R. D. Laing: Psychiatry & Apocalypse
Martin, David
RONALD LAING MUST BE ACCOUNTED one of the main contributors to the theoretical and rhetorical armory of the contemporary Left. By the contemporary Left is meant that soft variant of the...
...There is little conjunction of truth and social 'realty.'" Stylistically, the only mode of expression is unprepared, unstructured, gnomic, enigmatic...
...Sociologists are simply determined to assert that it is important at least to note the distinction between "is" and "ought...
...He then held various posts at Glasgow Royal Mental Hospital, at the Department of Psychological Medicine at Glasgow University, and at the Tavistock Clinic (1957-61) , He worked for the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations and has been director first of the Langham Clinic and then of the Kingsley Hall Clinic in London since 1962...
...5 A broad although ultimately unreal distinction needs to be made between Laing's work as a psychiatrist, which seems to be b Cf., D. Cooper, Psychiatry and Anti-Psychiatry (1967...
...Moreover, the generality of his work also weakens his remarks about sociology, in that sociology simultaneously aspires to adequate generality and adequate particularization...
...It may even be that he is a man of the highest intelligence who must accept the contempt of an intelligentsia which has never tried to understand why he must appear stupid in public and appear ignorant of what he may know better than anyone...
...Love in this sense can destroy the loved one bypredefining all alternatives as wrong, in one way or another...
...9 9 Cf., some comments by D. Cooper, in D. Cooper and R. D. Laing, Reason and Violence (London: Tavistock, and New York: Humanities Press, 1964), pp...
...He can certainly be considered an irrationalist in that he finds rational and argued discussion of religious questions uncongenial, and insists that the essence of religion is ecstasy...
...That said, it is instructive to look more closely at what appears to be a very confused discussion (pp...
...Politics cannot simply be a Gospel, or else that Gospel eventually declines not only into ritual but into mere ritual...
...Children do not give up their innate imagination, curiosity, dreaminess easily...
...Indeed, since a great deal of Laing's work has been on schizophrenia, it may be worthwhile to utilize a summary indicating his approach from The Divided Self, pp...
...The nature of the dissent it is capable of producing may be taken both as its condemnation and its salvation...
...R. D. LAING: PSYCHIATRY & APOCALYPSE Now it is worth asking here whether men are more or less free according to the variations in their social milieu, within societies as well as between them...
...The politician can be a man who wears a mask over his humanity in order the better to serve that humanity...
...The second form taken by this religious rejection of the world is silence, because the search for the Absolute has been attempted and failed...
...Such examples do indicate both the relevance of a milieu much more specific and particular than society as such (though clearly this plays its part too as an overall environment) and also the possibility of losing one's freedom, in some cases entering a vicious spiral very early in the process of life such that no human mercy or grace can save one or elicit one's free choice...
...Socialization makes us into unwitting subjects of the system just as psychiatrists are made into its unwitting agents...
...It is this view of socialization which links the experience of the family to politics, psychiatry to global issues, approaches to upbringing and pedagogical method to Vietnam...
...The schizophrenic within the family and within the wider group exists to conduct its tensions, to take the brunt of its "unlived living" and bear the weight of its crazy structure for the rest...
...The predominant style is not "honorable argument:" instead it is gnomic, testamental, and confessional...
...But first let us analyze, by way of example, the statement, "Much social science deepens the mystification...
...To utilize another phrase of Laing, it has given up the experience of politics in exchange for the "politics of experience...
...Laing is also an irrationalist in the sense that he proposes no means to achieve his vision, apart from offering vague hints about psychic subversion in the middle-range type of institution, such as the school and the university...
...It has been suggested, for example, that the British working class is a less "free" milieu than the middle class because it lacks the dramaturgical skills and appropriate "role distance" (in Goffman's sense) to exercise its freedom...
...As Laing himself might put it: a "happening" is the negation of the negation...
...It would also be worth showing that some element of mystification is inherent in every civilized social achievement, including the violence of socialized, rationalized, and sometimes civilized, in the state...
...It is in fact so affected by a degree of indecision and by a measure of self-indulgent irresponsibility (backed by fashionable psychologies) about its right to socialize, that it often neglects to give those firm, compassionate guidelines within the family and the school without which the child is a flailing ego...
...Presumably Laing is not objecting to the assumption that on the average and at the margin, the psychoanalyst is more experienced and in a sense more objective than the patient, and therefore must on occasion step back for a "review" on the basis of that experience, objectivity, and detachment...
...The abuse of politicians is one of the major forms of contemporary selfindulgence...
...This kind of man accepts the need for painful struggle and refuses to inveigh easily against the structures of reality, but instead employs the highest rational cunning to play those structures as far as they can be played: this is both a creative act of his own and an encounter with a strange, alien, recalcitrant otherness...
...New York: Pantheon, 1970), pp...
...but one can at least begin by pointing to the central assumption, derived from Rousseau, that man as man is originally innocent, and civilization, especially modern civilization, the focus of original sin...
...It is not a prime concern of the present essay to evaluate his psychiatric work, except insofar as the leading ideas of the psychiatric school he represents are connected with his political attitudes and also insofar as the professional perspectives deriving from psychiatric training of whatever school often seem to lead to sociological and political naivete...
...Naturally this attitude is in some tension with assertions of existential freedom...
...As Laing puts it, "Black on the canvas, silence on the screen, an empty white sheet of paper, are perhaps feasible...
...Perhaps one might even say that "one dies for the people" in that the rest achieve a kind of corrupt and desperate viability through the sufferings of the chosen one...
...The crux of the system is obedience resting on the generation of guilt and on the reflex of believing in the authorities...
...They, too, may be human...
...This obsessive pilgrimage toward the Absolute may result in a total rejection of all the way-stations where other people have rested on their journey, and in an excoriating contempt for their blindness...
...Unfortunately the term "attitudes," is only too appropriate, since we are confronted here by a psychological set that positively avoids careful analysis and treats the notion of fact as a treacherous bourgeois invention...
...The normal mode of socialization, terrorization into submission by love, repeats an endless spiral back through countless generations to the beginning...
...Since this is important, any exposition must include some reference to the religious elements found in Laing: our alienation from ecstasy and the problem of an original sin uniquely focused in capitalist society...
...This is the framework, these the plausible half- and quarter-truths which are major keys to the syndrome of attitudes found in Laing...
...The result is a disembodied self which may be lost in fantasy or engaged in a kind of dry "observation," or else may regard itself as essentially lost or destroyed...
...Whether our civilization is so hostile to this awareness as he maintains, so relentlessly secular, as compared with others, is open to doubt...
...2 The romantic anarchists proposed an end to politics, a generalized condemnation of Western industrial society which sometimes had religious or mystical overtones and betrayed more than a penchant for what lies behind the famous phrase "Civilization: its cause and cure...
