R D LAING 

By Richard Sennett
Oct. 3, 1971

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October 3, 1971, Section BR, Page 2

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In a moment of anger in his new book, R. D. Laing writes, “Our own cities are our own animal factories; families, schools, churches, are the slaughterhouses of our children; colleges and other places are the kitchens. As adults in marriages and business we eat the product” These charges may all be true, but they are tiresome, written in such a way that the reader turns them off. The strongest impression I have after reading “The Politics of the Family and Other Essays” is that Laing has substituted an easy rhetoric of accusation and condemnation for the struggle to understand people's feelings that dignified his earlier work.

In the dullness of his attacks on an inhumane society, Laing is, of course, not alone. Many of those who took fire during the recent years of turbulence are now passing through a moment when a great number of painfully acquired ideas threaten to enter the comfortable landscape of cliche. I don't mean that radical rhetoric is out of date, because the fissures in society stimulating it are still there; I mean rather that something is going wrong with the way we perceive injustice, something is atrophying in the words and ideas to express anger, so that the rhetoric remains true but no longer truly angers. Why this should be so, Laing's new book, in its very weariness, helps clear.

Lassitude follows periods of upheaval with almost monotonous insistence in history, but an exhaustion of sensitivity usually comes upon a people after they have endured a revolution or great change in their lives. The extravagants of Paris who emerged after the death of Robespierre gloried in precious clothing and precious sentiments, all the while mouthing the old revolutionary slogans; the “empty men” of the Weimar Republic, as Brecht called them, also bore the marks of exhaustion left by a domestic war. But the present loss of sensitivity is different, and puzzling, for when we turn away from the enthusiasm for apocalypse that sets the tone of newspapers and television, we face a society whose wars, poverty, racism and all the rest, are changing slowly if at all. Can it be only that we are tired response to the world—argued with stale anger from listening to so much talk about the need for change?

The writings of R. D. Laing have moved from early books which put forth a complex, painful vision of the human oppression involved in the phenomenon society labels “insanity” to books which replay all the early themes in such a fashion that the reader feels he is in a closed and stuffy room. Laing's thought has disintegrated dramatically in the last four years, but it is unworthy of him simply to itemize that decline. For what has happened to ?? shows why it is not just a matter of words that makes contemporary words of anger stale.

“The Divided Self,” his first book, appeared in England in 1960, when Laing was 28. The book's power lay in Laing's ability to catch the rationality behind seemingly irrational behavior, a logic he revealed by making the reader see through the eyes of someone labeled schizophrenic. Laing did not “explain” schizophrenia as a disease; he showed how schizophrenia was a perfectly logical way of coping with impossible, longstanding situations in a person's family or immediate society. Much of this ground was prepared for Laing by the American anthropologist Gregory Bateson—probably one of the greatest and most neglected writers on human behavior in this country.

A few years earlier (1956) Bateson had arrived at a theory of “double binds” to explain the contradictory language people called schizophrenics speak. A double bind is a situation in which a person is issued two contradictory negative commands he or she must follow in order to gain love. A mother tells her daughter to do dishes before math homework if she wants love from Mammy; the father tells the girl she must do math first if she wants his love.

When contradictions like this persist, what is the child to do? She wants and needs the love of both parents. It becomes logical for her to obey both parents at once: she may make dishwashing motions while reading her math, or call the dishes she handles plus and minus signs. In this way she comes to appear disconnected and deranged to her teachers or to a social worker, when in fact it is a situation she had no hand in creating that is deranged.

Bateson was concerned with the logic of “illogical” language. What Laing seized on in “The Divided Self” and in books that followed in rapid succession—”Self and Others” (1961), and “Sanity, Madness and the Family” (with A. Esterson in 1964)—was to ask why these contradictory and painfully disorienting situations should come into being.

In the course of these books Laing came to think that parents are no more to blame for posing the child insane demands than is the child for responding insanely. Forces out of their personal control make them hurt the child; few of the people in families of schizophrenics, Laing remarked, ever want to create sickness; they have to, they are driven souls. Who then is responsible?.

