50 Years Ago: Mind in a cul-de-sac: Laing (2022)

The 50 Years Ago column from the August 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

If one considers the family in its genealogical image as a tree, today lumberjacks are out. The tree, by various allegations, is blighted and corrupt, the leaves malnourished while society still praises its luxuriance. In the nineteen-fifties Dr. Kinsey showed statistically that monogamy was a stale pretence; in the ‘seventies Women’s Liberation proclaims it to be a cage. The most trenchant attacks on the family, however, have come from the psychiatrist Dr. Ronald Laing. In a series of writings on the condition of schizophrenia, Laing has shown family groups as circles bent on mental violence, selecting this and that member as victims for destruction. Only the mad are sane, says Laing.

A psychiatric theory may not, in itself, be thought to matter much outside the world of attempted therapy where—as with more palpable physical disorders—¬the patients are patched to be sent back to the environment where their troubles grew. But Laing’s has been popularised as material for social and political dissenters. Contributing to the New Left Review, Peace News and New Society automatically connected him with the cultural Left; in 1967 he was one of the speakers in the “Dialectics of Liberation” seminar at the Round House, London, with Marcuse, Stokely Carmichael and others. The film Family Life is a representation of his view of everyday relationships: an onslaught against the stupidity, unfairness and general motivation of the conventional and a vindication of the young dubbed insane, with the implication that the latter had better run from the former as fast as they can.

It is also a representation of the nature of Laing’s popularity. The appearance of cheap editions of his books coincided with the emergence of the “underground”, the movement for dropping-out and psychedelia. (…)

In the 1965 preface to an earlier work, The Divided Self, Laing speaks of his theories as condemning not only family relationships but the social order at large, because it “represses not only ‘the instincts’, not only sexuality, but any form of transcendence”. The preface was withdrawn from the 1970 edition, and he is now reported to have retreated into mysticism.

(Socialist Standard, August 1972)

Mental Health — a brief Critique by a Mental Hospital Worker (1973)

From the June 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

If you are feeling the strains of life, if you are beginning to feel you cannot cope, or if you become aware that you see existence differently from other people, then watch out as you may find yourself in the clutches of a psychiatrist. Such characteristics may be considered symptoms of mental illness and, whereas you are free to accept or reject the advice of a doctor if you suffer from a physical illness, this right may be removed from you in the case of a disease of the “mind.” Although the 1959 Mental Health Act made treatment for mental illness on a voluntary basis possible, there are still over 10,000 individuals in Britain compulsorily detained in mental hospitals against their will. Beware unruly, aggressive behaviour as, if you are apprehended by the police, Section 29 gives leeway for you to be detained for 72 hours in mental hospital on the order of a mental health worker, temporarily overcoming the necessity of court action. Whether a short-term or long-term stay, the “care” of the individual in hospital involves the removal of control of life from that person; during that time existence will be regulated and regimented by hospital staff.

It is easy to fall into the trap of believing that what is being dealt with are “faulty brains” and that the “mental” person must immediately be guided totally by others before they cause damage to themselves or the public. However, we must look at the assumptions underlying this approach to insanity, the dangers to every individual in society arising from these assumptions, and also the power that medics have over the destiny of so many lives as a result.

Social Definition . . .

What is meant by “insanity?” The general model used is the medical one. The individual is said to be sick, with a disease of the brain. As a consequence the term "mental health” has been coined and this in turn results in a whole set of reactions towards the insane man or woman (such as sending them to a doctor who specializes in brains, putting them into hospital, and treating them with drugs or surgery) which are not necessarily correct.

This approach is often completely presumptuous, probably arising from the growth of psychiatry through the roots of medicine rather than psychology. Although “mental” behaviour may be an obvious result of brain malformation or brain damage (in which case the behaviour tends to be of a specific type), in a vast proportion of cases of disturbance, no physiological/structural abnormalities are to be found in the disturbed person. Classification of individuals as suffering from a particular mental syndrome is based almost completely on the individual’s behaviour, including responses to other people, the ideas expressed, the ability to hold down a job, and the patterning of results on “intelligence” tests. In other words, the definition of insanity is based on comparing individuals’ behaviour with the behaviour shown by the general population. So it is a social definition and cannot be the objective phenomenon that is claimed, but is subject to the prejudices and ideologies of the professionals involved in the field of mental health.