...Laing's concentration on the group or on the society leads him to draw conclusions either from reading the social psychology of groups or from very abstract considerations of the nature of society...
...The flyleaves tell us that he graduated as a doctor in 1951 and became a psychiatrist in the army for two years...
...that way you won't necessarily be right but at least you won't inevitably be wrong...
...Consume more, live less," as one of the slogans has it...
...Now it is not clear how else moral perspectives can be derived in the first instance except from society, and it is even less clear that people do not, as they mature, partly transform what is so derived into a personal and critical perspective...
...At any rate, on the "soft" side of romantic anarchism, where R. D. Laing is mainly to be located, subjectivism, personalism, mys R. D. LAING: PSYCHIATRY & APOCALYPSE ticism, and creativity are in, whereas positivism and rationalism are out...
...You cannot talk with a man who throws his sincerity at you and who persistently implies that you and every other person who disagrees with him is a racialist, an anti-Semite, and a crass authoritarian...
...The situation in Vietnam is too appalling, the issues are too confused, the murderous intent on both sides is too typical of war at almost all times, for it to be used as a catchall riposte by those too lazy or too frenetic to engage in honorable argument...
...It is like a discussion arranged between a Pentecostalist in the pulpit and a Unitarian in the congregation: the convention within which the exchange takes place is set by the enthusiast, not by the inquirer...
...1, August 1968...
...This does not necessarily lead to withdrawals, but it is clearly potent with "mismatched interpretations, expectancies, attributions and counter-attributions," 13 and is particularly relevant to understanding the various circles of misunderstanding, desolation, fear, and corrosion into which husband and wife relations frequently fall...
...Them" currently comprise the Third World, the havenots, the exploited...
...But beyond Catholic mysticism there has been the attraction of experiential cults from Eastern religions, and of Zen, not to mention the various mind-expanding drugs which have simultaneously served to release weary souls from the chains of everyday technical rationality and from the bondage of industrial society...
...It can even claim to combine both, as in the slogan "creative vandalism...
...These are inevitably, and quite properly, conducted in a dubious half-light of more or less unhappy compromises...
...Once such a man has chosen a policy, he is within certain limits committed to it and indeed knows in advance that what he has chosen may acquire a momentum that will control him...
...The latter point is linked with the issue already mentioned in relation to physicalist methods: an executioner dealing with crime by the rope does not absolve himself by declaring that ethical judgments are not his business...
...Thus there is a hard Left as well as a soft one among the romantic anarchists, and its pedigree can be traced not only to Bakunin, but to Durutti's Barcelona and to Sorel's Reflections on Violence...
...He proposes no policies, articulates no alternatives, raises no queries about viability, weighs no costs and DAVID MARTIN advantages, assesses no immediate and remote consequences...
...Holy Communion—by sharing bread and wine—is a symbol and sometimes also a realization of a preliminary achievement in brotherhood and a pointer to the need for extending both its fellowship and the presence at the heart of that fellowship: but it cannot substitute for the pragmatic turmoil and administrative grind and cold calculation necessary for political action...
...It is they who— to take an image of Laing's—are the lonely "survivors" in a neocapitalist civilization which is condemned to swinish contentment...
...There is in Laing's writing not a single word suggesting that any virtue inheres in what is his own inheritance...
...That done, we may pass to an analysis of the broad syndrome of attitudes, and especially religious elements, embodied in Laing's work, notably as illustrated in The Politics of Experience...
...Super flumina Babylonis . . . the reference appears to be to capitalism or to Babylon: universalized, it is the essence of the religious awareness that "here we have no abiding city...
...All other types of society except his own have some kind of ontological root, something which may be admired, some kind of right to exist...
...There is no truth in mere knowledge, no truth in social forms, no truth in ourselves...
...The core of this objection has already been stated above insofar as it relates to the abdication of the social scientist from judgments of value and his silent implication in a supposed consensus...
...Perhaps Laing's position is best summarized in his own remark that one does 6 Cf., D. Cargello, From Psychoanalytic Naturalism to Phenomenological Anthropology (Daseinsanalyse...
...Without endorsing so gross a contrast it remains true, surely, that given milieus (within the overall repressiveness of society as conceived by Laing) do make freedom more or less accessible, so that the experience of a person in the one milieu may lead him or her to have that margin of desire to exercise freedom and therefore climb by beneficent spirals out of a psychological cul-de-sac...
...He may also legitimately restrict the degree of reciprocity and involvement which he allows himself, since he, too, has to survive...
...Psychiatry is the unwitting agent of a political operation against the individual, and the patients are thrown up and selected by a system of which psychiatrists are the malign solicitors...
...Herbert Read was one of the most attractive examples of those who lay within this band of feeling and attitude...
...His attempt at mad privacy is an effort to tell without being understood, to inform and communicate without giving anything away...
...Another point: mystique is not far removed from mysticism...
...This has meant that the romantic anarchism of the Left, particularly in its soft variant, has always included an interest in these religions with a weak component of rationalism...
...This is the general and by now familiar picture presented by the "soft Left," and it is the aim of this essay to locate the place of R. D. Laing within its broad syndrome of attitudes...
...176 and 129...
...For example, Laing's collaborator David Cooper refers to the schizophrenic as the author of the "totally gratuitous crazy act," and the once-for-all "happening" is precisely this: a negative symbol whose only point is its negation and which explodes violently into nothingness...
...He does not explicitly embrace ir rationalism, and indeed he uses the word "irrational" to stigmatize institutions and activities of which he disapproves...
...Violence cannot be seen through the sights of positivism" (Politics of Experience, p. 51) . This issue has been discussed in a thousand academic articles, and the proportion of social scientists accepting a crude positivism is very small, whether in denying the relevance of what Polanyi calls "personal knowledge" or in asserting an unqualified scientific objectivity, whether in dismissing value judgment as merely emotive or in refusing to acknowledge the imperatives that should operate on the scientist qua person as distinct from the special role taken up with respect to problems at a given analytic level...
...Global accusation, like libel and rumor, is easy: refutation, like art, is long and difficult...
...Ethical judgments will be none the less forceful for not being confused with scientific propositions...
...Yet sympathy for psychotics need not be linked to a modish contempt for politicians...
...Personally, I would agree with Laing that freedom is a universal option of humanity, but I would also want to know whether that affirmation, as stated by Laing, takes adequate account of the variation in its availability...
...Unless he appeals to contemporary Communist society as not implicated in such deformations, which seems an unlikely and certainly an unpersuasive recourse, he is saying that developed society as such is a universal context within which freedom is distorted...
...He has not adequately considered the possibility that—to quote him from a different context— his opponents may be people like himself, dressed differently...
