A few years ago I read about something called ASMR: “autonomous sensory meridian response.” Wikipedia defines it as “the subjective experience of low-grade euphoria characterized by a combination of positive feelings and a distinct static-like tingling sensation on the skin…. most commonly triggered by specific auditory or visual stimuli….” If you search for ASMR on youtube, you can find thousands of videos, the majority featuring some attractive young woman speaking in a low, solicitous voice as she rattles jewelry or pretends to perform an eye exam or give a haircut. The common denominators are soft, sibilant sounds and close proximity. One ASMR video reenacts a TSA patdown.
These videos are intended to provoke an ASMR reaction in the viewer. They suggest something midway between a paid fetish experience and a mother putting her child to bed. But when I first read about ASMR, I knew that I had experienced it. Yes, reader, I have experienced low-grade euphoria. My ASMR experiences have been brief and unremarkable, to the extent that I never paid them any mind except while they were happening. For me, ASMR is sensual, but not sexual, so the gender of the person causing it is not significant. The videos don’t work for me both because I find them ridiculous and infantilizing, and because the person is not actually interacting with me. The sensation is as Wikipedia describes: a pleasant tingling on the skin, encircling the head like a wreath.
Science can do little with ASMR because it’s evanescent and impossible to measure, a physiological will-o’-the-wisp. That elusiveness would not have fazed Wilhelm Reich, who would have understood ASMR to be a manifestation of what he called orgone energy: the life force. Reich’s life and work are discussed at length in Olivia Laing’s Everybody: A Book About Freedom.
Reich ‘discovered’ orgone energy during the summer of 1940, as he vacationed in Maine:
Gazing at the sky over the lake one night, he thought he saw something flickering between the stars. Suddenly, he realized that the life force he’d been searching for was everywhere, a radiant energy that hummed and buzzed amid the grasses and flowers, the colour of St Elmo’s fire. He’d been standing in it all along, ‘at the bottom of an ocean of orgone energy.’
In the 1920s and 30s, Reich had been a leader of the psychoanalytic community in Vienna and Berlin, a favored protégé of Sigmund Freud. Over time he diverged from Freudian orthodoxy on two points. First, through his interaction with working people at a free clinic, he determined that societal conditions played as much of a role in psychic health as family history. He joined the communist party and proposed that psychoanalysis and communism were complementary:
Both psychoanalysis and communism were full of potential for understanding human unhappiness and expanding human freedom, Reich thought, but each had major blind spots. The problem with psychotherapy was that it insisted on treating the individual as if their pain occurred in a vacuum, unmediated by the society they inhabited or the politics that governed their lives. As for Marxism, it failed to recognize the importance of emotional experience, not least the trouble caused by shame and sexual repression, especially to women.
If psychic health was a societal matter, that made it a political matter as well, and Reich’s convictions led him to play an increasing public role in 30s Berlin, even as the Nazi regime was expanding its reach to control all aspects of public life. He founded the very unlikely sounding “German Association for Proletarian Sexual Politics” and became “a prominent, passionate figure in the city, lecturing crowds of thousands.”
The Freudian orthodoxy was to steer clear of politics. In retrospect, not the right choice, though it doesn’t seem there was any right choice available under the circumstances.
The other point on which Reich diverged from Freud had to do with pleasure. In Berlin between the wars there was much sexual pleasure of all kinds to be had. But Reich, by touching his patients (something Freud had avoided since early in his psychoanalytic career) noticed a different kind of physical pleasure that seemed to serve a therapeutic purpose:
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 sensation he called streaming…
Sounds a lot like ASMR.
Reich came to America in 1940 and the remaining 17 years of his life were a disaster. He invented something he called the orgone accumulator, which was essentially just a windowless box with a chair in it. His idea was that if you sat in an orgone accumulator, you’d receive a therapeutic dose of orgone energy. Laing does not explain whether Reich tried to offer any scientific evidence for how the orgone box was supposed to work or if he proposed any mechanism for measuring orgone energy. What’s remarkable is how a parade of prominent mid-century cultural figures became orgone enthusiasts, at least for a time: J.D. Salinger, Jack Kerouac, Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer. As late as 1993, Kurt Cobain was photographed sitting in William Burrough’s personal orgone accumulator.