If the insane individual is the one who deviates from the normal what is meant by “normal” must be considered, as there is a great range of behaviour shown by members of society. Normality is behaviour that is generally tolerated throughout society, and the normal person is the one who has managed to survive in society with an acceptable balance between the development of his potentialities (including personality, intellectual and physical traits) and the conditioning by which his abilities are directed into socially acceptable functions (including such behaviour as being able to chat in the local).

. . . and Social Judgement

If, like Laing, you view the normal as sick (but see Socialist Standard, August 1972), what criteria have you for dealing with deviants from the “normally abnormal?” Bourgeois psychology indicates time and time again that present-day society is not one that permits individuals to fulfil their potentialities but one that inhibits people’s full development. Work by John Holt and Paul Goodman shows this process at work in the school setting where children’s creativity, inquisitiveness and desire to learn is progressively stilted as they become socialized to a regime that thwarts originality and praises tactics where “correct” answers arc provided without any understanding. This in turn reflects a wider conditioning where the “correct answer” is conformity to the requisites of capitalism; individuality means individuality within strict limits; to stretch beyond these is to become insane or criminal.

This is not attempting to exalt those in mental hospital, for their existence is often a miserable one. But questioning the very nature of normality and the conceptual — and practical — approach to abnormality exposes not only the inadequacies of the care for the “insane”, but also reveals a danger to every one of us. In Russia intellectuals are confined in mental hospitals and people are quick to condemn this. Yet this is only an extreme form of the attitude of those in the West: those who do not “fit in” must be locked away. Where are the boundary lines between the mad and the sane? Are you sure you belong to the population considered normal?

Let us consider those unfortunate individuals who find themselves in mental hospital. Removed from a bewildering world of insurmountable problems they may feel happier in the protected environment of the hospital where life is organized for them, where they only have to obey the staff. Alternatively, they may be further confused by their removal from a world they know to this strange environment. Whichever the case, evidence indicates that the longer the time the individual remains in “care”, the less chance there is of them leaving. For institutionalization works itself upon the inmates who, devoid of opportunities to run their own lives, learn behaviour that is inappropriate for the outside world and so become greater misfits. Goffman gives a good analysis of this process in Asylums and indicates how the inmate can be reduced to an obedient moron who is quiet and always follows the rules. From my own personal experience, when working in a mental subnormality hospital (in many ways identical to a psychiatric hospital), it was blatantly obvious that the person who attempted to assert himself in any way suffered great social recriminations and punishments with withdrawal of privileges. This type of individual, probably with the characteristics to survive better than other patients, is unlikely to be allowed out of the hospital by those in authority as they consider such behaviour to be “bad” — and so the hospital becomes a prison.

What's it all About ?

People “outside” show little interest in the mental hospital and, possibly due to this, doctors are left free to give E.C.T., drugs and brain surgery despite very inadequate knowledge of the consequences of these actions. The patient has no means of self-protection, and this is an uncaring society — which is possibly why many people are in mental hospitals anyway.

The problems are many and knowledge very limited. Certainly those individuals suffering from “mental syndromes” require support, care and understanding from the community in order to learn how to cope with life rather than to be rejected and locked away. But one cannot help being sceptical about this being possible in a society where most people are in some way “mentally sick”, which places so many pressures upon everyone that time is too precious to concentrate on helping “social inadequates”, and where everyone has a multitude of their own problems.

Judy

What Joe Orton saw (2012)

Theatre Review from the November 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

Joe Orton’s 1969 play, What the Butler Saw, was recently performed at the Vaudeville Theatre in London and starred Omad Djalli and Tim McInnerny. This farce by “the Oscar Wilde of Welfare State gentility” attacks petty bourgeois morality, sexual prudery, marriage, hypocrisy, conservative values, authority (“Accept your condition without tears and without abusing those placed in authority”), religion (“reject all paranormal phenomena. It’s the only way to remain sane”), psychiatry, and the police. Orton, influenced by Artaud, celebrates anarchy, the Dionysian pleasures of poly-sexual gratification and nymphomania, and delights in sadism, transvestism, ‘madness’, incest, gender identity confusion, and the base human appetites of lust for money and power.

