Olivia Laing: The Psychology of the Body
Photo Credit: Sophie Davidson
“That's what I think is so funny about this, is like a hundred years on, these things that he's talking about remain as live as ever as sort of as complex and as urgent as they were back in Vienna literally a hundred years ago. It feels to me like he was really onto something. And I don't think that's true of every thinker of the 1920s or every psychoanalyst of the 1920s. He really like a heat-seeking missile. He has this ability to sort of put himself in the most contested zones, our emotional lives.”
So says author Olivia Laing, the author of Everybody: A Book About Freedom, which explores the body as a mechanism for understanding the world around us through the story of radical psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich. A contemporary and friend of the famous Sigmund Freud, Reich believed that the body communicated things that his patients could not articulate. In many ways, he’s the often-overlooked father of trauma and somatic therapy. In Reich’s view, unexpressed reservoirs of emotion, if left unprocessed, led to the build up of a sort of muscular armor that patients carried with them for life. Though Reich’s later work, which featured increasingly eccentric ideas, has led to his erasure within the common psychoanalytic discourse, Laing reminds us that Reich’s belief in freedom from oppression and dominion over our bodies, and our lives, is just as prescient today as it was 100 years ago—and she challenges us in this conversation to think about the stories of our own bodies within this larger cultural context.
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Olivia’s Picks
DIG DEEPER:
Wilhelm Reich - the Psychoanalyst as Revolutionary - NYT April 1971, David Elkind
The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma - Bessel Van Der Kolk
Saving Us: A Climate Scientist's Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World - Katharine Hayhoe
TRANSCRIPT:
(Edited slightly for clarity.)
ELISE LOEHNEN:
Congrats on your latest book. I loved, I thought it was so beautiful and, and deftly done the way that you sort of weave from this idea of sort of our bodies as the mechanism for understanding and sensing the world, and the ways in which we metabolize our narrative history in the world, and then sort of bringing it all the way out to activism and how we engage in the world. It really, I thought it was beautiful and left me thinking for a long time. And I love that it's about sort of its loose thesis or it's cores about Wilhelm Reich, because as is the way and the collective consciousness, like I just learned about him through some meandering, random pulling of a thread. And I was like this, what is this? It was through an anthropologist who has fascinating ideas. And then I went and sort of was looking into his life and saw that he is currently like into, into Orgon and the box and that he's been like completely in the same way that Wilhelm Reich was sort of thrown out for going off the deep end, this guy has also followed that same course. So it's really interesting. So can you talk a little bit about Reich and sort of how you crafted a book around his story?
OLIVIA LAING:
Well, I didn't mean to, I think the thing is I meant to write a book about why it's so hard to inhabit our bodies at this moment, sort of the beginning of the 21st century. It felt like there was this onslaught of stories about, you know, violence to do with the kind of bodies people were in. There was the refugee crisis in the UK. There was the rise of the Far Right, really across the world and then the rise of Trump. So it felt like this moment in which all sorts of groups of people were being objectified and subject ti violence because, because of their kind of body, because of their skin color, because of their gender, because of their sexuality. And I was really like, didn't we solve these struggles in the 20th century? You know, what about the great freedom movements? What has happened?
And I wanted to go back and try and understand what had gone on there. Like, first of all, why our bodies are subjected those kind of forces, but also was the struggle for freedom over? Had we reached the end of that, or was this just another sort of twist in a long story? And I knew that Reich would be in the book. Like I looked at the original proposal recently, I started five years ago, and his name is definitely there, but I had no idea that he would become so huge in it because whatever area I went into. If I wanted to write about sexuality, if I wanted to write about anti-fascism, if I wanted to write about activism, there was Reich. If I wanted to write about imprisonment and incarceration, there was Reich.
So gradually I realized that his story sort of took me everywhere I needed to go and that he could form the sort of skeleton of the book, but that was really tricky as well. He's a really complicated character, you know, he's not straightforward, he's not totally likable. And some of his ideas are intensely meaningful and useful. And some of them they're really woo woo. They're really out there. And, you know, he paid a heavy price for those kind of ideas. So, you know, to a writer that is completely fascinating and gripping, like this is a difficult person, and this is somebody who goes to lots of different arenas. Okay, he's gonna be the whole of the book.