Laing came to believe that everyone and no one is. Society makes insanity, he argued; sanity is a condition in which people are willing to obey social rules, even if the commands are inhumane and irrational. The rebels are labeled insane. That little girl is a rebel in her acts because she didn't try to paper over a contradiction; she tried to respond as honestly as she could to the demands made on her, and her show of honesty prompted others to think she was sick.

Here, too, Laing was not alone. Michel Foucault's brilliant first book, “Madness and Civilization” (1961), argued that a long history stands behind the practice of treating the deviant as insane, so that, in his “illness,” he doesn't have to be taken seriously. The incarceration of Soviet dissidents in mental hospitals is an overt example today, but Foucault and, later, Laing argued that all of “civilized” society, practices this behavior, unaware of its own repression.

By the time Laing wrote “The Politics of Experience” (1967), it seemed logical that he would become a social analyst, a man whose experience as a psychiatrist would give him, and his readers, new insights into how society organized repression. But these insights were not forthcoming. Rather than follow the logic of his own anger and become a social critic, he chose to make his patients, whom he had formerly seen as dignified in their suffering, into heroes. He dealt with society only by clinging to those people who were its victims and whose actions, if not intentions, showed they were fighting back.

This tendency to cling to the victim as hero took hold of Laing in two ways. Everything he saw in his consulting room, all his intellectual associations and allies, made him think that traditional psychiatric logic, pos iting “rational” standards of behavior, was a sham, was really a tool for keeping dissidence down. If Laing were to become a social critic, if he began to ask why society brought into being these human traumas, wouldn't he run the risk of becoming one of “them,” wouldn't his gifts of sensitivity and originality fall prey to the deadness of that sane world? There is a failure of nerve here, a fear of putting himself in enemy territory, but it is complex and humane because it is a fear of losing his own humanity.

Of course the victims of brute power arouse sympathy, and any victims who show signs of resistance command respect. But the spectator of their plight, free to leave them and go home, engaged in their woes by empathy rather than necessity, always runs the risk of feeling that the victims have something he doesn't, that in their suffering they have transcended the vicious world that the empathetic observer gets along in. He is led by the force of his own sympathy to admire them, to want to be like these rebels, at least to champion them. As a a result, society seems ever less real apart from its effect on the lives of its victims, and the sympathizer's own life seems less real too; he orients his own reactions to society by those who are suffering so much more than he is. As their follower, their champion, he feels he too is

Blacks in the South and the urban ghettoes who were treated this way during the 1960's told their white friends to go home; the blacks felt used. Laing's sympathy for his mentally ill patients is enmeshed in the same contradictions that led to a crisis between black and white civilrights workers, but he has gone a step further. Laing has come to see madness not just as an act of rebellion, but as an act of “liberation,” of “waking up,” of a “freeing” of the individual from society's constraints. Rebellion and liberation are separated by a simple matter of fact: a liberation ends the causes of the distress that makes people want to rebel. Laing, however, has turned this around, and looks at madness as a liberation in which the individual reorganizes the world on his or her own terms, so that society can be shut out. But why then are mentally ill people usually in great and un

We do not know much of how Laing's patients feel about their doctor's sympathy. Kingsley Hall, the therapeutic community Laing organized in London, has had some dramatic successes and failures. But I suspect that the patients' relief at finding a professional who does not treat them with condescension must be balanced by the burden Laing places on them as his proxies. Further, we must ask what does the conversion of a victim into an existential hero do to the sympathizer, to the man losing himself in the struggles of others? This tendency is not Laing's alone, it is characteristic of many of his readers, who have learned during the last decade to feel angry by identifying with the victims of our society; the results of this identification are what Laing's latest boox has to show.

“The Politics of the Family and Other Essays” has as it; main section a rewrite of five radio talks given In 1968 over the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation as the eighth series of Massey Lectures; the three other essays in the book come from a talk given to English social workers during the same year and two pieces previously published in specialized medical books in England. All the essays are ostensibly concerned with the role of the therapist intervening in family crises.

