Wilhelm Reich was the first psychoanalyst to confront patients, observing facial expressions and body language - as expressions of character resistance.

He confronted them with their unconscious emotional expression and brought out repressed anger, crying, disgust, etc. Within this resistance analysis, Reich also broke with the taboo of psychoanalysis that patients should not be touched, because when certain muscle parts are gently massaged or pressed, repressed impulses can be released, e.g. when crying literally "gets stuck in the throat".

The release of these muscular blockages is also accompanied by the release of emotional and mental restrictions. The toddler builds up these blocks to cope with psychological and physical trauma. The muscular blocks are involuntary chronic spasms that constrict the entire body in a ring-like fashion in segments. An organism "armoured" in this way must therefore - in order to maintain the spasms - constantly perform work, actual displacement work. Reich speaks of "character armour". The muscle spasms consume energy which is no longer available to the organism and this weakens it in every respect - the cause of psychological and somatic damage.

The aim of Reich's vegetotherapy (or psychiatric orgone therapy) is to release the blockages and secure healthy (genital) character structures by allowing the body's energy to flow unhindered through the entire muscular system.

Reich initially regarded character neuroses as individual disorders that could be treated therapeutically. Or to put it another way, he believed that people could be energetically healthy through therapeutic methods, or as he called it: "uncover the genital core of character". Later, he realised that neurosis is an epidemic disease, a plague that has afflicted all of humanity for millennia. Largely healthy people with stable genital character elements are rather rare coincidences. His goal in the long run was to rid humanity of the plague of mass neuroses.

In about 1950 he completely abandoned the concept of individual therapy because he realised that it was virtually impossible to make neurotically hardened adults healthy and he himself withdrew completely from individual therapy. In 1952, in an interview for the Freud Archive, he said that individual therapy was useless, that it was only of great use to make money and give some help to some patients. But his goal of defeating neurosis on the social level had failed. That is why he stopped training therapists.

One of Wilhelm Reich's outstanding qualities was his willingness to see and name undesirable developments and to take new and different paths for all the world to see. From 1950 onwards, he saw the only possible way out of the mass disease of neurosis as the "children of the future", the option of letting a generation of children grow up healthy so that they themselves will find ways out of the catastrophe. Humanity has been trapped in this for millennia, it was seen as "original sin", as "karma" etc., i.e. as natural or God-given. But the path of the "children of the future" has also proved impossible to implement, because neurotically damaged adults cannot raise people of sound character. It seems to be a task that could only be solved in centuries or millennia.

Unfortunately, these statements by Reich and his clear rejection of any psychiatric therapy have been completely ignored by Reichian therapists for obvious reasons.