ELISE:
Can you give a quick summary of Reich? And then we can talk about you sort of nail the, the breakup between Reich and Freud as being this, you know, this intense moment or sort of this, this division and the way that their views of the world continue to impact us. For people who aren't familiar as I wasn't, can you give us a little bit of a backstory?
OLIVIA:
Absolutely. So it starts really at the end of the first world war in Vienna, and Reich is a young man. He's been a soldier and he is very poor and brilliant, like incredibly intelligent and sort of voraciously hungry for life, and for ideas, and very passionate young man. And he's training to be a doctor. He doesn't really like it. And then he encounters the ideas of Freud. And this is the moment where if you encounter the ideas of Freud, you can go, I'm gonna go knock on Freud's door. And that's what he does. He literally just knocks on Freud's door and it's like, what should I read? And Freud, this happens throughout Freud's life. Freud sees this young protegé, this brilliant young, and he's like, great. They sort of fall in love with each other in a platonic way, but there's this intense bond between them like a kind of father and son bond. And Reich sets up as a psychoanalyst.
He becomes a psychoanalyst and he has these two immense ideas very early on in his career. So first of all, he starts thinking his patients are talking to him, it’s the talking cure. And he thinks what they're saying is not the whole story. Their bodies are talking to me. They're sitting on the couch, they're lying on the couch. And they're saying all these things haltingly, and at the same time, their bodies are communicating reservoirs of feeling. They're communicating pain, or grief, or shame, or anger. And what he felt is that people from early on in their childhood, they have emotional experiences that they're told not to have. They have experiences of trauma that they're not allowed to cry over. They have experiences of anger that they're not allowed to vocalize. Often it's gendered. Boys don't cry, girls don't get angry. And, and he felt that if these things weren't felt, if they weren't expressed people, tighten up and they create a kind of armor, a sort of muscular armor that stays with them life long.
And I think instinctively recognize this. And not actually, if you think about it, it's what actors are doing all the time. Actors are showing you what a character is like by how they hold their bodies. And I think we all instinctively know how to read that. We recognize those sort of set faces and fury. We sort of veer away from somebody in the street, because we can feel anger coming off them, or intense sadness, loneliness, these different moods. So this is Reich's first idea. But then his second idea is he's working in a working class clinic and the patients he's seeing, he realizes what's happening to them. Isn't just to do with the family. It's not just Freud's idea of what happens in the domestic realm that's impacting on them. It's political, it's social, it's to do with poor housing. It's poverty it's to do with their work relationships.
So he's like, you know, a lot has to change. To heal my patients a lot has to change, and the body is the ground by which it can change. He tries to unite the ideas of communism and psychoanalysis, communism and Freud, Marx and Freud. And nobody likes him doing it. Everybody's angry, Freud in particular. And by this time we're in the 1930s. Reich has moved operations to Berlin and, and it's the rise of Hitler. And he sees absolutely that Hitler has to be resisted. He sees that this is something that has got to be counteracted with full force. And the breakup with Freud has often been described as like their ideas diverged, but actually looking into it deeply, what happens is that Freud wants to stay neutral. He wants psychoanalysis to remain neutral through fascism. He believes that that's a possibility and Reich says, absolutely not. We can't do that. We have to resist it. And he's almost like the sacrificial lamb. He's thrown out of the psychoanalytic institution, sort of as a sop to Hitler and to the Nazi party. And that's the tragedy in his life. That's the moment where he really loses his context, loses his support network, and he moves to America, and he starts to have a very different set of ideas.
ELISE:
He's such an interesting character because you look at this, the beginning of his work and this is what we believe so wholeheartedly today. This is the basis of most good therapy. It's somatic. The body needs to express itself as you said, to metabolize these experiences. We are recognizing increasingly that these traumas, which as you, you said, are very complex, intergenerational, social, political, historical become stuck in our bodies, inaccesible. And we don't know how to just metabolize it and move it out. So in a way it's like we are living and, and Freud's version feels so in many out of touch. And obviously we, the Jugnians, et cetera, there are many schools, but it's interesting how so much of it is Reichian and yet he isn't credited. Or he's been discarded because his ideas went a little bonkers. And obviously we love, you know, we love to judge people only on the totality of their life. We we're. So it's so hard for us to parse, right. To accept some parts and be like this, this is crazy. So can you talk a little bit about, we don't have to go in too much depth, but about sort of Orgon and sort of where he went nuts, only because it is part of our cultural history here, and obviously captured the imagination of a lot of people.
