A Question of Facts

...his mother "went into 'a decline'" and he was nursed instead by a "drunken slut...

...Bell's assignment, as Last's patient and the house writer for the Antipsychiatric movement, is to go crazy...

...The analyst Laing became may long ago have rescued the child, but both remain characters in search of an author...

...Unfortunately, it does not gain our total confidence...

...It is easier to understand why the burden of his career has been investigating severe disturbances in human communication...

...resembles the author of The Facts of Life in so many respects that we find ourselves caught in one of Laing's double binds: If, in the words of the usual assurance, any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental, then we must assume there is no Scottish psychiatrist in London who says "Ye're engulfed by her depersonalized fantasy of yir perception of her collusion wi' yir imploded false self-system...

...I tried to figure out what was going on between these people...

...It is as bleak a vision as Freud ever dreamed of in Civilization and its Discontents...

...Had he continued his narrative, Laing would have had to fill in the missing connections and in the process acknowledge that the cultural experiences he deems "inauthentic" and gratuitous have some value...

...For years thereafter, an uncle "gone daft" in the War turned up regularly to fight his brother in the living room...

...Schoolkids read his books, family therapy is fashionable and he has brought about significant reforms in the treatment of psychotics —all this Bell grants when his "trip" with Last has ended...

...Since he believes the true self is completely alienated by society, he refuses to provide in his description of his origins even the information that his "immediate culture" was Scottish Presbyterian...

...His unconvincingness as a sufferer is not a disadvantage, for the group's governing theory holds that the line between insanity and sanity is indistinct if not invisible...

...in the end it is the author's inability to separate himself from Bell that gives one an uneasy sense of past and private scores being settled...

...that at 25 he began to introduce his reforms—indeed revolutions?in the treatment of psychotics...

...For all its cuteness, this old Masses extravaganza makes clear that Sigal sees the radioal therapeutic movement as a confrontation between New and Old Left...

...The double bind of fact and fiction seems at first to come from the resemblance of Last to Laing...

...Too bad, for much of the disorder of The Facts of Life finds its sources in the painful frustration of the literary impulse...

...A JL Although Clancy Sigal—whose previous book, Going Away, appeared in 1961—does not come immediately to mind as someone uniquely equipped to observe the Laingian world, his earliest work, Weekend in Dinlock, exhibited an Orwellian gift for observation, and his new novel, Zone of the Interior (Crowell, 277 pp., $7.95), in fact concerns the London Antipsychiatry scene...

...Willie Last (will he last...

...Despite his grave preoccupations, however, Laing fails to engage us...

...We finally ignore the disclaimer, therefore, assume Last is Laing and settle down to enjoy a parody...

...Then he and Dad would go at it...

...As far back as I can remember...

...Laing's account of his childhood serves the book he finally put together...

...The reason for this, I think, lies in our impression that The Facts of Life is a failed autobiographical projeot...

...Or how it is, given the apparent brutality of his childhood, that "what is done to unborn children, mothers and babies in childbirth, to people who lose their minds, amazes" him...

...Not a word would be spoken...

...I went behind the curtain...

...Read as case history, it calls for a dismal prognosis...

...For days his father could not acknowledge his arrival...

...Last is exposed as a hypocrite, a liar, a frustrated guerrilla who wants to be the Castro of psychoanalysis...

...The chapters on "Con House" (even here, where he approves of the project, Sigal can't resist the characteristic pun) could be published separately as the kind of observation the author does best...

...his "father was so aghast he forgot to hit me...

...And not surprisingly, the terms are ultimately religious: "Can what is morally wrong be scientifically right...

...The reader wonders what really happened to make Sigal write this book—a question no writer should want raised...

...who has founded a therapeutic community where psychotics may discover that schizophrenia is "nae a disease but a state of awareness...

...He goes beyond Otto Rank's concept of the birth trauma to propose that there are "even greater" varieties of prenatal than postnatal experience, and that prenatal patterns may be "mapped onto the natal and postnatal.' Further, the evidence presented of scientific "tampering" with human life in the guise of medical research, and the hypothesis that man has "a tendency actually to create minimizing environments," suggests a built-in human destructiveness...

...But if we see it for the device it is, we sense the presence of a repressed storyteller...

...So wholehearted a separating out of the self from the body of society looks like a curious analogue of the self hating what is most truly its own...

...Pushed by Last and powered by LSD, Bell achieves his schizophrenic vision...

...But "why," he asks, "after all my experience in unions and the Communist party, did I seek refuge in near-Fascist irrationalism...

...It is difficult, in any event, to determine from the highly selective autobiographical information in The Facts of Life the nature of the self that went out from that Glasgow flat...

...Few outsiders entered the three-room flat...

...At 15 Ronald uttered an obscenity and his mother, "standing in front of one of those floral-designed wallpapers," fainted...

...Sid Bell, the hero, is an American writer and former union organizer who could be Sigal...

...who has written a book about The Unhealed Heart...

...Bell goes to Conolly House, a hospital wing dedicated to Laingian principals (the real Laing is occasionally mentioned...

...If I believed one, I couldn't believe anyone else...

...When he "goes up the spout" he is surrounded by "wingless seraphs"—Clarence Darrow, Leo Huberman, Sam Grafton, Edmund Wilson, and others, who tell him to "stop romanticizing the heroic in life and politics.' God—in the person of an old Wobbly—warns him against "giving up his brains to some piecard who says he's got the answer to all your problems, who is like the union scab with a permanently bitter thing going...

...his charges are very serious...

...Zone of the Interior is absorbing and often very perceptive...

...that at 28 he published his first book, The Divided Self, and dedicated it to his parents...

...Another visitor was a great-uncle, "a perfectly formed midget with a perfectly formed bowler hat and three-piece suit even a midget-sized umbrella, perfectly rolled...

...He still seems to see every experience as "material," to feel he must "use" all, and because he virtually gives his characters' addresses and phone numbers, the reader tends to discredit his inventiveness...

...While his mother was pregnant with Ronald, his father, who regarded his own father as "having murdered his mother 'systematically' over the years," had thrown the old man out of the house "by the scruff of the neck...

...Yet we know that at 14 Laing resolved to study psychology, philosophy and theology...

...Anti-psychiatry is a threat to Socialism...

...Yet Sigal is not simply having fun...

...It moves fitfully from questions to the mirror?What am I, am I?"—to dizzying diagrams and formulae and desperately perplexed theological musings...

...The next year Ronald found out where babies come from—in a book on the dangers of venereal disease...

...When he was 10 months old, his maternal grandmother and aunt joined the household for eight months...

...Students of Laing's theories, of course, will nevertheless be interested in his new speculations...

...Thus the early life of psychiatrist R. D. Laing, taken from the autobiographical fragment that opens his latest work, The Facts of Life (Pantheon, 153 pp., $7.95...

...In Last's jargon, Bell notes, we never "see" —we "perceive...

...Yet his heroic accomplishments in rendering them intelligible make for a certain pathos, because it is precisely in coherence that his new book is wanting...

...It introduces all the themes: repression, false signals, silence, isolation, violence, cruelty, the search for inheritance...

...Somewhere, very early on, his heart got trapped or branded and he came out without knowing who or what he was...

...Mother would push the furniture to one side...

...Sigal has developed his considerable gifts as a documentary writer, but he has not solved his old difficulties in handling fact along with fiction...

...The obvious disjunction brings to mind the observation of David Martin, one of Laing's harshest critics, that in all his writings "there is not a single word suggesting that any virtue inheres in his own inheritance...