dictates do not aim at real change. They aim at making the imperfection disappear, or at making it appear as if the particular perfection were attained. This becomes especially clear if the inner demands are externalized. Then what a person actually is, and even what he suffers, becomes irrelevant. Only what is visible to others creates intense worries. The shoulds lack the moral seriousness of genuine ideals.

There is one further quality of the shoulds that distinguishes them from genuine standards. That is their coercive character. Ideals have an obligating power over our lives. This means violent emotional reactions to nonfulfillment, reactions which traverse the whole range of anxiety, despair, self-condemnation, and self-destructive impulses. Reactions of anxiety often escape attention because the customary defenses against anxiety are set going instantaneously.

But there are great individual differences in the attitudes toward this tyranny and the ways of experiencing it.

They range between the opposite poles of compliance and rebellion. The expansive type tends to identify himself with his inner dictates and to be proud of his standards. His arrogance may be so great that he does not even consider the possibility of failure, and discards it if it occurs. The self-effacing type, for whom love seems to solve all problems, likewise feels that his shoulds constitute a law not to be questioned. But when trying to measure up to them, he feels most of the time that he falls pitiably short of fulfilling them. The resigned type to whom the idea of "freedom" appeals more than anything else, is, of the three, most prone to rebel against his inner tyranny. Because of the very importance which freedom has for him, he is hypersensitive to any coercion.

Sometimes a person who usually complies with the shoulds may go through a phase of rebellion. It is usually then directed against external restrictions. Finally, others may go through alternating phases of self-castigating "goodness" and a wild protest against any standards. Whatever the prevailing attitude, a great deal of the process is always externalized. Roughly, a person may primarily impose his standards upon others and make relentless demands as to their perfection. The more he feels himself to be the measure of all things, the more he insists upon his particular norms being measured up to. The failure of others to do so arouses his contempt or anger. Again he may primarily experience his expectations of himself as coming from others. And, whether these others actually do expect something or whether he merely thinks they do, their expectations then turn into demands to be fulfilled. He may try to anticipate or guess at their expectations in which case he usually also anticipates that they would condemn him or drop him at a moment's notice if he fails. Or, if he is hypersensitive to coercion, he feels that they are imposing upon him, meddling in his affairs, pushing him or coercing him. Or, if his rebellion is more aggressive, he will flaunt his defiance and believe that he does not in the least care what they think of him. The most general disturbance on this score is hypersensitivity to criticism. Otherwise the kinds of disturbance in human relations depend upon the kind of prevailing externalization. They may render him too critical and harsh of others or too apprehensive, too defiant, or too compliant. Most important of all, the shoulds further impair the spontaneity of feelings, wishes, thoughts, and beliefs, that is the ability to feel his own feelings, etc., and to express them.

We are accustomed to think that we cannot control feelings but only behavior. But if the shoulds issue an order as to feelings, imagination waves its magic wand and the border line between what we should feel and what we do feel evaporates. We consciously believe or feel then as we should believe or feel. The creation of make-believe feelings is most striking in those whose idealized image lies in the direction of goodness. Love readily makes way for indifference, or for resentment and contempt, when pride or vanity is hurt. An irruptive anger often is the only feeling that is really fair. At the other extreme, feelings of callousness and ruthlessness can also be exaggerated. The taboos on feelings of tenderness, sympathy, and confidence can be just as great in some neurotics as the taboos on hostility and vindictiveness are in others. Their emotional life then is less distorted than plainly impoverished.

What Horney has done here is address the issue of the ego ideal, but in a form much expanded from Freud's conceptualization.

Freud saw the ego ideal as only the internalization (culminating during the oedipal situation) of the parent (or, to use his wonderful terms, the internalization of "the beloved enemy"). Horney has expanded that to consider the full range of ideals derived from the family culture and the general wider culture. In fact, recent research, summarized in Pinker (2002), indicates that the peer group has more influence on the final outcome of the person than do the parents.

What I would like you to take away from this discussion of Freud's formulation and both Bergler's and Horney's amplification is the pervasive (and corrosive) nature of the superego and the ego ideal. There is no single more important issue in all of therapy than is the issue of, as I call it, defusing the superego. More than any putative repression or armoring or lack of grounding or other such neologism, it is the destruction wrought by the imperious demands of the superego and the ego ideal that constitute the major impediment to an enjoyable and self-directed life.

D. Character

1. Introduction

I have cast this whole book in terms of the issue of character. In doing so I have done with Reich what he did with Freud. Reich thought the early Freud was correct and Freud's later repudiation and emendation of his prior theories was a mistake. I think Reich's original formulation of his body work technique in terms of character ("character armor") was correct and his later revision in terms or either orgone or emotion (either or both, take your pick) was incorrect.

