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Character, i.e. those features of the personality which are more or less permanent and 'characteristic' of it, is usually attributed to the ego. But in fact it is the result not only of the ego's specific ways of dealing with internal and external stimuli but also of the specific nature and quantity of the demands made on the ego by the id. It is also modified by the specific demands and prohibitions of the super-ego. Hence 'one might define character as the sum total of specific reactions of the individual, determined by the three provinces of the mind according to their inherited and acquired dynamics'. Particularly when character is considered in relation to resistance is it important to be aware of this threefold origin and to avoid the tendency to restrict the concept to the province of the ego—a tendency we owe to Reich, to whom character and resistance were identical and who conceived of both as simply expressions of ego-defence.
Freud in The Problem of Anxiety classified resistances into five groups. It is clear that four of these groups, the three types of ego-resistance and resistance from the super-ego, are closely connected with character. In the case of the fifth, resistance of the id, which is essentially a matter of the 'viscosity' of the libido, the reluctance of the instincts to develop has a definite effect on character, as is shown by the example of psychological infantilism.
Although clinical experience shows that certain character types frequently display certain types of resistance, this fact has little value in intensive therapy. 'Psycho-analytic therapy is extremely individualistic and the single patient approaches patterns and types only very superficially.' Since we are far from possessing a unified psycho-analytical characterology, the connection between the concepts of character and resistance should be kept as loose as possible.