What the Butler Saw has echoes of Sophocles’ tale of Oedipus and his mother/wife Jocasta, the ‘madness’ of Caligula, and the Carry On films. Orton wrote critically of the film, The Marat/Sade: “Let’s look at mad people. At queer people.” Interestingly, in his play there are no ‘lunatics’ just doctors, and he parodies the traditional Freudian psychologist. Freud was the bourgeois psychiatrist and defender of capitalism who went from an emphasis on Eros to Thanatos. It is only with Reich do we get psychoanalysis with Marxism and the development of psycho-sexual health for the working class. The 1960s saw a radical shift in psychiatry with the use of LSD therapy and the RD Laing ‘anti-psychiatry’ school. Fromm in The Sane Society identified the contradictions in capitalism between ‘having’ and ‘being’, and the need for a sane socialist society. Orton writes: “You can’t be a rationalist in an irrational world. It isn’t rational”.

Orton had no time for the ‘work ethic’ (“I resented having to go to work in the morning”), adopted a Nietzschean outlook (“reject all the values of society”), and disliked bourgeois capitalist society, writing with echoes of Reich that “sex is the only way to smash the wretched civilization, the only way to infuriate them, much more fucking and they’ll be screaming hysterics in next to no time”. He pungently added: “the old whore society really lifted up her skirts and the stench was pretty foul”. Orton also perceived the contradictions of bourgeois liberalism noting: “I don’t like the sort of liberal that is reactionary underneath”.

Orton satirises Britain’s ‘popular’ wartime leader Churchill who died in 1965. In 1967, Hochhuth’s play Soldiers implicated Churchill in the 1943 Sikorski crash. This member of the capitalist class is also responsible for miners killed in Tonypandy, anarchists burned to death in Sidney Street, 150,000 war deaths in Gallipoli, millions of deaths in the Bengal Famine of 1943, half a million deaths in Allied bombing of German cities, threats to machine gun strikers in the 1926 General Strike and the gassing of Kurdish rebels in Iraq in 1920.

In the 1960s the Lord Chamberlain would not allow Churchill’s phallus at the end of the play, so it was replaced with his cigar.

Steve Clayton

Mixed Media: The Hospital at the Time of the Revolution (2013)

The Mixed Media Column from the September 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Hospital at the Time of the Revolution by Caryl Churchill

Earlier this year the Finborough Theatre in London staged the world première of Caryl Churchill's 1972 play The Hospital at the Time of the Revolution.

Churchill's play is partly based on the chapter, Colonial War and Mental Disorders in Frantz Fanon's study of the Algerian war of independence, The Wretched of the Earth, described by Sartre as 'the Third World finds itself and speaks to itself' '. Fanon's title is taken from the opening lyrics of The Internationale. Fanon was a Martinique-born psychiatrist, philosopher, self-styled Marxist, revolutionary and writer who was head of the Psychiatric Department at Blida-Joinville Hospital, Algiers in French Algeria. He resigned to work with the FLN, Algerian National Liberation Front in their guerrilla war for independence.

Churchill's play portrays Fanon treating the schizophrenic teenage daughter of a French civil servant (involved in 'interrogations' of Algerian rebels), and a French police inspector hearing screams in his head who has been beating his wife and children as a result of his 'work' torturing captured Algerian rebels. We also see three Algerian 'patients' in the hospital who are paranoid, delusional, suicidal, or catatonic as a result of the colonial war in Algeria. The bloody conflict for Algerian independence claimed the lives of 100,000 French soldiers and 'colons' and probably 1 million Algerians. The war is vividly brought to life in the 1966 Gillo Pontecorvo film The Battle of Algiers.