OLIVIA:
Yeah, absolutely. And, but just before I say that, I think you are so right. Like that book, The Body Keeps the Score, is absolutely which, you know, everybody has read now. It's, it's been a bestseller for years and years, and that is so Reichian. That's so much the Reichian argument that isn't credited. So what happens is he comes to America and he, you know, he's already talking about energy. He's already talking about how our bodies work, systematically, how they hold emotions. He has a feeling of the sort of, of life force that can get blocked. So it sort of makes sense that his next step is to start talking about a life energy. And he, he believes he sees it. He's on holiday in Maine. And he believes he sees this universal energy pouring through everything. It's in flowers, it's in grass, it's in people.
He calls it Orgone. It's blue, he sees it as blue. And he thinks other people have seen it before. He thinks Vn Gogh has seen it. He's like, this is, this is a thing people have recognized, but I have named it. And he invents a contraption that he thinks will help people to charge up on an Orgone energy. He thinks that it gets blocked in people. We know that, so, okay. How do you get it moving again? And this box is, it's like a closet. It's like a little sort of telephone box. You sit inside it, it's got layers of steel wall. It's not gonna hurt anybody, but probably it wasn't doing what he was thinking he was doing. And then it gets sort of taken up by beatniks. So William Burrows has one. Saul Bellow has one. Norman Mailer has one, you know, it’s kind of around in the counter culture, sadly for, he does an interview with a woman called Milford Brady for The New Republic. And he doesn't realize it's a hit piece.
In some ways, he's a real innocent, you know, he's from the old world and he's come to the new world. He doesn't quite understand things. And he speaks to this person who writes a hit piece about him and the Food and Drug Administration pick up on it. And for the next decade, they spent a quarter of their resources trying to stop him, trying to investigate him, and trying to stop him from doing what he's doing. And eventually there's a court case. He's told that he can't pedal this machine anymore. And he breaks the injunction and he is sent to prison and he dies in prison. So it's this kind of tragic tale. His books were burnt. He's the only person whose books burnt on American soil and the books that were burnt. Weren't just stuff about Orgone energy. It, it was the mass psychology of fascism also burnt by the Nazi party. So you start seeing that, it's not just about the Orgone Accumulator, his ideas more broadly were considered dangerous. And that's the thing I find so fascinating about it.
ELISE:
Yeah, no, he is fascinating. And this idea of Orgone or this blue light, I mean, it's not that it's not crazy. It's the, you know, the contraption, et cetera, but what's crazier, as you mentioned, is like in the way that he was persecuted by the FDA, and the ways in which, as I mentioned, I sort of came to him by way of this anthropologist who's trying to take up this fight. And it's like, it is still being sort of slam-dunked on, on Wikipedia, et cetera, in a way that's like, this is, it's kind of an amusing historical anecdote. I mean, not his life and the end of his life, but it is wild how this idea of a box can get people so exercised, literally. But, but that it is so that there's something so damning, particularly because so many of his other ideas make such an incredible amount of sense.
And you also, you know, when you talk about sort of that heartbreak between and Reich and Freud, you write about how Freud ultimately believed that in sort of the corralling of humanity, that oppressive forces were required and policing and rules. And, and yes, we can't live in complete chaos, but he was sort of arguing not the opposite, but this idea that freedom should not be curtailed by these oppressive authorities and that we should have dominion over our own bodies and our own lives. And obviously there's some line in between those two things, but it goes to sort of this idea of like the fear of the, of the matter, the fear of the human of our animating impulses and this need to sort of slap it down, versus what would the world be like if we could all be fully expressed.
OLIVIA:
And I think the thing that we haven't mentioned is sex. That for Reich a lot of this was it it's sexual energy that he's talking about. And he believed that people, if people could be sexually expressive, then they would achieve some kind of liberation. And I think that was a problematic idea in the 1920s. It was an idea that frightened people. And I think it's still a very complicated and problematic idea now. There's something, like I said, there's something naive and innocent about him. He believes in the goodness, in people at the same time of all the sexual liberationists, he's the only one who really understood what rape meant. He's the only one who really understood what sexual violence meant. And I think it's probably worth saying something about his childhood here. He was the child of an abusive father who beat his mother until she killed herself.
