The man who thought orgasms could save the world

The orgasm, it is generally accepted, is A Good Thing. An intensely pleasurable experience that can promote bonding between partners. But might it be even more than that? Do orgasms prevent illness? In fact, are orgasms linked not just to the well-being of the human body but to the health of the body politic? Are they intrinsically anti-fascist? Can they prevent totalitarianism?

These were the radical ideas of a maverick psychoanalyst who had a profound influence on popular culture. According to his biographer Christopher Turner, author of Adventures in the Orgasmatron: "In the 1970s, everyone at a Hampstead cocktail party would have heard of him, but he is mostly forgotten now."

While you might not have heard of Wilhelm Reich, you have probably heard Kate Bush's Cloudbusting or Patti Smith's Birdland, two songs about him. And you have heard of writers such as Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Saul Bellow and Norman Mailer, who were all fascinated by him. And you will be familiar with the term "sexual revolution", which Reich coined. And now a new book may revive Reich as a topic of cocktail party conversation. Everybody, by Olivia Laing, uses his life and work as a framework for a meditation on bodily freedom.

"I think Reich is an immensely complicated figure, but his complexity is not a reason to reject him outright," Laing tells BBC Culture. "He tried to unite the ideas of Freud and Marx, he was a sexual liberationist who truly believed in women's right to pleasure, and he rooted his ideas about freedom in the body itself, which he saw as both repository of trauma and agent of change."