Everybody
OLIVIA LAING
Everybody
A Book About Freedom
For Rebecca and PJ,
with love and gratitude
‘I don’t want a body anymore. Fuck the body.’
Ryan Trecartin, Sibling Topics
‘In my life politics don’t disappear but take place in my body.’
Kathy Acker, Blood and Guts in High School
‘May we not say there is probably some sort of Transmutation of essences continually effected and effectible in the human frame?’
Edward Carpenter, Love’s Coming of Age
‘My life held precariously in the seeing/hands of others’
Frank O’Hara, ‘Poem’
Contents
1 The Liberation Machine
2 Unwell
3 Sex Acts
4 In Harm’s Way
5 A Radiant Net
6 Cells
7 Block/Swarm
8 22nd Century
Notes
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
This is a book about bodies in peril and bodies as a force for change. I started it during the refugee crisis of 2015, and finished it just as the first cases of Covid-19 were being reported. The new plague has revealed the frightening extent of our physical vulnerability, but the global Black Lives Matter uprisings of the past year prove that the long struggle for freedom isn’t over yet.
1
The Liberation Machine
IN THE FINAL YEAR of the twentieth century, I saw an advert in a herbal pharmacy in Brighton. It was pink, with a hand-drawn border of looping hearts, and it made the bold claim that all symptoms, from headaches and colds to anger and depression, were caused by stuck energy from past traumas, which could be loosened and induced to move again by way of body psychotherapy. I knew this was a controversial statement, to say the least, but the idea of the body as a storage unit for emotional distress excited me. I’d had a strong sense since childhood that I was holding something, that I’d locked myself around a mysterious unhappiness, the precise cause of which I didn’t understand. I was so rigid and stiff I flinched when anyone touched me, like a mousetrap going off. Something was stuck and I wanted, nervously, to work it free.
The therapist, Anna, practised in a small, soupy room at the top of her house. There was a professional-looking massage bed in the corner, but the overwhelming impression was of slightly grimy domesticity. Frilly cushions proliferated. My chair faced a bookcase crammed with charity-shop dolls and toys, awaiting their casting into Gestalt pantomimes. Sometimes Anna would take a grinning monkey and clutch it to her chest, talking about herself in the third person, in a high-pitched, lisping voice. I didn’t want to play along, to pretend an empty chair contained a family member or to wallop a cushion with a baseball bat. I was too self-conscious, painfully alert to my own ridiculousness, and even though I found Anna’s antics mortifying I was aware she was inhabiting a kind of freedom to which I did not have access.
Whenever I could, I’d suggest we ditch talking in favour of a massage. I didn’t have to undress completely. Anna would don a stethoscope and lightly work at odd places on my body, not kneading but seeming instead to directly command muscles to unclench. Periodically she’d lean over and listen, the bell of her stethoscope pressed against my stomach. More often than not, I experienced a sense of energy streaming through my body, moving through my abdomen and down my legs, where it tingled like jellyfish tentacles. It was a nice feeling, not sexual exactly, but as if an obstinate blockage had been dislodged. I never talked about it and she never asked, but it was part of why I kept coming back: to experience this newly lively, quivering body.
I was twenty-two when I began seeing Anna, and the body was at the centre of my interests. When bodies are discussed, especially in popular culture, it has often meant a very circumscribed set of themes, largely to do with what the body looks like or how to maintain it at a pinnacle of health. The body as a set of surfaces, of more or less pleasing aspect. The perfect, unattainable body, so smooth and gleaming it is practically alien. What to feed it, how to groom it, the multiple dismaying ways in which it might fail to fit in or measure up. But the element of the body that interested me was the experience of living inside it, inhabiting a vehicle that was so cataclysmically vulnerable, so unreliably subject to pleasure and pain, hatred and desire.
I’d grown up in a gay family in the 1980s, under the malign rule of Section 28, a homophobic law that forbade schools from teaching ‘the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship’. To know that this was how the state regarded your own family was to receive a powerful education in how bodies are positioned in a hierarchy of value, their freedoms privileged or curtailed according to more or less inescapable attributes, from skin colour to sexuality. Each time I went to therapy I could feel the legacy of that period in my own body, as knots of shame and fear and rage that were difficult to express, let alone dissolve.
But if my childhood taught me about the body as an object whose freedom is limited by the world, it also gave me a sense of the body as a force for freedom in its own right. I went to my first Gay Pride at nine, and the feeling of all those marching bodies on Westminster Bridge lodged inside me too, a somatic sensation unlike anything I’d previously experienced. It seemed obvious to me that bodies on the streets were how you changed the world. As a teenager terrified by the oncoming apocalypse of climate change, I started attending protests, becoming so immersed in the environmental direct action movement that I dropped out of university in favour of a treehouse in a Dorset woodland scheduled to be destroyed for a new road.
I loved living in the woods, but using my own body as a tool of resistance was gruelling as well as intoxicating. The laws kept changing. Policing had become more aggressive and several people I knew were facing long prison sentences for the new crime of aggravated trespass. Freedom came at a cost, and it seemed that the cost was bodily too, the loss of physical liberty an omnipresent threat. Like many activists, I burned out. In the summer of 1998, I sat down in a graveyard in Penzance and filled out an application for a degree in herbal medicine. By the time I started seeing Anna, I was in my second year of training.
