"[Wilhelm Reich] treated mostly working-class patients and believed that they were 'carrying their past experiences around in their bodies, storing their emotional pain as a kind of tension'..."

"... which he called 'character armor.' Therapy could help, as could Marxism, but what was really needed, Reich thought, was a revolution in sex, the liberatory potential of which had been warped by an extractive economic system..."

From "Olivia Laing’s Strange, Sublime Book on the Body 'Everybody' is, per the title, an interrogation of bodies, but not in the sense that bodies are usually interrogated" by Katie Waldman in The New Yorker.

This is a review of a book that is about a whole lot of people, not just Reich, but we're told he's the "central character" and "fragments of Reich’s story are woven throughout." Somehow the book is "an interrogation of bodies, but not in the sense that bodies are usually interrogated."

The book skips over traditional sites of interest, such as health or appearance, to explore questions of force and constraint, and how, more abstractly, our physical forms can shove us into conceptual categories—Black, male—that then shape us further.... The book proceeds, via an almost dreamlike, permutative logic, from the body as prison to the body in prison to masses of bodies in prison to masses of bodies in protest. At the end, we are released on a note that is either utopian or dryly ironic. “The free body,” Laing writes. “What a beautiful idea.”

Here's the book, in case you're tempted to read it. I sort of am. Well, it's the sort of thing I definitely would have read 30 years ago.