...The former development is mostly gain, the latter almost entirely loss...
...Laing is claiming that his value judgments are rooted in his genuine experience as a human being, whereas those who disagree with him are the deluded facsimiles of oversuccessful socialization...
...That is not surprising...
...Laing is of the latter...
...The psychology of identifying a malevolent "Them," which he describes, is unusually well developed in his followers...
...He may even acquire a reputation among the cognoscenti for naive reasoning and dishonest appeals, simply because the public neither wishes to know his actual reasons nor would be willing to face the stark alternatives involved in that reasoning...
...He both asserts this as a universal truth about the human person as such and refers to the nature of capitalist society as being a nearuniversal social context in which that freedom is deformed...
...The contemporary Left, if very much more amiable, is marked above all by its preference for spiritual exhibitionism...
...of current values by defining madness within the terms set by his society, thus failing to observe the partial responsibility of the mechanisms and institutions approved by that society for the genesis of mental disorder, overlooking the valid protest lurking behind the supposed abnormality, and assisting the patient to acquiesce again in the mad routines of supposedly normal people...
...Confronted by one's own humanity and others', there is only one possibility: a relaxed compassion toward oneself and other people...
...They are the blind led by the blind...
...Our school systems are attempting to achieve a balance between required structures and individuality: if they err it is sometimes in taking the sentimentalities deriving from Rousseau too seriously, in acceding too easily to callow cults of spontaneity...
...It may even happen that such an attitude enters into a scientist's general moral perspective...
...One takes no risks, because one believes that advantage will always be taken, and one may avoid any contact not only by secrecy but by an overcompliance, which also expresses the sense of other people's ontological weight poised threateningly against one's own insubstantiality...
...L L RING WAS BORN in 1927 in Glasgow, educated at a grammer school and at Glasgow University...
...Vide Freud...
...Indeed it is perhaps central to Laing's position that modern society attempts to turn every child into a conformist and in so doing deprives the child of its potentialities and creativity, devastating its being with the chains we choose to call love...
...The first begins with a quotation from Laing by Jules Henry: "If all through school the young are provoked to question the Ten Commandments, the sanctity of revealed religion, the foundations of a patriotism, the profit motive, the two-party system, monogamy, the laws of incest, and so on...
...21 and 38...
...The best way into such R. D. LAING: PSYCHIATRY & APOCALYPSE an exposition is to concentrate on these attitudes as illustrated in The Politics of Experience, and to preface them with a brief look at Laing's contribution to The Dialectics of Liberation entitled, "The Obvious...
...Since he firmly indicates no concrete milieu where deformations do not occur, one suspects that his category of society is not limited at all, even when it appears to have special reference to capitalist society: it is society tout court in all its historical manifestations hitherto which is at fault...
...also 1. Sedgwick "Laing's clangs," New Society, January 14, 1970...
...They are regarded as the prisoners of themselves and the goalers of the rest of us...
...Just as a psychiatrist may proceed with a crude dichotomy of the individual and society which ignores the variable inter mediate institutional network from society to society, so philosophers in the pursuit of genuine individual freedom despise the variations in stabilized liberties...
...Laing argues that at a certain point in the process of explanation some psychoanalysts cease to make their observations within the context of mutual exchange between persons and assume a one-sided superiority of objective external judgment toward the condition of the patient as if he were a mere biological organism...
...Since he seems not personally to have rejected the family, this suggests that some families in certain circumstances are better than others...
...New York: Schocken, 1966...
...But the analogy is very partial, and in any case methods do not need to be physicalist for the essential point to be made that the psychoanalyst may act as an agent 7 R. D. Laing, The Divided Self (London: Penguin, 1965...
...One thinker who illustrates these trends is Binswanger,s and he is only one of a number of theorists to whom Laing is indebted...
...Perhaps such a man is a kind of genuine human being: willing to accept what it will be like to live with himself and with the obloquy of those not in his shoes should the worst happen...
...In the present century in Britain it is possible to trace a continuous counterpoint between rationalism and romanticism within the non-Communist Left...
...This is a persistent theme to which one may return later...
...The old Left at least proposed a method of bringing dreams to fruition: when that method proved a nightmare the Left was reduced to the dream again and to variants of peyote...
...In a way one feels that Laing prefers to concentrate on the grandiose perversity to the neglect of these unhappy mundane truths...
...44, et seq., on "hierarchies of mediations...
...S S UCH A BRIEF ACCOUNT, however inadequate, does allow us to move on to an analysis of the underlying personal attitudes of Laing, since the fact that he sets a particular type of "abnormal" experience within a social context, coupled with a suspicion of the psychiatrist as representing an undesirable society, allows him to question both the ab 13 Interpersonal Perception (1966), pp...
...A histrionic manner is acquired which the analyst finds increasingly real to him until he feels lost outside schizophrenic company...
...And here, of course, one encounters a cheapness of effect which in Laing goes with this kind of intellectual economizing...
...These basic themes are simply found on a larger scale in The Politics of Experience: white Western society, its governmental system, its methods of upbringing, its science and its scholarship are part of a tissue of delusion which is responsible for stereotyped divisions into "us" and "them," and is to blame for violence and counterviolence...
...others have no imperative need for masks in any area of their lives, perhaps because they have chosen just those areas of social life where the discipline of social relations can be lax and easy, where few exigencies constrict and few responsibilities congeal...
...The appeal of this to the kind of young person looking for quick global answers, impatient with the requirements of careful study, and armed with a drifting paranoid suspicion of all authority, is obvious...
...It is "obvious" to Laing that what is "irrational" in the individual can be understood in the context of the family, and that the irrationality of the family is intelligible within its "encompassing networks," and so on up to the society itself and the total social world system...
...Socialization is the first and primal violence against the person which can only be met by projecting violence on to others, acting violently toward them and justifying oneself by attributing violence to them...
...8 Occasionally even the overstatement is avoided...
...The point about the relevance of the social context is also genuinely helpful, but it suffers like almost all psychiatric excursions into sociology from excessive universalism...
...In its origins the Left was both the party of humanity and the party of reason, 1 The Dialectics of Liberation, D. Cooper, ed...
...At the Tavistock Institute he concentrated initially on research on schizophrenia and the family...
...The following paragraphs from Laing are perhaps the quintessence of both style and attitude...
...Here is the second quotation: And immediate experience of, in contrast to belief or faith in, a spiritual realm of demons, spirits, powers, Dominions, Principalities, Seraphim and Cherubim, the Light, is even more remote...
...In short, if democracy and a free press are less genuine than they claim, the best answer is to abolish free elections and ban open comment...
...What he says is this...
...Essentially the politics of experience are no adequate guide to the experience of politics...