Though I didn’t know it at the time, the type of therapy she practised had been invented in the 1920s by Wilhelm Reich, one of the strangest and most prescient thinkers of the twentieth century, a man who dedicated his life to understanding the vexed relationship between bodies and freedom. Reich was for a time Freud’s most brilliant protégé (der beste Kopfe, the best mind, in psychoanalysis). As a young analyst in Vienna in the wake of the First World War, he began to suspect his patients were carrying their past experiences around in their bodies, storing their emotional pain as a kind of tension he compared to armour. Over the next decade, he developed a revolutionary new system of body-based psychotherapy, drawing attention to the characteristic ways each patient held themselves. ‘He listened, observed, then touched, prodded and probed,’ his son Peter later recalled, ‘following an uncanny instinct for where on one’s body the memories, the hatred, the fear, were frozen.’ To Reich’s surprise, this emotional release was often accompanied by a pleasurable rippling feeling he called streaming; the same unmistakable sensation I’d experienced on Anna’s couch.
Many of the patients Reich saw in Vienna were working class. Listening to their stories, he came to realise that the problems he was seeing, the psychic disarray, weren’t just a consequence of childhood experience but of social factors like poverty, poor housing, domestic violence and unemployment. Each individual was plainly subject to larger forces, which could cause just as much trouble as Freud’s central site of interest, the crucible of the family. Never one to shirk almighty ventures, Reich spent the interwar years
trying to fuse two major systems for diagnosing and treating human unhappiness, wrestling the work of Freud and Marx into productive dialogue, much to the discomfort of the followers of each.
Sex had always been central to his notion of freedom and in 1930 he moved to Berlin, a city on the brink, caught between two disasters, where out of the wreckage of war there arose a great flowering of new ideas about sexuality. Reich believed freeing sex from centuries of repression and shame would change the world, but his activities in Berlin came to an abrupt halt when Hitler seized power in the spring of 1933. In exile in Denmark that autumn, he wrote The Mass Psychology of Fascism, a gripping analysis of how Hitler utilised unconscious sexual anxieties, including the fear of infection and contamination, to whip up anti-Semitic feeling.
The first book of Reich’s I read was People in Trouble, an account of his political experiences in Vienna and Berlin. I found a copy in the old Sunday market that flourished in the 1990s in the car park of Brighton station, picking it up because the title was the same as a novel I loved. Although it was written in the 1950s, it chimed with my memories of becoming involved in activism, the excitements and frustrations of trying to agitate for political change. Reich was not a beautiful writer, like Freud, and nor were his arguments so disciplined or composed. He often sounded boastful, even paranoid, but there was an urgency that tugged me in. It was as if he was writing from the battleground, hunched over his notebook, sketching out high-stakes possibilities for enlarging the freedoms of real people’s lives.
His ideas seemed so relevant to my own times that I couldn’t understand why I hadn’t heard about him, either in protest circles or during my training. It wasn’t until much later that I realised the reason he isn’t more respected or discussed is that the excesses of the second half of his life have overwhelmed the first. The radical, incisive ideas about sex and politics that he developed in Europe before the war have been almost buried beneath the far more dismaying notions developed in his years of exile, which range from pseudo-scientific theories of disease to a space-gun that controls the weather.
When Reich emigrated to America in 1939, he didn’t establish himself as a psychoanalyst or an activist, but as a scientist, albeit one proudly uninterested in the process of peer review, the testing ground of all scientific achievement. Shortly after his arrival, he claimed to have discovered the universal energy that animates all life. He called it orgone, and in the laboratory of his house in New York he developed a machine to harness its healing powers. Given the consequences it would have for its maker, it’s ironic that Reich’s universal healing device was a wooden cell slightly smaller than a standard phone booth, in which you sat in stately self-confinement.
Reich believed the orgone accumulator could automate the work of liberation, obviating the need for laborious person-to-person therapy. He also hoped it might cure disease, particularly cancer. This latter claim triggered an exposé, which in turn drew him to the attention of the Food and Drug Administration, initiating an investigation into the medical efficacy of the orgone accumulator that lasted almost a decade. On 7 May 1956, Reich was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment for refusing to stop selling his invention. The following spring he was sent to Lewisburg Penitentiary in Pennsylvania.
The orgone guy: that was Reich! I hadn’t put the two things together. As a teenager I was besotted with William Burroughs, and as a young man Burroughs was obsessed with Reich. His letters from the 1940s and 1950s are riddled with references to Reich and his orgone boxes. The flickering blue glow of orgone energy, the ‘vibrating soundless hum of deep forest and orgone accumulators’ form the pervasive atmosphere of his books, contributing to their apocalyptic chill, ‘the message of orgasm received and transmitted’. Like many counter-cultural figures, Burroughs built his own orgone accumulators. In fact, the first time I ever saw one was when Kurt Cobain tried out Burroughs’s rusty garden accumulator in Kansas in 1993. He was photographed waving through a porthole in the door: a melancholy, earthbound astronaut, frozen in time six months before his suicide. Every time I saw that photograph, it seemed retroactively to condemn Reich as a hopeless fraud.