And that legacy of understanding what forces are arranged against women's sexual expression. She, his mother had had an affair and that was, that was why his father began to beat her. And it's so clear in his writing that he understands what patriarchy means. He understands the violence of patriarchy in a way that feels incredibly modern and incredibly vital to our moment. He understands that sex can be a very malevolent force, but he believes that's patriarchal capitalism sex. And he thinks that there's something underneath that that is. I don't like the word purer, but that is of wilder and freer and that we can tap into that. And that again is a very beautiful vision of Reich’s I think.
ELISE:
Yeah. And wasn't his, didn't his dad sort of use him as a tool against his mother in the sense of making him complicit in her sort of torture. I mean, that's such a terrible story, but I think that it it's exactly that, right. You know, if you think about it in the context of the feminine principle or the feminine energy being this chaotic, creative mother, matter, mater, and then this sort of oppressive, you know, the, the, when, when masculinity becomes too expressed too toxic, this need to oppress or control. And if you think about sort of the feminine as the body, as this, this vehicle of creativity and, and generation and the ways in which we bring sort of that animating energy, or life spirit into the world. And then this desire to be like, well, no, we'll say when will, will say how, we'll say the mechanism by which it can be expressed, which feelings are okay. It's like trying to govern the ungovernable in a way that, of course we get completely twisted about sort of what's ours. What's not, what's me, what's the world. And then of course, like what's me up here in my brain for my body, right? Like that disconnection becomes really confusing in a way.
OLIVIA:
That's what I think is so funny about this is like a hundred years, on these things that he's talking about remain as live as ever as sort of as complex and as urgent as they were back in Vienna, literally a hundred years ago. So that it feels to me like he was really onto something. And I don't think that's true of every thinker of the 1920s, or every psychoanalyst of the 1920s. He really, he really, he’s like heat seeking missile. He has this ability to sort of put himself in the most contested zones of our emotional lives.
ELISE:
I love how you open the book with your own somatic experiencing, and trying to understand, you know, the strange way in which certain practitioners try to read and understand the body. And I know you trained as an herbalist, you write about it as a narrative, a type of narrative healing that requires understanding the story in order to diagnose and treat. And then it's like, again, it's sometimes when we take these ideas to the point where they become dangerous, I loved the discussion o. Because you sort of connected this for me, the discussion of Louise Hay and, and her book, You Can Heal Your Life. I cannot believe it's sold 50 million copies in 1984, but that's where like, sort of this idea becomes pernicious, right? That not only does your body, but you're responsible for your body's illness by virtue of your thoughts. And sort of, again, it goes to this idea of like your ability to control the uncontrollable and how it manifests in your experience.
OLIVIA:
Yeah. The Louise Hay sory is fascinating and, you know, she, she was big already, but she, she really profited off the AIDS crisis. That was, that was her big thing. You know, there's this community of people who are complete pariahs at that moment, and not getting treatment anywhere else. And she opened her doors to them. She set up the hay ride. She had people coming in. She had these very sort of charismatic healing sessions. But the baseline of what she was saying is you can change this. You are experiencing the illness because of a lack of self-love, because of a lack of confidence, because of guilt. And if you can shake off those emotional feelings, you will be healed. Well, okay, confidence, guilt. All of those things obviously play into how our immune systems work, but they don't stop a virus. And the virus is also, as Reigh tells us political and social.
So it's multifactorial illness is multifactorial and her kind of accounting of it, it becomes so crude and so cruel as well. It's like polio is caused by jealousy. You know, she literally writes the sort of ABC of illness and you're like, okay, so what about the vaccine, honey? You know, there's a lot more to illness than just our emotional states. But on the other hand, if you look at complete allopathic medicine that leaves out our emotional lives altogether, that also is sort of damaging to people and is only telling half the story. So there, there's definitely a middle ground that is a wiser kind of medicine, but there's a side to the New Age movement and it's, it's influence in healthcare that is incredibly toxic and dangerous, I think.
