Therapies of Sexual Liberation: Society, Sex and Self

Abstract

This chapter relates to sexual liberation therapy, which took place in Paris between 1973 and 1981. It was an experiment in political bio-energy, developed at the Laboratory of General Orgonomy (LOG), that offered the practical application of the ideas and ideologies of sexual liberation in the form of workshops based on emotional and corporal therapeutic approaches. These activities were inspired primarily by the work of Wilhelm Reich¹ and other psychiatrists such as Alexander Lowen² and Fritz Perls³ and psychologist Arthur Janov.⁴ These sessions were held during weekends in a town house in the Buttes-Chaumont region of Paris, and aimed to give each individual the ability and ‘galvanisation’ needed to change their life-style. The well-being felt over the course of one or several workshops of this kind of bio-energy would contribute to the radical transformation of the self and evoke a desire for social change and maybe social revolution. Marx had written in one of his famous Theses that it was not oppression in itself that was intolerable, but rather being conscious of being oppressed. The sexual liberation therapy developed at the LOG was based on a different assumption: it was the experience of happiness and well-being that would render oppression, domination and ennui intolerable.