Everybody by Olivia Laing review – a book about freedom | Health, mind and body books | The Guardian

This is an expansive book, bold in scope and speculative range, an invitation to ongoing conversation rather than bland assent. In that conversational spirit, I would venture a different view of the dynamic between freedom and control animating the book. Laing’s Reichian take on sexuality as a “wild force”, which every social order seeks to circumscribe and control, might account for why states and institutions keep such vigilant watch over the body, but not why liberation movements so often sabotage or compromise themselves – why, for example, an agitator for sexual reform such as Magnus Hirschfeld, founder in 1919 of Berlin’s Institute for Sexual Research, should also have been an advocate for “welfare eugenics”, including the compulsory sterilisation of the “mentally stupid”.

Reich, in other words, has a theory of suppression, of how the body is kept compliant by external forces; but he lacks its essential Freudian complement, a theory of repression, of the anxiety induced by the strangeness and lawlessness of the body’s drives and the unconscious mechanisms we employ to keep them in check. From my more Freudian perspective, fear belongs as much and as indelibly to us as to the police.

Yet Laing’s Reichian utopianism, with its ultimate horizon of a body without fear, coexists with a clear-eyed sense, at work in all its granular explorations of sexual politics, art and ideas, of how and why that horizon seems always to be vanishing. And this tension, between defiant hope and sober realism, only enriches her intensely moving, vital and artful book.