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79
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
80/100Critics
77/100Scholars
Author:
Olivia Laing
Publisher:
W. W. Norton & Company
Date:
May 4, 2021
The body is a source of pleasure and of pain, at once hopelessly vulnerable and radiant with power. In her sixth book, Olivia Laing charts a course through the long struggle for bodily freedom, using the life of the renegade psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich to explore gay rights and sexual liberation, feminism, and the civil rights movement.
What The Reviewers Say
In this multilayered and masterfully structured book, Laing obsessively examines the life of psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich (a protege of Freud), drawing connections to other intellectuals, ranging from the Marquis de Sade to Malcolm X, while including stories from her own life.
Talk about timely: Laing began writing about bodies under siege over five years ago, and the book is being published in the middle of a pandemic. But we have become newly aware of the vulnerabilities of our bodies in the past year in other ways.
... brims with empathy. Never condescending or unkind, Laing explores the experiences of those crushed by feckless cruelty, shaken by cancer, or crazed by their impulses to eke out possibility, meaning and joy — all to achieve a semblance of freedom.
Everybody pulls liberally from Reich’s biography, but the doctor belongs more to the book’s form than to its content: his narrative provides the hard factual shell into which Laing can pour her ideas. Everybody is, per the title, an interrogation of bodies, but not in the sense that bodies are usually interrogated. The book skips over traditional sites of interest, such as health or appearance, to explore questions of force and constraint, and how, more abstractly, our physical forms can shove us into conceptual categories.