...The basic unit of interaction is dyadic, "I" and "You," and what happens in all the possible combinations of "persons" in the family or beyond it can be partly illustrated in the basic interaction of personal perspectives...
...Laing himself contradicts his own thesis...
...4 R. D. Laing, The Politics of Experience (London: Penguin, 1967...
...So pessimistic is this approach that hope is only thought possible by calling in a Third World to redress the balance of the two old ones...
...There are, of course, innumerable varieties of romantic anarchism, and not all of this is harmless artistic alienation: irrationalism can embrace both the mystique of creation or the mystique of destruction and nihilism...
...The basic stratagem of this style of thinking is: if you want to know what to believe, find out what is the current consensus and turn it upside down...
...The psychiatrist is not so much the objective representative of health as the corrupt solicitor, the secret agent of society whose modus operandi is tainted by precisely the ills he attempts to heal...
...Moreover, a doctor may recognize how marginal the superiority of his experience and how frail and partial his objectivity while not wanting to trumpet the fact to patients who are often specialists in using such admissions R. D. LAING: PSYCHIATRY & APOCALYPSE as means of avoiding whatever fragments of the truth the analyst has managed to acquire...
...Perhaps the exploration of the personal and professional defects which psychoanalysts share with the rest of us has less eclat than accusing them of misconceived ontology, and of treating persons as things...
...however I do know that you know I like you...
...Laing does, of course, speak of the socialization provided by the family, and very occasionally by the school, as agents of the general socializing process emanating from global society...
...And Laing himself, through a residual Presbyterianism, is unwilling to assert that he is one of the Elect— "the survivors...
...and I do not know that you do know that I do not know that you like me...
...We are all murderers and prostitutes...
...This article appears in The New Left, a book edited by Maurice Cranston (copyright © by Maurice Cranston, 1970) and published this spring by the Library Press, Freeport, New York...
...Incidentally, it is interesting that this assumption links Laing with another large success in the field of commercial publishing: the type of egregious ethological speculation represented by The Human Zoo and The Naked Ape...
...These constitute a kind of spiral based on how "I" look in the view of "the other...
...By always referring to institutions in general, his work is a triumph of masterful evasion...
...The points just made have been related to the variable cultural context of personal freedom and of institutionalized liberty, but they also can relate to Laing's general at tempt to bring the social context into account as contributing to explanations of psychological phenomena...
...The Truth itself was not available (or only intermittently) and, since all the mediate intervening half-truths have been rejected, nothing can be said...
...While he rightly criticizes Sartre for attacking sociology on the basis of fragments from Lewin (a social psychologist) and Kardiner (a "cultural" psychoanalyst), Laing is engaged in precisely the same exercise himself...
...All that can be attempted here is a brief summary of Laing's methodological prescriptions, and some indication of his major substantive ideas as a psychiatrist...
...The more extreme forms of a religious rejection of the world often result in ;4 David Holbrook's criticism of Laing—"Madness to Blaine Society," in Twentieth Century, 2, 1969— points to the seductive charm of blaming "society" for everything...
...This he will never be able openly to explain, and may have to accept the mortification of having to claim that a tiny victory was a great one...
...No doubt that fact provides an additional attraction for the temperamentally heterodox...
...two apparently contradictory responses both illustrated in Laing: the first is a flailing violence toward all mundane structures, all those things which for others may mediate elements of truth and personal being...
...To get through to the patient he adopts an exaggerated pose as a fellow-sufferer which requires him to blow up the oppressiveness of social situations and act contemptuously to ordinary common life and the normal sources of identity...
...Such skill in understanding interpersonal relations does not of course validate his contentions vis-avis the geneticist-constitutional school with respect to schizophrenia, except insofar as he may quite rightly insist on the provisional hypothetical character of their approach, nor does such skill validate the naive set of attitudes informing his political comment...
...1° This is equally evident in his plea for an evaluative stance and an enveloping "total" perspective within which social science may operate...
...The child has gradually to be converted to a treason against itself by making a pact with the madness of society...
...It is arguable that their analysis and their verbal rituals were as stiff, predictable, and stereotyped as a Punch and Judy show, but the outline was devastatingly clear, and their political responses were sometimes angled (however woodenly) to what was actually happening and even to what could actually be done at a given time...
...etc., etc...
...Lacking either a developed sociology or an articulated politics, these anarchists tended to concentrate on the liberation of the repressed psychology produced by civilization and its discontents, or on the achievement of that liberation through sex, art, and aesthetic education...
...The logic of Laing's position is ultimately violent and totalitarian in spite of (or because of) its extreme libertarian gloss...
...Admittedly it is often an orthodox, conventional mask: yet it could be that behind the disguise lies more humanity than in those who affect no disguises, whose appearance of open-hearted innocence depends on the proclivity for unmasking other people...
...Having originally seen the patient as an oracle, the analyst becomes oracular...
...We project our own unjust violence onto them, are surprised at their just violence against us, and so feel justified in destroying Vietnam...
...All that is well said, though those of us who are not doctors or psychoanalysts can only wonder that those who are should discover so painfully what the rest of us are not tempted to forget: that people are, after all, people...
...and such a context prevents those who adopt it from an ethical response when violence against men and animals is perpetrated...
...Now there is a tiny grain of truth here, which is that a person specializing at a given level of scientific interest such as biochemistry may become so professionally deformed as to forget that what he studies is also a human being, may indeed refuse to acknowledge that in principle results may need to be reassimilated within a wider view that includes the specifically human...
...The main methodological prescriptions of Laing are broadly of a kind with which the present writer is in sympathy...
...in the historical dramas constructed by the hard Left the bourgeois played a definable role in the predictable mechanics of the plot, for the romantic anarchists he was simply the object of ritual cursing, an all-purpose stand-in for Beelzebub...
...161-64...
...But while he refers to persons and to groups and to society, there is little particularized social and historical location through which the universal processes have to be channeled if they are to be truly explanatory...
...First, socialization, including moral and political socialization, is a violence against personal experience because it is socially derived and imposed rather than individually achieved...
...There is no more important task in defending the disciplines of civilization against writers such as Laing than the rehabilitation of the political vocation...
...Yet it is an emphasis, and at times so emphatic and careless as to be absurd...
...On the continuum running from pragmatic articulated politics to the gratuitous crazy act Laing and Cooper stand about midway, but their sympathies clearly turn toward the latter end of that continuum...
...We think "they" are to blame...
...Those who do not view patients as persons depersonalize themselves...
...The schizophrenic is knocking obscurely on the walls of the sunken submarine, terrified of the dangers involved in the upward route to safety and conscious of the steady diminution of the possibility of life within...
...But whereas 2 See the analysis of the political attitudes of rationalists like Russell and Kingsley Martin to the prewar crises in my Pacifism (London: Routledge, 1965...