Reich became a kind of cult leader, albeit not one bent on amassing personal power. He also became increasingly detached from reality, doing nighttime battles with flying saucers in the New Mexico desert and inventing a cloudbuster, a machine that purportedly shot some sort of energy into the sky to produce rain. He died in prison in 1957 after the Food and Drug Administration decided he was peddling quack cures. They rounded up every available copy of his many books and burned them: “the only nationally-sanctioned book burning in American history.”
Laing’s book is not a biography of Reich, though he is the most prominent of a collection of writers and artists that she uses to make her argument, which is that the human body, as it experiences sex, illness, or imprisonment, can be used to trace the histories of various liberation movements in the 20th century. She notes that the specific characteristics of the body you’re born with, such as its sex organs and the color of its skin, go a long way toward defining the parameters of the life you will lead:
To be born at all is to be situated in a network of relations with other people, and furthermore to find oneself forcibly inserted into linguistic categories that might seem natural and inevitable but are socially constructed and rigorously policed. We’re all stuck in our bodies, meaning stuck inside a grid of conflicting ideas about what those bodies mean, what they’re capable of and what they’re allowed or forbidden to do. We’re not just individuals, hungry and mortal, but also representative types, subject to expectations, demands, prohibitions and punishments that vary enormously according to the kind of body we find ourselves inhabiting.
Laing describes herself as “nonbinary” (though she is married to a man and uses she/her pronouns), and she seems exceptionally receptive to artists and writers who share her sense of the body as a decisive factor in either their imprisonment, be it literal or psychic, or their liberation. In Reich’s case, it was both. Laing looks for a way to integrate the insightful thinker and reformer of Reich’s European years with the unbalanced visionary of his final decades in America. It’s an Icarus-like story—someone who dared so much, ventured so far beyond the safe limits of an established school or discipline then being broken on the limits of his own psychic endurance and on the forces of cultural repression, which were considerably more potent in 1950s America than they were in 1920s Berlin. The US Government prosecuted Reich for making claims about the therapeutic value of orgone therapy—that it could cure everything from cancer to the common cold, as one magazine article claimed—but Reich’s undisguised belief that orgone energy was also sexual energy undoubtedly contributed to the ferocity of the government’s campaign.
The ideas in Everybody are Laing’s own, yet she ingeniously develops them out of biographical snapshots of various writers and artists that have influenced her. She introduces them one by one, and then continues to call on them throughout the book. The ability to orchestrate so many voices so artfully is worthy of a skilled dramatist. The list includes Susan Sontag, Malcolm X, Christopher Isherwood, Angela Carter, Andrea Dworkin, and the Marquis de Sade. What’s remarkable about the book is not so much what she has to say about any one of these figures, so much as the way she blends and recombines her ideas about them to make her points. Particularly interesting is the way she includes visual artists—Ana Mendieta, Philip Guston, and Agnes Martin—in her exposition. What is often challenging about visual art is grasping the ideas and emotions that propel it, but Laing is utterly convincing as she integrates her understanding of the work with what she has learned about the artists’ lives and struggles and with the times and places where the work was created.
Everybody is a difficult book to describe or summarize, maybe because it looks at relatively familiar people from a completely unique angle, always brimming with insight and empathy.
One final curious fact about Wilhelm Reich: British pop star Kate Bush found a copy of the book that Reich’s son Peter had written about his father in a bookstore and was so taken with the story that she wrote a song about Reich, called Cloudbusting. She even made a video of the song, with Donald Sutherland as Reich and herself (in short hair and overalls) as Peter:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pllRW9wETzw
It’s strange and lovely, just like Olivia Laing’s book.