ELISE:
Yeah. And I think we're certainly experiencing that now and, and in the context of, you know, obviously QAnon or, or vaccine hesitancy, and it's it's, and I understand why people are like, I just want one, I want one lens through which to understand the world. And it needs to either be completely chemical, and biological, sort of through a microscope, or it needs to be through emotions, or it needs to be through sort of political context. Or in Reich’s world, you almost see him just widening that aperture. And starting with the body, then expanding to sort of the bodies of our, you know, the collective body of our political functioning and as an organism of society. And then you see him trying to sort of expand it even more, at which point maybe he's really onto something, but he loses people and condemns himself. But it is, it feels like everyone just wants to go in at one specific point. And through that specificity, you lose the wider context and suddenly everything else is worthless.
OLIVIA:
Yeah. And I think that increasingly that's just so dangerous and we can't, we can't do that. We have to look at things from multiple aspects of once, because that's, that's the world we're living in it. It does run on multiple channels simultaneously. We, we all do really know that, that we have an emotional life. We have an intellectual life, we have a political and social life, and we're working in many systems all at the same time. And again, this is, this is what makes Reich so kind of exciting is, you know, nobody had invented the word intersectionality at that point, but that's is talking about, he's talking about the way that we carry multiple identities and they all land inside our bodies. This is the ground at which we are experiencing all of those different things.
ELISE
And then I love how you took it out and let, let me see if I can connect this without making it confusing. But I think that in the same way that it, we, it's very comforting for things to be binary. Right, good and bad, light and dark. And that's sort of the sphere that we want to exist in individually. And it's really hard for us to hold the collective. I think that we also get so easily overwhelmed, understandably, about sort of the manifold, number of factors, and problems, and issues, and threats and things that need to be solved. And I think that we're living in a strange time also where, and maybe this is me alone, but I continually have to remind myself, like I'm not the only one who's worried about these things, or working on these things, or contemplating these things. And so I loved the sort of study at the end of Nina Simone and other activists and, and like fascinating people.
I was really excited to sort of like see through your eyes, Bayard Rustin. And what they brought to world of activism. And it's like that moment I think I made a note, but when, when Nina Simone is like talking about, if you don't mind, if I read to you, you write about how her life is feeling meaningful. And you say, “As an activist, she had a sense of dignity and purpose that had been lacking right through her adult years, singing freedom songs, she told an interviewer helps to change the world, to move the audience, to make them conscious of what has been done to my people around the world. When the organizer Vernon Jordan asked her in 1964, why she wasn't more involved, she had snapped. Motherfucker: I am civil rights. A song is not a gun just as a painting is not a protest march, but that doesn't mean it has no effect in the outside world. And then she talks about how it's not her job. I'm not the doctor to cure it. However, all I can do is a expose the sickness. That's my job. But I loved her, you know, showing up in, in this world that you write about as an example of like, well, it's my job to be me. It's your job to be you, Nina Simone was doing her own version of activism. And in a way that I found deeply comforting, obviously she's sort of a once in a lifetime talent, but this idea that like, we each have our own part of this, again, like our own thread, that's our, whatever, the expression of our gifts, that moment of activism and not necessarily being responsible for the entire thing, because that's deeply overwhelming.
OLIVIA:
I mean we're speaking on the day that the climate change information has come out. That feels like a very overwhelming moment. I mean, it feels like a very frightening moment, but I think the, the one sort of really heartening takeaway I wanted from this book is, it is a long struggle. It is a long struggle and many people are participating in it. Because I think we all feel overwhelmed. We have more information than humans have ever had in any moment in history, we know so much about what's happening in different places in the world. And I think the danger of that is you become scattered. You become depressed, you become incapable of action. You become paranoid. All of these different things. And I think just remembering the, you have to play your part. You don't have to solve the entire thing.
Like you say, there are, there are many millions of people who also want to change the world for the better, who also don't want a planet on fire or a planet underwater, who want a planet that has justice for people, no matter what kind of body they live in. So I think that sense that you do your part feels to me like, well, that's achievable in a way that solving the problems isn't in any way achievable. It's not down to any of us. It's not down to of us who are alive right now. It's, it's a transgenerational struggle as well.