...They find it easy to indulge in generalized abuse of politicians, easy to sympathize with the psychotic and to regard him as less "estranged from reality" than the politician...
...and the "spiral" of potential misunderstanding informing all interlocking personal relations, but most dramatically of all perhaps, the dyad of husband and wife...
...Laing contributed to those records and that book a piece entitled "The Obvious," and the Introduction by Cooper illustrates how closely linked their thinking is...
...For example, there is no necessary relation between stepping into an objective role for the purpose of "judgment" and losing the reciprocity of a relationship...
...14 Cf., R. D. Laing, H. Phillipson, and A. R. Lee, "The Spiral of Perspectives," New Society, November 10, 1966...
...Here one must turn to a group of ideas and attitudes that provide a bridge passage between his psychiatric stance and his politics: they are contained in the notion of the "mystification of violence...
...The old Left did at least propose an analysis and practiced a policy in relation to concrete politics...
...A philosophical detour that articulates what one always knew is not a waste of time, and the emphasis achieved by Laing in so doing is important...
...So much contemporary protest of the kind Laing admires seems to consist of precisely these rituals and exhibitions executed by those who have no access to the idea of cost and are therefore unwilling to pay the administrative and personal costs of their gospels...
...Alternatively it may be self-destructive because it has lost any sense of the personal right to be alive, or the ability to operate with a sense of what is due to one, even (say) the right to occupy a chair...
...That is as true of politics as it is of person-to-person relations...
...4 This is the style and the atmosphere...
...They've got something...
...Consider the following proposition: that R. D. LAING: PSYCHIATRY & APOCALYPSE the highest moral responsibility could conceivably reside in a civil servant, or a politician at the ministry of defense, who uses the coolest rational calculation to tread that narrow edge which is marginally closer to survival than all the alternatives...
...When earlier in this essay I located Ronald Laing on the fringes of the irrationalist Left there was one sense perhaps in which it was untrue...
...With the erosion of a proletarian Communism, its confinement to institutional rigidity or its continuing commitment to Stalinoid deformations, one is left with a salon Communism, whereby the Ortega y Gassets of the Left join forces with their conservative opposite numbers on the other side of high table in a lament for the regrettable tendencies of mass society...
...Socialization, for him, is the local agent of that canalized institutional violence which is located in central government and which stalks society cloaked in the language and unspoken assumptions of the mass media...
...For example, the psychoanalytic profession is not only expert at the game of "tails I win, heads you lose," not only curiously indifferent to external fact such as perfectly genuine threats and difficulties, not only often oblivious to ongoing social situations, but it also protects itself far more than mere personal or professional survival requires in terms of a group of ploys designed to cover the extent of professional failure...
...It appears here with the kind permission of the publisher...
...We are enabled to see the Third World as "them" by our own misconception of what we wrongly believe to be the Western desire for peace and by our faith in its vaunted democracy...
...Just as there is no necessary relation between elements of objectivity assumed for purposes of review and the loss of genuine reciprocity, so there is no necessary connection between either of these things and treating persons as biological entities, although there may be a necessary connection in reverse, insofar as those with a biologically and neurologically reductionist approach must find it difficult to achieve a full recognition of the equality involved in person-to-person relationships...
...and to the extent that they are invaded by religion then either each shifty pragmatic compromise is papered over by religious legitimation or intimations of the New Jerusalem drive l'homme moyen sensuel relentlessly and intolerantly toward a predestined goal...
...Occasionally he bothers to state this position in a qualified and commonsense form,'' but at other times the assault on his own profession must seem so extreme as to prevent fellow doctors from hearing what he has to say...
...There is a subsidiary point that arises here and has some relevance to Laing's politics insofar as those people who are burdened with a metaphysic of freedom frequently ignore or despise the concrete variations in the institutionalization of liberties...
...When one considers the nature and constraints of politics there is perhaps in politicians a kind of heroism...
...ultimately perfected biochemical and neuro-physiological techniques, and carefully delineated instinctive units of behaviour, will account "correlatively" for every possible "psychic drive" that can be thought up...
...Roles, institutions, and everyday experience are rejected because what they mediate is not the Truth, because they partly mask what they partly reveal...
...The main writings of Laing are The Divided Self (1960), The Self and Others (1961, rev...
...Not even the relief of an autobiographical exposition of his motives is open to him: he can only advise and act...
...Yet here are real dangers to which Laing points, though it is regrettable that some of his criticisms are not more specific...
...Yet at the same time one's greatest desire is to be allowed to be, and to be understood and accepted...
...For people of this mind, all delimitation of issues, all academic division of scholarly R. D. LAING: PSYCHIATRY & APOCALYPSE labor, and all attempts to view phenomena objectively from a variety of specialized perspectives at different analytic levels are part of a policy of divide in order to rule...
...Such a method cannot compete with a rhetorical either/or, with grossly simplified alternatives, with slogans used as an excuse for not thinking...
...Let us at least nominate them as competitors in the ontological stakes, alongside those traditionally easy winners, the artists and intellectuals...
...Laing will not engage in rational argumentation because that is not the way converts are made...
...One is the simple stereotyping of "us" and "them," encapsulated in vast assertions about what people in Western societies think: a grandiose simplification of all issues achieved by stigmatizing whole societies as solidary elements in "the Enemy...
...It is a kind of compliment...
...Each of the wider systems pervades the smaller subsystems...
...between, that is, the argued politics and articulated policies of a Bertrand Russell and the gentle apolitical withdrawals of the gemeinschaftliche tliche anarchist...
...If, in addition, you hope for a hint as to what is right, listen to those whom society stigmatizes as abnormal...
...The other characteristic is the repetition on the macroscale of what he describes as inherent in the experience of schizophrenia on the microscale...
...However, in such instances he rarely tells us what he means by "irrational," and one can only assume he uses the word simply as a stand-in for emotional disapproval...
...repression can be labelled the maintenance of civilized order...
...In short, the denunciatory style of radical psychiatrists touched by existential philosophy is likely to be indiscriminately global, whereas there are, after all, seven circles both in hell and in heaven...
...a denunciation is not a viable policy...
...confined to the pleasures of consumption without appropriate refinement of palate...
...Presumably what he is saying amounts to an assertion that the interpenetration of levels of analysis from physics and chemistry to DAVID MARTIN existential philosophy does not destroy the independent validity of each level in its own terms or render them reducible to each other...
...He also collaborated with Aaron Esterson in Sanity, Madness and the Family, vol...
...in certain circumstances men gradually conform to their own peaceful self-portraits and are pressed by opinion to implement their misleading idealizations...
...However, this will clearly have its impact on what one considers therapeutically and ethically appropriate techniques...