Churchill uses ideas from RD Laing's Sanity, Madness and the Family in her portrayal of the French couple and the schizophrenic daughter where a child is subject to the 'double bind' of contradictory commands that places a child in an existential checkmate of an 'untenable position' in the closed family nexus thereby causing madness.

Churchill wrote this year about the play; 'unfortunately it feels more relevant now than for a long time' which is true considering the American use of 'extraordinary rendition' of 'terror suspects' to countries that use torture, not forgetting the torture of 'terror suspects' by the USA at Guantanamo Bay, torture and abuse of Iraqis by the US military at Abu Ghraib prison and the British Army torture and abuse of Iraqis in Basra.

Churchill has explored issues of power since Owners, her critique of capitalism through to the sexual politics and colonialism of Cloud Nine to her 1987 attack on financial capitalism in Serious Money. From The Hospital at the Time of the Revolution to her 2009 Seven Jewish Children, a charity piece for the Palestinian people of Gaza, Churchill is evidently sympathetic to the struggles of oppressed peoples under colonialism.

Steve Clayton

Mixed Media: Mary Barnes (2015)

Saint Joseph
Finger painting, April, 1968

The Mixed Media Column from the December 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

Earlier this year there was an exhibition of paintings by Mary Barnes (1923-2001) at the Nunnery Gallery, Bow in East London. The works came predominantly from the collection of psychiatrist Dr Joseph Berke, who is 'Boo-Bah', Mary's therapist and friend. Mary was an Army Nurse in the Second World War, in 1949 she converted to Roman Catholicism which was a rebellious and unusual step, representing a break from staid and bourgeois Anglicanism. But when she was 29 she was diagnosed as schizophrenic. With her condition seriously deteriorating, in 1963 she read RD  (‘Ronnie’) Laing's The Divided Self, and contacted and began regular therapy sessions with him.

Laing and fellow psychiatrist David Cooper were heavily influenced by Jean-Paul Sartre's Marxist Existentialism which was expounded in Search for a Method (1957), and Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960). Sartre aimed for a synthesis of Marxism and Existentialism, seeing Marxism as the dominant philosophy and existentialism as a reinforcing ideology. Sartre proposed Existentialism and Marxism as a possible means of understanding humanity and the world as a totality. Laing and Cooper in their 1964 book Reason and Violence, a Sartrean synopsissaw a combination of a Hegelian-Marxist dialectic with an Existentialist psychoanalysis that incorporates individual responsibility into class relationships, thereby adding a properly Existentialist dimension of moral responsibility to a Marxist emphasis on collective and structural causality. For Laing and Cooper, mental illness was a normal, functioning element of the capitalist world we live in, and that it was in fact a perfectly rational response to an insane world and must therefore be treated as such.

In 1965 Laing, Cooper, and Berke set up the Philadelphia Association at Kingsley Hall in East London, a therapeutic community. One of the first members was Mary Barnes. Laing believed that a breakdown, if allowed to progress without medical intervention, could lead to a more stable state of mind. Thus Mary was encouraged to give in to, and regress to, a state of helpless infancy so that she could grow up again into sanity. She became the patient of 'Boo-Bah' Berke, regression therapy and a psycho-dynamic discourse ensued. Mary discovered her gift for painting, and her condition improved. Mary became a cause célèbre, featuring in a June 1968 Sunday Observer article How Mary Barnes grew up again at 42, and held her first solo exhibition in April 1969 at the Camden Arts Centre.

Mary's canvases are full of vivid colour and often depict religious imagery. Trees shows a figure on a tree in a crucifixion pose while Crucifixion, with its 'INRI' is much more explicit. Mary wrote that 'Ronnie especially liked The Vine, a crucifixion painting of Christ as the vine.' (Mary Barnes: Two Accounts of a Journey Through Madness Mary Barnes and Joseph Berke 1971) William James in The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) pointed out that religious emotions may be deranged but are crucial to human life, religious experiences can be irrational but nevertheless are largely positive as after a religious experience the ideas and insights usually remain and are often valued for the rest of the person's life. Marx identified that 'Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering.' (Introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right) In The Politics of Experience (1967), Laing wrote 'we are born into a world where alienation awaits us. We are potentially human beings, but are in an alienated state, and this state is not a natural system' which owed a huge debt to Marx's writings on alienation in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts.