ELISE:
There's something to, you know, I was reading this book that's coming out, it'll probably be out by the time this runs called Saving Us by Katherine Hayhoe. And she's, I think the head of the Nature Conservancy and it's sort of this practical, it's a practical guide to climate change in the sense of talking to people, how to have conversations about it because I think it's so frustrating. And her point is that it's really only there's I can't remember who it is. He sort of breaks down the spectrum of people's concerns sort of, I think it's, she does it on the basis of sort of North America, but it expands to global from, you know, very alarm down to dismissive, which is sort of another preferred word for her than, you know, denial. And the dismissive are only 7%. Everyone else is somewhere on the spectrum, but the dismissive that's very loud. Isn't that cheering?
OLIVIA:
I think that's incredibly cheering. I think most do us want a livable planet. It doesn't seem too much to us.
ELISE:
And her point is like, you can start to meet people where they are based on that continuum, whether it's that they are ardent skiers or divers or really into wine and sort of move them, you know, meet them there. And,her point was, you know, in the same way, the, that, you know, going back to Reich, like a single trauma can inform your whole life that the negative impact is such a rock in the pond. But that similarly it becomes overwhelming because the people who are the naysayers are so insistent and so loud, that they have an outsized impact in terms of like most likely as a concerned citizen, I'm not like trolling people online. And, but she of course receives tons of trolling. And she was like, it's just this very loud insistent, like I'm gonna find you, and it's bots as well. But like, I'm gonna hammer you in a way that's like the two are not equivalent. It's not a 50-50 debate.
OLIVIA:
I think that is so crucial to remember. And actually to, to the idea of just reaching people where they are and being, you know, about gentle, but communicating to the fears that people really have. Because I think that's the other thing that Reich shows us is everybody is carrying around these senses of trauma and vulnerability and everybody has built protections around them. Inside, I think most of us really do want a planet that is pretty good for our children and our grandchildren. You know, I think it's a very small amount of people who do not, don't give a shit about that. So the sense that people are afraid and then when people are afraid they become dismissive, or violent, or harsh in many different ways. I think understanding how that works, understanding the sort of mechanism of vulnerability to cruelty is really important to know in many, in many different arenas, not just to do with climate change. So this is sort of another thing where I think Reich can be not just enlightening, but like crucial for this time.
ELISE:
Yes. No. Everyone has the story and you know, it's wild, I'm writing a book, and I put out a survey that was long and intensive. I just don't know any other way. And a bunch of people took it, which was amazing and very generous, but it's it wasn't going out and asking people like, tell me your most traumatic stories. Like I wasn't fishing from that specific pond. But what was interesting to me is one how willing people are to reveal themselves. And two, how everyone has something. It was quite moving. I I've had to take frequent breaks because it's so much to metabolize, but whether it's the death of a child, or being molested, or you know, a parent who took their own life. Like it was a profound experience in the sense of how hard life is, even though it's so beautiful and amazing on the whole. Again, it's like 99% awesome for most people. And then that 1% can really have an outsized impact on the way that you experience the world.
OLIVIA:
Yeah. I think absolutely. And I think, you know, thinking of the relation between vulnerability and armor that people do those kind of pains that people carry. People create defenses around them. You know, we, we know that, we see that in our friends, we see that in our families, we see that in people that we're close to and the defenses are all very different from each other. And some of those defenses are not attractive or not easy to work with, but there's something behind them. And I, I just think that that model makes it much easier than like that person has a horrible character or that person's toxic. A thing I really hate. Cause I don't think people are toxic. I think people are damaged. And I think those two things are very different from each other, you know, toxic sounds irredeemable and damage sounds like something that most of us are on some level or rather
ELISE:
That can be restored. And yeah, we obviously quickly resort to sort of the ad hominem, I don't like her. I don't like him. Yeah. He's a bad person. It's like, no, you don't like this behavior.
OLIVIA:
Exactly.
ELISE:
But our ability to sort of wholesale reject the humanity of people or to align them along these ideas of like good guys and bad guys is really problematic as we try to move forward. And our, you know, as we re-litigate history, yes, it's really important to sort of examine some of these, some, uh, and some of the influential people who we revere and adore and to be like, oh, these were some really problematic ideas.
OLIVIA:
Yeah.