...Clearly a discussion of this latter could develop into a full-scale sociological critique of psychiatric perspectives on social processes which is not appropriate here but is clearly much required...
...These ploys do not have very much to do with treating people as things or with biological reductionism or anything so grandiosely perverse, but are simply the verbal mechanisms for coping practically with patients, for the reduction of proliferating involvements and for the safeguarding of medical prestige...
...Conversely another person may lack just that margin and by parallel vicious spirals reach a point where he is literally without option—where he may say, quite correctly, there is no way out...
...I am not here objecting to the use of mechanical or biological analogies as such, nor indeed to the intentional act of seeing man as a complex machine or animal...
...In short there are those who see human institutions as dykes canalizing a raw, variable, morally ambiguous human potential into the fructifying ways of civilization, and those who see those institutions as barriers to a flood of inherent generosity, innate humanity, and abounding creativity...
...This is perhaps the place to say that his analyses of interpersonal relations, either dyadic ones such as those between husband and wife or within the overall nexus of the family,12 strike me as rich in insight...
...25-26 of the Introduction to Reason and Violence, in some paragraphs where he is discussing both Sartre's position and his own on the limits of psychoanalysis...
...London: Penguin, 1968), pp...
...On the contrary, it is the duty of a home or school proudly and exultantly to induct a child into that incredibly rich human achievement called civilization, and into those social, spiritual, and intellectual disciplines on which it is built...
...Yet no doubt we do need to think about these matters: to establish as part of a carefully articulated phenomenology and ontology the validity of personal life qua personal life, independent of our unreflective awareness of it or as imparted to us through the partly unspoken assumptions of humanist and religious traditions...
...Perhaps its possibilities are best illustrated by a passage from John Gerassi in The Dialectics of Liberation (p...
...He knows it includes certain costs, may in extreme circumstances begin to include further costs that may be appalling, but when that stage has been reached are probably (but not certainly) less appalling than the alternative costs...
...Indeed, in Laing we have constant shifts between four main modes of the religious consciousness: mystical experience of the coincidentia oppositorum, intense prophetic violence, withdrawal into silence, into institutional and intellectual dissolution, and total reprobation...
...Meanwhile the person, his purposes and choices (his "project") have disappeared: his ongoing mental life has been explained out, stultified with "fetishised pseudo-irreducibles...
...However much marred by the silliness of great minds, it assessed certain kinds of situations, and proposed what looked like remedies...
...Maybe such trials are reserved as necessities for those who specialize in the science of persons, since they, it seems, have a special facility (not to say training) in forgetting what the rest of humanity remembers without thinking about it...
...is preserving his being from intrusion...
...90-91 of The Politics of Experience, where he suggests his main purpose is to loosen any assumption that the psychiatrist is right and the patient wrong...
...He may describe very well a highly generalized social process such as the mechanisms of gossip and scandal by which everybody is caught up in a situation that thereby acquires its own autonomous momentum because each person is primarily concerned about what the other thinks...
...not have schizophrenia, in the same way as one has the measles, one is schizophrenic...
...Indeed he may have to face the obloquy of seeming to acquiesce in and abet just such a martyrdom...
...But he gives almost no impression whatever of the hierarchy of status and class, the pro= cesses of aspiration, of mobility and peergroup formation, and all the vastly differentiated milieus in terms of cultural pattern from one area to another, town and country, north and south...
...Both the personal relationship and "the person" disappear...
...In other words, they escape into the boltholes of partial sanity because they cannot bear too much sanity, just as others escape into partial madness because they have an inkling how partial the sanity found in those boltholes really is...
...22-23...
...The question is: which...
...As he puts it: "We who are half alive, living in the often fibrillating heartland of a senescent capitalism...
...For some people destruction must precede cleansing...
...RONALD LAING MUST BE ACCOUNTED one of the main contributors to the theoretical and rhetorical armory of the contemporary Left...
...Not indeed that mankind should or can give up its dreams, but without an articulated machinery for the dream to be brought on stage it remains generalized in proclamations, embedded in rituals, and confined to what can be achieved by sympathy and goodwill: in short, it remains religious...
...Laing's choice of visionary viewpoint is allied to Eliot's "Mankind cannot bear very much reality," but without his compassion...
...He also suggests that in treating schizophrenia the analyst can come to play out for himself the meanings he desperately attributes to the patient...
...Although religious experience can achieve a general prophetic denunciation of a given social condition it is a poor guide to day-today politics...
...His method consists in random accusation and sloganized virulence, which destroys the possibility of genuine discussion...
...How beastly the bourgeois is...
...The patient may even, in particular instances and in relation to particular aspects, have superior insight...
...As domains of experience become more alien to us, we need greater and greater open-mindedness even to conceive of their existence...
...In David Cooper's words, DAVID MARTIN Most people who are called mad and who are socially victimized by virtue of that attribution...
...Thus Herbert Read once declared that in the last analysis he stood with Pascal and Simone Weil and not their opponents, and the very names cited indicate that Catholicism itself has never been quite certain about this particular margin...
...Such a plea rests on an objection to positivism, the very word "positivism" (or "vulgar positivism") being a "booword" in certain circles...
...This is close to the Quaker experience...
...Neither the family nor this group ought to be regarded as a pathological organism, since the problem must be viewed as an intelligible outcome of people's intentions and actions (praxis), however much the resultant processes acquire an autonomy of their own...
...come from family situations in which there is a desperate need to find some scapegoats, someone...
...I: The Families of Schizophrenics (1964), and with H. Phillipson and A. R. Lee in Interpersonal Perception (1966) . Both Laing and David Cooper helped to organize the Congress on the Dialectics of Liberation, at the Round House, Chalk Farm, in 1967, an event that resulted in 23 gramophone records and a book of the same name edited by Cooper...
...Social salvation is not possible by individual conversion nor by seizing the state apparatus, but by working outward from the middle range of institutions, e.g., factories and schools...
...The contrast between "soft" and "hard" Left needs to be related to a further contrast between the rational Left and the irrational Left before the first approximate placing of Laing on the map of left-wing ideology is possible...
...and the best response to militaristic tendencies is the total militarization of everybody...
...By the contemporary Left is meant that soft variant of the utopian urge which has jettisoned the Marx of Capital for the spiritual exploration of alienation, which acknowledges that capitalism "delivers the goods to an ever increasing part of the population," 1 and therefore concentrates its attention on the salvation of the all-too-common man from what Marcuse calls "one dimensionality...
...Now in Laing's view this is a condition, or rather an experience, to be investigated not primarily on an individual basis but within a social context, notably the context of family dynamics, and these constitute a complete pattern of interaction, processes and structure...
...Whatever he does now will acquire no honor in the world of those easily achieved martyr doms undertaken in "progressive" causes...