Mary's Volcanic Eruption: Explosion of IT (1969) is the centrepiece of the exhibition, all primary red, green, yellow, orange, and black colours in seismic flourishes. Mary wrote 'in December 1965 I had a dream that I think must have been about IT: walking along a road... I saw a man in a dark suit and beret. He reminded me they would soon be testing the bomb.' The exhibition features her metal trunk with a handwritten note sellotaped to it 'Mary Barnes Art Work, paintings etc. of mainly Kingsley Hall period 66-70.' There are photographs of Boo-Bah and Mary at the publication of their book, Mary at a performance of David Edgar's 1978 play Mary Barnes, and a photograph of Mary in 1990 visiting Sweden where she frequently gave talks to both psychiatrists and patients. This particular photograph shows Mary meeting a patient deemed too dangerous to meet face-to-face.

For the rest of her life Mary showed her work worldwide, usually accompanied by lectures on mental health issues, and the benefits of psychotherapy. According to Laing's son, 'Mary became a show-piece for Ronnie's central theory of the potential healing function of extremely disturbed forms of behaviour.' (RD Laing: A Biography Adrian Laing 1994) The exhibition epitaph is Mary's hymn to Berke: 'Boo-Bah, Ascension Day, Hip-pip Hooray! Joe, I love you with the burning heart of the Sun' which is testament to the humanism of radical 'anti-psychiatry'/Existential Marxist psychotherapy.

Steve Clayton

Mind in a Cul-de-Sac: Laing (1972)

From the August 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

If one considers the family in its genealogical image as a tree, today lumberjacks are out. The tree, by various allegations, is blighted and corrupt, the leaves malnourished while society still praises its luxuriance. In the nineteen-fifties Dr. Kinsey showed statistically that monogamy was a stale pretence; in the 'seventies Women's Liberation proclaims it to be a cage. The most trenchant attacks on the family, however, have come from the psychiatrist Dr. Ronald Laing. In a series of writings on the condition of schizophrenia, Laing has shown family groups as circles bent on mental violence, selecting this and that member as victims for destruction. Only the mad are sane, says Laing.

A psychiatric theory may not, in itself, be thought to matter much outside the world of attempted therapy where—as with more palpable physical disorders—­the patients are patched to be sent back to the environment where their troubles grew. But Laing's has been popularised as material for social and political dissenters. Contributing to the New Left Review, Peace News and New Society automatically connected him with the cultural Left; in 1967 he was one of the speakers in the "Dialectics of Liberation" seminar at the Round House, London, with Marcuse, Stokely Car­michael and others. The film Family Life is a representation of his view of everyday relationships: an onslaught against the stupidity, unfairness and general motivation of the conventional and a vindication of the young dubbed insane, with the implication that the latter had better run from the former as fast as they can.

It is also a representation of the nature of Laing's popularity. The appearance of cheap editions of his books coincided with the emergence of the "underground", the movement for dropping-out and psychedelia. The first Penguin by Laing, The Politics of Experience, came out within weeks of the first issue of International Times. In a recent symposium, Laing and Anti-Psychiatry, Jan B. Gordon says: ". . . Laing's popularity among political activists, particularly those of New Left persuasion, is more easily understandable. He wages an incessant argument against history and sees any suggestion of scientific objectivity as an excuse for psychological colonialism . . . altering the maps unfairly." The writer is probably identifying "New Left persuasion" with the large anarcho-hippy fringe of those years, possessed by the idea that an aggregate of drop-outs was itself an "alternative society". The intellectual demigod of an earlier generation, Freud, held that the anarchist rebel was simply someone who rejected his father. Laing has gone further and supplied the rebel with a whole case-history against his father.

The Politics of Experience is an argument on the nature of personal experience, and the effects of relationships on it. For Laing, we are what we experience. Each individual's experience is unique:

I cannot experience your experience. You cannot exper­ience my experience. We are both invisible men. All men are invisible to one another. Experience is man's invisibility to man. Experience used to be called The Soul. Experience as invisibility of man to man is at the same time more evident than anything. Only experience is evident. Experience is the only evidence.