ELISE:
There context around these ideas and the time and the we've obviously come a long way, without sort of burning them on a stake. You know, it's really interesting how we, and, and Reich is a perfect example of someone who probably would be as revered as young, if hadn't been canceled, you know, by the FDA or deemed irredeemable or insane. I wish we were better at sort of parsing, not accountability is obviously really important and I’m not suggesting for ever a second that that's not, but, but that we could be better about holding space for the full spectrum of someone's humanity, rather than just sort of rejecting them based on one part of their life or one of their ideas that we might not agree with.
OLIVIA:
And I think all of that, the context of how things happen and why things happen is so important. It was really important to me when I was writing the book, not just Reich, but the other figures in it that they're all complex characters. They're all people who lay in sort of social media environment that were now would've been canceled, including Nina Simone, who was violent to her own daughter. And Andrea Dworkin is a very complicated character. And that whole sort of Second Wave Feminism conflict around porn meant that she was somebody who was really vilified. And I, I wanted to have characters like that in the book was, I wanted to say, you can pick out ideas that work for you now. You could be pragmatic about you as reader can be pragmatic. And think that is useful to me right now. That's a tool I would like, you don't have to think is this person a Saint?
And would I follow everything that they ever said? Because that person, I don't think exists. I haven't encountered that person as certainly not as an artist or as I thinker, because those people tend to be actually subject to the forces that they're are trying to make work about or trying to resist. They, they are as vulnerable, if not more vulnerable as anybody else to those malignant forces. They're vulnerable to the kind of injustices and sort of warping effects of white supremacy, of patriarchy. And I think that's really important to remember and to be able to go back to the past with a sense of what is useful to me now, in order to make the world I'm in better, seems a wiser way to me. Than how can I litigate against every person in the past and how can…it's the binaries again? How can I sweep them into this group, the good group and this group, the bad group. Because people don't work like that. They're both, all of us, I think, are both.
ELISE:
Yeah, we all are. And I think in, in demanding perfection and holding people accountable to the social standards of today without really ever, I mean, and none of us can really understand the full context of any time. Like we weren't there, it’s a shutting down of conversation at a time am when like we really need to be talking to each other.
OLIVIA:
We need to take risks with each other. I think we need to be able to say things that might be wrong. We need to have that. One of the most touching things Reich says when he's being prosecuted is I demand the right to be wrong. And I think that's so important right now that while we're trying to figure out our way with these very, very large questions, it's important that we can suggest things it's important that we can try out things and that they can be wrong. Because I think if everybody's operating on a, if you're not perfect, then you are out, it's very hard for anybody to say anything or risk any new ideas. And that doesn't feel like particularly useful climate to be in when the challenges in front of us are so vast.
ELISE:
Well, if you can't tell, I loved Everybody by Olivia Lang and was just so thrilled to be introduced to Reich because as mentioned, I had sort of encountered him, but almost from the opposite side, from the discussion of him, as you know, this quack who was, and this idea of Orgone that had been continually, you know, sort of perpetual really pushed forward and shut down. And I didn't realize that he's really the fountainhead of a whole new type of therapy, the type of therapy that I personally love, and find incredibly healing and helpful. For those who have listened to me do podcast interviews for years, you'll know like about sort of my somatic experiencing, and this idea that I believe is so true, it's so felt. Ir that has been my own experience that, you know, our stories really do live on in our bodies in ways that can short circuit us in our subconscious in a way that we're not even aware and that we're continuing to act these things out.
And, and I believe that we do this intergenerationally as well, and that sometimes you're in a pattern and you're stuck, and you are trying to sort of understand why, and the reality is it might not even be your story. It might be your grandparent’s story. It might be so old that you've, there's no way you can, you can pick up the thread or really understand where it came from. But there are ways to let it go. And I just, I loved our conversation about, and it's a hard conversation and a touchy conversation, particularly right now. And particularly it seems for many women of how can I participate and engage, and stay engaged, that line between wanting cookies of affirmation and reassurance that you're a good person and that you're thinking about everything in the proper and appropriate way, balanced against feeling like you do want to understand and explore and ask questions. And be very concerned that you will say the wrong thing or do the wrong thing, or offend someone, or you know be violent with your language in a way that's not at all mapped to your intention. So I love this conversation for that because I think that's also a conversation and we need to be about having about the lack of conversation and we all need to build some strength and durability around digging in so that we can build bridges with each other. And as you know, as she was saying, you know, build this survivable world and really address some of these global environmental concerns that have us all in their clutches.