Olivia Laing explores the life of the renegade psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich to chart the long struggle for bodily freedom, from gay rights and sexual liberation to feminism and the civil-rights movement.

Drawing on her own experiences in protest and alternative medicine, 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, Christopher Isherwood, Andrea Dworkin, Sigmund Freud, Susan Sontag and Malcolm X.

Why are basic rights and freedoms again imperilled and how can ordinary human bodies resist oppression and reshape the world?

Please note: this event has been pre-recorded.

Olivia Laing’s Everybody is published by Picador. Buy a copy from Waterstones, our bookselling partners.

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Festival of Ideas: Olivia Laing, What Does Bodily Freedom Mean Today?