Though there are references in the same book to structures of experience being shared, and to the attempted communication of experience, what Laing reiterates many times is its personal nature. He says: "Our be­haviour is a function of our experience. We act according to the way we see things . . . If our experience is destroyed, we have lost our own selves."

The sentence between the two in that quotation is a key one in Laing's thesis. Put in italics by him to em­phasise its importance, it is: "If our experience is destroyed, our behaviour will be destructive." This is the springboard of Laing's other social-psychological works, Self and Others and Sanity, Madness and the Family. Man's failing is the mental violence he persists in doing to others. Its nature is attack upon and intended invalidation of others' experience, the effect to cause them to "lose their own selves". Nowhere in society is this more precisely practised than by the members of families, one upon another:

. . . the frightened, cowed, abject creature that we are admonished to be, if we are to be normal—offering each other mutual protection from our own violence. The family as a 'protection racket'. Behind this language lurks the terror that is behind all this mutual back-scratching, this esteem-, status-, support-, protection-, security-giving and getting. Through its bland urbanity the cracks still show.

We are, says Laing, "effectively destroying ourselves by violence masquerading as love". 

In this light, the form of insanity called schizophrenia is examined intensively in the books. For Laing, normality is hardly desirable. "Normal" men are alienated, sleep-walking, have killed one another by the million in wars, do frightful violence mentally in their family circles. The Politics of Experience quote descriptions of a teacher-and-pupils session to show the extension of coerced adaptation into school. Is madness a fact, or is it a label devised by the normal, who are insane anyway, for those who won't join their game? Laing believes it is:

In over 100 cases where we have studied the actual circumstances round the social event when one person comes to be regarded as schizophrenic, it seems to us that without exception the experience and behaviour that gets labelled schizophrenic is a special strategy that a person invents in order to live in an unlivable situation. (our emphasis)

Thus, Sanity, Madness and the Family is a collection of case-histories including recordings of the patients' discussions with their families. The Family Life film is a dramatized view of the same terrain—dunder­head factory-foreman father, thin-lipped always-right mother, reactionary doctors, and nice young people with a hip flavour who could have made things all right for the girl if she'd been left alone. The point recurs: the sane are hopeless and destructive, the alleged insane are simply running blind to escape their intentions.

Where does all this take us? Has Laing a clue to remedying the disorders of our society? Obviously much in his writings appeals to anyone dissatisfied with the conventions and the spurious wisdom of the social order. The thought that the world is mad has occurred to most of us at some time, and cultural schools like Surrealism and Dada have been formed to make appropriate gestures in kind. It is easy to relish, too, the description of the pressures brought to bear in the family for social conformity: the induced anxiety and emotional blackmail—"My concern, my concern for your concern, your concern, and your concern for my concern, etc." Likewise the comments on the established functions of psychiatry: "But social adaptation to a dysfunctional society may be very dangerous. The perfectly adjusted bomber pilot may be a greater threat to species survival than the hospitalised schizophrenic deluded that the Bomb is inside him."

Beyond these attractions on the surface, however, Laing is offering nothing but a great deal of confusing of issues. What needs considering at once is the basic idea of experience from which his theory is developed: "All men are invisible to one another." Despite the qualifying and extending remarks which are at times contradictory tangles, the central point on which Laing insists is a Berkeleyan belief that experience, and therefore reality, are subjective. Indeed, the contradictions are inevitable. If it were true that "the experience of the other is not evident to me, as it is not and never can be an experience of mine"—if, in fact, all men were invisible to one another—communication would be impossible. Society depends on the certainty of common experience.

To say that only personal experience is evidence is as meaningless in social practicality as was Berkeley's theory of matter when the stone fell into the pond. True, Laing says he rejects the categories "subjective and objective", "inner and outer", "process and praxis", and many more, but the rejection will not do. In each case, he is really seeking to reject one of a pair of opposites by naming both of them. In the description of experience, it is objectiveness that is disclaimed and subjectivity left by every inference. (If any doubt remains, the penultimate chapter of The Politics of Experience, titled "Transcendental Experience", asserts not only the subjectivity of experience but the desirability of its being so.)

