Reichian Body Armour — Seven Segments
Reichian Body Armour — Seven Segments is a Modern Western Somatic Psychology — Reichian character analysis / Bioenergetics body system as transmitted through the lineage Wilhelm Reich's character-analytic account links chronic muscular holding with defensive character formation and describes a sequence of armour segments across the head, throat, trunk, and pelvis. Alexander Lowen's Bioenergetics develops this clinical reading through posture, breathing, affect, and muscular tension, while David Boadella provides a modern biographical synthesis of Reich's evolving body-psychotherapy work. This system is a clinical phenomenology map, not an esoteric anatomy or a medical diagnostic chart.. This page lists every point in the system with sourced placements and links to cross-tradition correspondences curated for The Body Spiritual.
Open in interactive explorerPrimary sources
- Wilhelm Reich, Character Analysis (3rd enlarged edition, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1972 (original German 1933)) — Primary Reichian account of character armour, muscular armour, affect blocking, and segmental bodily holding.
- Alexander Lowen, Bioenergetics (Grune & Stratton, 1975) — Bioenergetic development of Reichian body psychotherapy through posture, breathing, muscular tension, and affective expression.
- David Boadella, Wilhelm Reich: The Evolution of His Work (Vision Press, 1973) — Biographical and scholarly synthesis of Reich's clinical development and body-psychotherapy lineage.
Known lineage variants
- Reich's segmental armour language and later Bioenergetic teaching overlap but are not identical clinical taxonomies; this map uses the commonly taught seven labels ocular, oral, cervical, thoracic, diaphragmatic, abdominal, and pelvic as a comparative synthesis rather than claiming one fixed canonical diagram.
- The horizontal bands are editorial front-view projections in normalized 0..1 coordinates. Reich and Lowen describe bodily holding and functional regions, not these exact SVG boundaries; anatomical-right is therefore not relevant to the midline bands, and broad boundaries preserve uncertainty.
- Descriptions use clinical phenomenology: blocking crying or seeing, unmet feeding needs, suppressed vocal affect, held breath, affect control, fear/fight bracing, and inhibited sexual excitation. These are interpretive characterological functions, not claims that emotion is stored in a discrete tissue or that the map replaces assessment.
Related systems
No other systems share this tradition label.