Footnote 53. Internalization is the general process of which there are three components listed in the coping mechanism table: introjection, incorporation, identification.

While I defined character in Chapter one and provided the story of Betty (page 6), the subject, as the major focus of this book and the reason d'etre for the body work, deserves elaboration. This is especially true in this chapter where I will be supplying you with techniques to explore the derivative effects of character and, if consciously applied, cleanse yourself of these derivative.

2. On The Definition Of Character

I would start with quoting what I wrote in Chapter one: "Character is the basic statement a person makes (unrecognized) about himself, the world and the relationship between the two."

But before I get into a discussion of character, it is important that I differentiate between several concepts: (1) character disorder versus neurosis, (2) ego-syntonic versus ego-dystonic, and (3) Freud's concept of character as opposed to the concept used here.

Footnote 54. The term used by Reich, character neurosis, is outdated and is no longer used. It was an acceptable terminology in 1933 when Reich wrote Character Analysis, but the compound term of character with neurosis is no longer used.

Footnote 55. Current fashionable terminology is to replace the term 'character disorder' with the term 'personality disorder' and to drop the term neurosis while retaining the distinction between a character disorder and a neurosis. Thus, for example, the contemporary diagnostic manual (DSM-IV-TR) lists "obsessive-compulsive disorder" separately from 'obsessive-compulsive personality disorder.'

a. Character disorder versus neurosis

Originally, in the literature of Freud's time, there was a distinction drawn between character neurosis and symptom neurosis. Character, as we will discuss below in looking at Freud's view of character, was considered to be a result of the operation of certain defenses. When those defenses failed to deal appropriately with the intrapsychic conflict (for which purpose they were employed) then symptoms emerged in the form of a neurosis. Thus the character was viewed as asymptomatic and the neurosis was viewed as symptomatic.

That distinction is still valid and, as noted in footnote 55, is still employed in current diagnostic manuals (though not with those names). That a character disorder is differentiated from a neurosis by the absence or presence of symptoms does not mean that both can not be present in the same individual. To the contrary, the presence of a (symptom) neurosis almost requires that the like character disorder lies beneath it. Thus being presented with an obsessive-compulsive neurosis, one makes the working assumption that there is also an obsessive-compulsive character disorder.

However, to treat (or work on) a neurosis is not to treat the character disorder. The treatment of the two is different as is the objective of the treatment. One expects, and usually finds, that when one has corrected a character disorder that the related neurosis lessens or disappears; but that expectation is not guaranteed.

The reason it is not guaranteed is due to another concept: the concept of "functionally autonomous." It would take us astray to discuss that here, so just keep it in mind for our later discussion.

Just to ground this distinction in history, here is what Freud wrote about the distinction between character and neurosis:

"In the field of development of character we are bound to meet with the same instinctual forces which we have found at work in the neuroses. But a sharp theoretical distinction between the two is necessitated by the single fact that the failure of repression and the return of the repressed—which are peculiar to the mechanism of neuroses—are absent in the formation of character. In the latter, repression either does not come into action or smoothly achieves its aim of replacing the repressed by reaction formations and sublimations. Hence, the processes of the formation of character are more obscure and less accessible to analysis than neurotic ones. (Freud 1913/1958, p. 323)"

b. Ego-syntonic versus ego-dystonic

Character is who you are as a person, it is your natural way of operating in the world. As such, you, in general, do not recognize that you are the way you are. It is simply you. You are probably aware of traits like friendly or shy, like neat or messy, like adventurous or cautious; you might even not like some of those traits and wish you were different; but most of what you are as a person are so 'just you' that you are not even aware of them.

As an example, I am mess y. I know it, but I also am comfortable with it. I keep a messy desk, I keep a messy home. But it is just more work, more time, to be neat then it is worth to me. So I accept that I am messy. My messiness is ego-syntonic. But, then, so are all my other traits, the ones I am not even aware of. They are all ego-syntonic, they do not disturb my ego's equilibrium.

Ego-dystonic, by contrast, are traits that a person wishes he did not have. Traits that he is, as it were, forced to do but that he knows get in the way of his life. He wants to correct them, get rid of them, but he can't. They are ego-dystonic.

So ego-syntonic are character traits, whether known or (mostly) unknown, with which you are comfortable, that are just you. Ego-dystonic are traits or behaviors or conditions with which you are uncomfortable but can't stop. Put another way, ego-syntonic is character, ego-dystonic is neurosis.