...normality of the supposedly mentally ill and the normality of the society which is the context of the illness...
...It is more economical and more effective to say, "Meanwhile the Vietnam war goes on...
...He collaborated with his fellow psychiatrist David Cooper in Reason and Violence (1964), which examines Sartre's principal writings between 1950 and 1960...
...It is this fact that should be the basis of any critical appraisal of the type of politico-religious awareness found in Laing...
...Most human beings do not require to be reassured that a person is a person by a long detour through the more verbose, pretentious, and obscure German philosophers in the existentialist and phenomenological tradition...
...The contrast between the rational and the irrational Left has, of course, a long history, though the contemporary drift to irrationalism and to subjectivism is particularly strong...
...H H AVING DISCUSSED certain aspects of Laing's methodological prescriptions, one may very briefly note what are his substantive ideas in the field of psychiatry...
...This is .a simple diagnosis, easily achieved by standing an equally simple diagnosis on its head...
...New York: Ballantine), p. 60...
...In any case, a more appropriate intellectual economy might have been employed, since what is being said is even more simple DAVID MARTIN than it appears...
...Patient refutation has to build up on a basis of carefully verified evidence, has to define its terms (whereas Laing simply prefers to use them), and eventually to build up -a cumulative impression...
...These are mostly and perhaps appropriately addressed to psychoanalysts rather than to social scientists, and are not so much new in psychoanalysis as inadequately disseminated among the general public interested in such issues...
...The word religious is not used figuratively: it happens to be accurate...
...14 These are, if you like, the basic notions: schizophrenia as a problem of personal ontology and threats to the affirmation of personal being...
...And while it would be better to regard ecstasy as suprarational rather than irrational, there is in Laing's whole style a substitution of ecstasy for argument and a disinclination to build up a sequence of ordered points, supported by carefully collected evidence, qualified in respect of this issue or that...
...There can be no taking apart of Humpty-Dumpty even in order to put him together again: the question is, as Humpty-Dumpty himself said, "Who is master...
...D. H. Lawrence, the archetypal contrast to Russell, provides another exemplar...
...It is in milieus which invoke visitation by indiscriminate ecstasy that Laing's writings have their provenance, and it is in a period characterized by Aleister Crowley redivivus that they resonate...
...Only that which is his own constitutes a kind of delusion, a mass of subhumanity, suffering from ontological weightlessness...
...If the self is bent on selfdestruction it may do so because what has been destroyed is then eternally safe...
...you like me but I do not know that you like me...
...One must be silent concerning that which cannot be spoken...
...Second, Laing argues that to regard animals and humans in a given scientific context as (e.g...
...The crucial point for criticism of Laing is the contrast between his politics of experience and the experience of politics...
...For Laing, a central element in the broader task of "demystification" is an attempt to "demystify" violence, and the essence of this task is to recover access to that direct experience which socialization so successfully violates and destroys...
...What Russell proposed still retained an affinity with the attitude of the hard Left in being at least a kind of politics...
...the "mad" person as essentially "bearing" the condition of the group...
...Holbrook himself describes this as an essential self-indulgence according well with the attitude "I'm this way because society...
...Indeed, where he appeals to an alternative type of society he actually looks back to periods notorious for their deformation of the possibility of freedom, actually postulating in one instance a decline over the past thousand years...
...It was thus susceptible to criticism...
...From 1961 to 1963 he held a fellowship of the Foundations Fund for Research in Psychiatry...
...They "scurry into roles, statuses, identities, interpersonal relations...
...There is no answer to a grain of truth eked out by indiscriminate misrepresentation except a disciplined understanding...
...British society, no doubt through a concatenation of favorable circumstances, has been relatively successful in the institutionalization of liberties, yet Laing's criticisms presumably apply to it with equal vigor as to anywhere else, and, since he lives here, with added emotional violence...
...DAVID MARTIN best represented in The Divided Self, and his politics...
...There are several different points encapsulated here, and some confusion...
...From Freud to Binswanger," in The Human Context, vol...
...Thus we have two universals, the universality of freedom and the universal repressiveness of society as such...
...In The Politics of Experience the viewpoint expressed is religious not only in the chapter concerned with "transcendental experience" but throughout...
...Let us take Laing's wholly acceptable remark about men qua men ultimately being free, choosing as well as "chosen...
...1, no...
...This need not be the absolute assumption characteristically made (say) by a consultant in relation to biological disease, since the patient is always himself experienced in what it is to be a human being and often acquires insight comparable in kind if not usually in degree to that possessed by the analyst...
...nothing but a public life and an "insane" commitment to politics...
...No evidence is DAVID MARTIN cited, just projections about what people in the disapproved societies are projecting about "them...
...The difference in psychiatry is that it is the death of the soul" (The Dialectics of Liberation, p. 19...
...By methodological prescriptions is meant not so much therapeutic techniques as the fundamental therapeutic strategy and personal stance taken up by the analyst in consequence of his basic assumptions about the nature of the human entity and about the status of the notion of "person...
...Can we do more than sing our sad and bitter songs of disillusion and defeat...
...1969), and The Politics of Experience (1967), which consists largely of miscellaneous writings from the years 1964 67...
...Insofar as psychoanalysts do take up biological reductionism, Laing is surely right in pointing out that it explains all and explains nothing: It explains all in the sense that...
...11 It is one of the major achievements of social science to loose itself from the bonds of ethical judgments and global metaphysics, 10 D. Cooper and R. D. Laing, Reason and Violence (1964), p. 22...
...This spiral backwards is the precondition of our projecting a world composed of "us" and "them" in which the hatefulness of "them" is ourselves seen in the mirror...
...This violence against the individual is paralleled by violence on the societal scale: while the microsystem selects an individual, the macrosystem selects "them...
...there would, says Laing, "be such creativity that society would not know where to turn...
...3 Love is the path through permissiveness to discipline: and through discipline, only too often, to betrayal of self...
...W W ITH WORLD ENOUGH AND TIME, it would be worthwhile indicating just how grossly Laing exaggerates the pressure of socialization on the child in the democratic West as compared with almost any other period or type of society...
...to take on the disturbance of each of the others, and, in some sense, suffer for them...
...biochemical complexes is equivalent to a denial of their true nature as animals and persons...
...Presumably he is also saying that reductionist assumptions lurking in the medical mind lead doctors to resort more frequently than is appropriate to drugs and to physicalist methods of dealing with particular problems, such as prefrontal surgery and electric treatment...
...To meet another person and communicate with him is to acknowledge the other's free existence and thus open up the possibility of the other treating one as a mere object...
...As the consequences of his choice accumulate, he becomes totally immersed in fending off the worst, and this may mean the death of his personality...