The meaninglessness is demonstrated when one looks at examples of what Laing calls mental violence, the denial of another person's subjective experience. What is being denied usually is physical or social fact: the violence consists not in the denial but in the blocking of avenues to verification. In the Orwellian example where the inquisitor demoralises his victim by insisting that two and two make five, and in Laing's examples where Jack tells Jill her perception is wrong, the attack is simply on social axioms. There are, of course, realms where values and preferences rather than facts are attacked: a person's liking for this or that music and art, his relationships and aspirations, may bring hostility and denigration from those round him. Again, however, there is nothing subjective about the experiences involved—the person's misfortune is to have displayed them in the wrong social milieu. But in any case it is absurd to claim all criticism or dispute to be mental violence. There is bullying and pressure to conform, and much of it takes place in families; but rebuttal and challenge are essential to personal as well as social development.

The studies of family groups show a person's experience—i.e. the core of his or her individuality—under attack from other members of the family, and the label "schizophrenic" affixed. What is pointed out, implicitly or explicitly, is that it is not he or she but they who are insane. It has already been remarked that this is gratifying to people at odds with, disapproved or condemned, by their parents; but where does it lead? One is bound to ask who, in turn, made the parents mad. Laing has recognised the question by saying (in a 1967 article) that the web may stretch back three generations, but that does not answer it. As a reductio ad absurdum there could be postulated an insane God as the first cause, the spider who created the web. Nor is it suggested what happens to the children of the schizo­phrenic-sane. Do they grow up free from the pressure of mental violence; or does the schizophrenic experience make new norms and new demands that others should conform to them?

In the 1965 preface to an earlier work, The Divided Self, Laing speaks of his theories as condemning not only family relationships but the social order at large, because it "represses not only 'the instincts', not only sexuality, but any form of transcendence". The preface was withdrawn from the 1970 edition, and he is now reported to have retreated into mysticism. The dilemma of Laing is that a subjective view of human existence is a blindfold to consideration of the social order. The results, inevitably, are negative: Jan B. Gordon sees Laing as having accomplished "the construction of a system which makes nihilism functional". In his diagnosis of schizophrenia the idea of a cure cannot have a place; the schizophrenic embarks on a journey closely resembling a drug-taker's "trip", but we are not told about the return.

The general effect of work like this is to obscure the answers to social problems of relationships. On one hand, Laing is saying to many young people that there is no answer: hide, drop out, escape the lethal insanity of the world. On the other, the nature of what is going on in society is made to appear a complex of attitudes and behavioural algebra. At no point does Laing—or any of the commentators in the Anti-Psy­chiatry book—distinguish between the family as a human grouping and the family under capitalism. Yet the distinction contains the explanation of the mental violence and the pressures which provide so much material for psychologists and liberationists together.

For capitalism, the family is vital because in it we work the social roles required of us economically. Stability and organisation are provided; experience is communicated to make social life continuous and coherent. What Laing sees as the facade of family life was real enough in the past because acceptance of the roles was not questioned (insofar as they conflicted with instinct, half-recognised arrangements were made). However, as capitalism has extended and intensified the division of labour, the experience of one generation has ceased to mean much to another. Hence the roles themselves become doubtful: why should women wait on men, sons defer to fathers, children strive for respectability which means a damned-awful life? At this point violence is immanent. Laing observes rightly enough that it disguises itself as love and concern, but has no word as to why the situation is there in the first place. It is the channel for the compulsions of capitalism, through which hopes of good relationships are continually destroyed.

The answer is therefore not at all obscure. Laing's ultimate cry is wholly negative: "If I could turn you on, if I could drive you out of your wretched mind, if I could tell you I would let you know." Tell you what, except introspection and despair? At both the personal and the social levels, relief from futility can be achieved by positive engagement: specifically, in creating a society where experience has meaning, and human personality is able to live.

Robert Barltrop