I was twenty-two when I began seeing Anna, and the body was at the centre of my interests. When bodies are discussed, especially in popular culture, it has often meant a very circum-scribed set of themes, largely to do with what the body looks like or how to maintain it at a pinnacle of health. The body as a set of surfaces, of more or less pleasing aspect. The perfect, unattainable body, so smooth and gleaming it is practicallyalien. What to feed it, how to groom it, the multiple dismaying ways in which it might fail to fit in or measure up. But the element of the body that interested me was the experience of living inside it, inhabiting a vehicle that was so cataclysmically vulnerable, so unreliably subject to pleasure and pain, hatred and desire.
I’d grown up in a gay family in the 1980s, under the malign rule of Section 28, a homophobic law that forbade schools from teaching ‘the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship’. To know that this was how the state regarded your own family was to receive a powerful education in how bodies are positioned in a hierarchy of value, their freedoms privileged or curtailed according to more or less inescapable attributes, from skin colour to sexuality. Each time I went to therapy I could feel the legacy of that period in my own body, as knots of shame and fear and rage that were difficult to express, let alone dissolve.
But if my childhood taught me about the body as an object whose freedom is limited by the world, it also gave me a sense of the body as a force for freedom in its own right. I went to my first Gay Pride at nine, and the feeling of all those marching bodies on Westminster Bridge lodged inside me too, a somatic sensation unlike anything I’d previously experienced. It seemed obvious to me that bodies on the streets were how you changed the world. As a teenager terrified by the oncoming apocalypse of climate change, I started attending protests, becoming so immersed in the environmental direct action movement that I dropped out of university in favour of a treehouse in a Dorset woodland scheduled to be destroyed for a new road.
I loved living in the woods, but using my own body as a tool of resistance was gruelling as well as intoxicating. The laws kept changing. Policing had become more aggressive and several people I knew were facing long prison sentences for the new crime of aggravated trespass. Freedom came at a cost, and it seemed that the cost was bodily too, the loss of physical liberty an omnipresent threat. Like many activists, I burned out. In the summer of 1998, I sat down in a graveyard in Penzance and filled out an application for a degree in herbal medicine. By the time I started seeing Anna, I was in my second year of training.
Though I didn’t know it at the time, the type of therapy she practised had been invented in the 1920s by Wilhelm Reich, one of the strangest and most prescient thinkers of the twentieth century, a man who dedicated his life to understanding the vexed relationship between bodies and freedom. Reich was for a time Freud’s most brilliant protégé (der beste Kopfe, the best mind, in psychoanalysis). As a young analyst in Vienna in the wake of the First World War, he began to suspect his patients were carrying their past experiences around in their bodies, storing their emotional pain as a kind of tension he compared to armour. 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 feeling he called streaming; the same unmistakable sensation I’d experienced on Anna’s couch.
Many of the patients Reich saw in Vienna were working class. Listening to their stories, he came to realise that the problems he was seeing, the psychic disarray, weren’t just a consequence of childhood experience but of social factors like poverty, poor housing, domestic violence and unemployment. Each individual was plainly subject to larger forces, which could cause just as much trouble as Freud’s central site of interest, the crucible of the family. Never one to shirk almighty ventures, Reich spent the interwar years trying to fuse two major systems for diagnosing and treating human unhappiness, wrestling the work of Freud and Marx into productive dialogue, much to the discomfort of the followers of each.
Sex had always been central to his notion of freedom and in 1930 he moved to Berlin, a city on the brink, caught between two disasters, where out of the wreckage of war there arose a great flowering of new ideas about sexuality. Reich believed freeing sex from centuries of repression and shame would change the world, but his activities in Berlin came to an abrupt halt when Hitler seized power in the spring of 1933.