Everybody
A Book About Freedom
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5.0 • 4 Ratings
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
'Intensely moving, vital and artful' - Guardian
'A dizzying ride . . . both timely and beguiling' - Sunday Times
From the award-winning author of Crudo, this is an exhilarating and eminently readable study of the long struggle for bodily freedom – from gay rights and sexual liberation to feminism and the civil rights movement.
Drawing on their own experiences in protest and travelling from Weimar Berlin to the prisons of McCarthy-era America, Laing grapples with some of the most significant and complicated figures of the past century, among them Nina Simone, Sigmund Freud, Susan Sontag and Malcolm X.
At a time when basic rights are once again in danger, Everybody is a crucial examination of the forces arranged against freedom – and a celebration of how ordinary human bodies can resist oppression and reshape the world.
Longlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize.
'An ambitious, absorbing achievement that will make your brain hum' – Evening Standard
'Sets her alongside the likes of Arundhati Roy, John Berger and James Baldwin' – Financial Times
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Novelist and critic Laing (Crudo) places the life and legacy of psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich (1897–1957) at the center of this impassioned and provocative study of "the vexed relationship between bodies and freedom." Laing highlights Reich's development of body-based psychotherapy to help patients release their emotional pain, and his conflicts with Sigmund Freud, an early mentor, over the inhibition of sexual desire (Freud thought sex was "an unruly, dangerous force"; Reich believed it to be "the foundation of emotional health"). She also delves into Reich's efforts to "fuse" psychotherapy and Marxism and his criminal prosecution for claiming that he could cure cancer by harnessing a tangible "life force" he called orgone. Along the way, Laing folds in reflections on her own experiences undergoing Reich's bodywork therapy and her reaction, as the child of a "bona fide lesbian household," to the passage of a 1988 law banning positive discussions of homosexuality in U.K. schools. Detours into the lives of Christopher Isherwood, Andrea Dworkin, Susan Sontag, and Nina Simone illuminate the influence of Reich's theories, which Laing boils down to two "durable truths": human bodies carry personal and inherited trauma, and people are "porous and capable of mysterious effects on each other's lives." This lucid foray into some of life's deepest questions astonishes.