*
It wasn’t until the despairing year of 2016 that I returned to Reich. Over the previous few years, the body had become a battlefield once again. Two issues in particular had come to a head: the refugee crisis and the Black Lives Matter movement. Refugees travelled to Europe in leaking boats from regions that had been graphically destroyed, and other people expressed the belief that they were scroungers and crooks, followed by the hope that they would drown. Those who did make it across the Mediterranean were penned in camps from which they would potentially never escape. The presence of these desperate bodies was utilised by the far-right to gain power in Europe, while in Britain they were deployed in the xenophobic scaremongering of the Brexit campaign.
Meanwhile in America, the Black Lives Matter movement had emerged in 2013 in response to the acquittal of the murderer of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black teenager killed by a white man. Over the next few years, Black Lives Matter protested the ongoing murder of African-American men, women and children by the police: killed for selling cigarettes, for playing with a toy gun, while reaching for a driving licence, while asleep at home in bed. The demonstrations that took place in Ferguson, Los Angeles, New York, Oakland, Baltimore and across the nation seemed as if they must bring change, but on 8 November 2016 enough people voted for Donald Trump, a barely disguised white supremacist, that he became the 45th President of America.
The old bad news of bodily difference was everywhere again. Words and phrases that would have been unthinkable a decade earlier were articulated by newspapers and politicians in countries that had only recently seemed bastions of liberal democracy. The right to abortion was rolled back or rescinded altogether in several American states, even as it was secured in Ireland. In Chechnya, gay men were put in concentration camps, in what was euphemistically described as a ‘prophylactic sweep’. The right to love, to migrate, to gather in protest, to reproduce or to refuse reproduction were becoming almost as viciously contested as they’d been in Reich’s own time.
It was beginning to seem as if the great liberation movements of the twentieth century were failing, the victories of feminism, gay liberation and the civil-rights movement overturned one by one, assuming they’d ever been secured at all. I’d grown up embedded in some of those struggles, but it had never occurred to me that their painful, inching progress could be so rapidly reversed. What they all shared was a desire to turn the body from an object of stigma and shame into a source of solidarity and strength, capable of demanding and achieving change.
This had always been Reich’s subject and as my own era grew more troubled I was haunted by the sense that there was something vital untapped in his work. His ideas felt like time-capsules, half buried in history and still humming with life. I wanted to unearth them, to trace their legacy in the flickering light of the twenty-first century. What Reich wanted to understand was the body itself: why it’s so difficult to inhabit, why you might want to escape or subdue it, why it remains a naked source of power, even now. These were questions that burned away at me too, informing many different phases of my life.
The pseudoscience of his orgone theory appalled me, but I was beginning to wonder whether there wasn’t something to be learned from his downfall, too. Throughout his career he’d struggled for bodily emancipation, and yet he ended up in a prison cell, unmoored by paranoia, an end not uncommon to people involved in freedom movements. I felt as if his troubled life formed a pattern that was in itself illuminating. Why had his work gone so catastrophically astray, and what did it tell us about the larger struggles in which he’d played such a dynamic, ardent role? His failures felt just as important to understand in this new moment of crisis as his more obviously fertile ideas.
It turned out Reich’s influence was far more substantial than I’d realised back in the 1990s. It was him who’d coined the terms ‘sexu
al politics’ and ‘the sexual revolution’, though what he’d hoped for was closer to the overthrow of patriarchal capitalism than the Pill-abetted free love of the 1960s. According to Andrea Dworkin, one of the many feminists who drew on his work, he was ‘that most optimistic of sexual liberationists, the only male one to abhor rape really.’ James Baldwin had been reading Reich, as had Susan Sontag. He even had an afterlife in pop culture. Kate Bush’s song ‘Cloudbusting’ immortalises his long legal battle over the orgone accumulator, its insistent, hiccupping refrain – ‘I just know that something good is going to happen’ – conveying the compelling utopian atmosphere of his ideas.
Though I was fascinated by his life, which is charted in a brilliant, troubling biography, Adventures in the Orgasmatron by Christopher Turner, what I found most exciting about Reich was the way he functioned as a connector, drawing together many different aspects of the body, from illness to sex, protest to prisons. It was these resonant regions I wanted to explore, and so I took him as a guide, charting a course right through the twentieth century, in order to understand the forces that still shape and limit bodily freedom now. Along the way I encountered many other thinkers, activists and artists, some of whom drew directly on his work and some who arrived in the same places by very different routes.
Reich led me first to illness, the experience that makes us most forcibly aware of our bodily nature, the ways in which we are both permeable and mortal, a revelation that the Covid-19 outbreak would soon forcibly bring home across the world. One of Reich’s more controversial theories is that illness is meaningful. This was Sontag’s criticism of him in Illness as Metaphor, and yet the more I discovered about her own experience of breast cancer, the more it seemed that the reality of illness in our lives is far more personal and complicated than she might have been willing to admit in print. As she put it in her hospital diary: ‘My body is talking louder, more plainly than I ever could.’