...s Some of what Laing means by love may correspond with the situation noted by D. Cooper in Psychiatry and Anti-Psychiatry (London: Tavistock, and New York: Barnes & Noble, 1967), where a mother makes statements suggesting independence and by gestures indicates that she is afraid of any attempt to implement the suggestion...
...DAVID MARTIN This is perhaps more a complaint about psychiatry as such than about Laing, but it does indicate why the jeremiads and lamentations in which he engages refer so much and so indiscriminately to "the society," "the family," "the school," and so on...
...not at all, it is we who are to blame in the world...
...The politician, however, has chosen a role where exigency and responsibility demand a mask at nearly all times...
...And similarly scientific propositions will not gain by being worked up and then stuffed as a mediate element in some totalizing synthesis, even one continuously constituted and reconstituted...
...My thesis is limited to the contention that the theory of man as person loses its way if it falls into an account of man as a machine or man as an organismic system of processes...
...This leads in two different directions: one is to establish the relevance of social context in any explanatory model of behavior and the other involves a philosophical issue insofar as the positivistic abdication from value judgments prevents one from seeing how the psychoanalyst is in his whole mode of operation expressing and executing the values of society...
...So total a rejection, so wholehearted a separating out of the self from the body of society, so extraordinary a fear of becoming reattached to it by fiendish subtleties, looks like a curious analogue of the self hating what is most truly its own...
...His highest achievement will be a tiny victory, his normal achievement just to survive...
...The state, the church, the government, scholarship and science—authority and authorities —all are partners in such a morass of delusion that almost nothing can be truly known: we can only trust something deeper than ourselves, and it is most obvious that this is most hidden...
...There are indeed certain situations where the total truth is the grossest violence and where the question is always: what is the most responsible and compassionate proportion of truth and delusion...
...Masked (or "mystified") violence is often a step forward in a peaceable direction...
...They are allied to a stress on the need for transcendence, which is in part a range of experience akin to mystical illumination, which modern society is held to inhibit and denigrate and which is also an ability to see beyond the confines of one-dimensionality to another mode of social life...
...L L AING'S SECOND MAIN POINT with respect to methodological prescription concerns the relevance of the social context in interpreting individual psychology...
...The result is an experience of "chaotic non-entity" whereby verbal expression acquires a quite bizarre and obscure coherence and in which the obscurity is deepened further because the schizophrenic 12 As in Interpersonal Perception (London: Tavi stock, 1966...
...This is an important point, however much overstated...
...His comments on sociology contain very occasional slanting references to Parsons and Durkheim, but any serious acquaintance with the vast literature on the explanation of all the varied institutional patterns of modern society, or for that matter with the equally enormous literature discussing what are among his major interests—objectivity, internal personal knowledge, etc.—seem entirely lacking...
...S ONE PROCEEDS to document the Laing-A ian position one can hardly help noticing two characteristics in his own work which illustrate his own analysis of what constitutes a fundamentally irrational view of the world...
...This looks like an unfortunate example of the spiral perspectives in which Laing is himself a specialist...
...There is nothing within which the irrationality of the world may be made intelligible, unless it be God, and perhaps He is mad too...
...It would take too long...
...As Laing says, "It is only through the discovery of a freedom, a choice of selffunctioning in the face of all determinations, conditioning, fatedness, that we can attain the comprehension of a person in his full reality...
...Gerassi presents as an alternative to Stalinism something exemplified in Cuba, where "one way to guarantee that their people are genuinely free is not elections, is not free press, is not all the trappings of the so-called political democracy that we have, but simply to arm their people...
...And in this process the schizophrenic may be the one who cannot suppress his instincts enough to perform the much-solicited treason...
...Roman Catholicism is an allowed option, not because it is irrationalist (clearly it is not) but on account of its symbolic richness, its partial dissociation from industrial civilization, and its margin of mystical experience...
...In the demonology of those who aspire to be real human beings (and who so often inflict their humanity indiscriminately on others) politicians are the archetypes of the straw man, drained of all ontological root...
...Men do attempt to delude themselves and others...
...It is a curious consummation to the metaphysics of freedom...
...Indeed, there must be some assumption of superiority which the analyst will take up in his role as specialist in psychological dynamics, otherwise he is simply interacting with the other person...
...Here the Quaker experience mutates back to the characteristic Calvinist experience: the total reprobation in which man as man is uni R. D. LAING: PSYCHIATRY & APOCALYPSE versally implicated...
...Speech is an impropriety and the structured or prepared speech is a blasphemous attempt at order when no order is possible...
...So much for mere external biography...
...You have to love them to get them to do that...
...A succinct statement of his position is to be found on pp...
...Many children rightly suspect that absence of discipline is absence of love...
...Humpty-Dumpty may lie shattered on the floor...
...In any case, many people accept the disciplines that require a mask in a certain limited area of their life, say, their profession, but are able to relax into simple humanity in every other sphere of their life...
...Yet in this competition for ontological supremacy perhaps even the politicians and the bureaucrats have a chance...
...In schizophrenia the self is "out of the body," and both wishes and fears to be reintegrated with it...
...For obvious reasons: if he did, the whole visionary edifice would collapse like the baseless fabric of a dream...
...11 Ibid., part 3, section A. R. D. LAING: PSYCHIATRY & APOCALYPSE not in order to reject the importance of ethics or metaphysics but to acquire a necessary (not merely a provisional) autonomy, a fragile but genuine independence for its own particular scientific purposes...
...Men always partially misrepre sent their actions: legitimate and minimum authority can be labelled repressive violence...
...Sometimes his focus of understanding is the family, though at other times he seems to suggest that one may conceive of a kind of primary network of some 20 to 30 people within which schizophrenia is to be treated...
...So universal is our ignorance of and obedience to this system that the number of those surviving as human beings is minute...
...e.g., on pp...
...15 Perhaps the condition could be called macroschizophrenia...
...Now, however, the contemporary revolutionary has largely lost confidence both in the movement of history and in the efficacy of reason...
...50-53 of The Politics of Experience), which Laing conducts concerning socialization, violence, and value judgments...
...Thus: "doctors in all ages have made fortunes by killing their patients by means of their cures...
...But it happens to a certain degree to certain people, and the extent to which it does would require extensive documentation...
...As Laing puts it, this takes the form of "I like you...
...DAVID MARTIN and in Marxism its abstract rationality succeeded in locating itself within the movement of history and in what was held to be a rational understanding of that movement...
...At what levels of analysis is it universal, at what levels variable...
...Perhaps such a man has some claim to his humanity and ours...
...unfortunately the techniques of the propagandist asserting the primacy of his "genuine" human experience do not allow so wasteful an expenditure of intellectual energy in the cause of mere verification...
Vol. 18 • June 1971 • No. 3