I should say at once that the reader who was moved by “The Divided Self” will find in these essays of a decade later a few pages with the old force. For example, Laing gives a brilliant analysis of how the famed 19thcentury French psychiatrist B. A. Morel drove a patient mad: failing to explore the reality before him seriously, that a young boy hated his father, Morel assumed instead that there was some hidden physical disease to explain this unnatural and impolite feeling; the boy was institutionalized and eventually became no more than a vegetable because the doctor refused to accept the “mad” idea of father‐hatred as equal in lucidity to the presumptions of natural filial affection ruling the doctor's own

Sadly, the few passages with the old fire are sandwiched between dead prose like the following: “As Sartre would say, the family is united by the reciprocal internalization by each (whose token of membership is precisely this interiorized family) of each other's internalization.” Much of the book reads at this level or worse; Laing can no longer write clearly unless he is showing someone being hurt.

Laing cannot talk about the theories and intellectual constructs surrounding mental illness with the same imagination and originality with which he talks about the mentally ill patient because he won't permit himself to. All of Laing's own powers of originality are concentrated on speaking for the patient; but the patient, as Laing elsewhere argues so strongly, is not the maker of his own illness. What can Laing use to confront the tormentors? Examples of their practices gone wrong. But there is no way of explaining what has gone wrong other than by using their terms. He sounds like Doctor Laing, pompous and boring, because it is he who made the split between doctor and human being, for fear he would not have the strength to confront the doctors without his patients to hold on to.

Making the victim a proxy for his own anger forces Laing's thoughts about victimization itself into a pedestrian mold. In “The Politics of the Family” he argues that there is a triangle composed of blind authority, the invasion of intimate feelings, and “waking up” through mental illness. From the moment of their birth men are contaminated by others, ultimately by society. Laing draws a “map” of this invasion, but the countryside and the routes of invasion have all been laid out before by Freud, David Rappoport and Alfred Adler—none of whom gets much credit. Laing argues that nuclear war and genocide are connected to schizophrenic feelings without drawing the connections at all. How can this psychiatrist help us if outside the consulting room his great gifts of intelligence go dead, and he mechanically and woodenly repeats the ideas of others? This failure of intellect is especially disturbing since the behavior Laing perceived in his consulting room could not be adequately explained by the older

This invasion from the outer world, Laing says, is blind, unintentional: each person or social group wounds others only hoping to protect itself. I believe this, but I don”t understand why. Laing believes it, and doesn't think it matters why, because “why” gets us too far away from the “reality that is the patient.”

So when Laing talks of waking up, of liberation, he ends at an impasse. If this is a vicious and insane world what are men to do? How are they to wake up? The analysis of schizophrenia on which Laing's work rests is that people are forced into what society calls insane behavior when they try to take the world seriously; it is the essence of his argument that you do not become insane by some willful act or failure of your own. If you did, we would be back in the world of Morel where patients needed to learn to control themselves better. If I, a sane man, want to wake up, and I can't will myself into mental illness, what

Here is the closest Laing comes to an answer “I consider many adults (including myself) are or have been, more or less, in a hypnotic trance. ... Attempts to wake before our time are often punished, especially by those who love us most. Because they, bless them, are asleep. They think anyone who wakes up ... is going crazy. Anyone in this transitional state is likely to be confused. To indicate this confusion is a sign of illness, is a quick way to create psychosis.”

It is an obsessive litany: You will be punished for being mentally ill when you wake up. But how do I get there? There is no therapy in this therapist's writings.

The conversion of his patients into “models” of behavior inhibits Laing from talking about three issues. The first is himself: “When I was thirteen, I had a very embarrassing experience??f shall not embarrass you by recounting it.... The first family to interest me was my own. I still Imow less about it than I know about many other families. This is typical.” A humanistic psychiatry does not have to bear the burden of autobiography or ‐confession, yet Laing cannot talk about himself openly in the detail he feels entitled to talk about his patients. When he uses “I” in this book, it usually is in terms of putting himself in the place of a suffering patient

Laing thinks of himself as an existentialist—indeed, one of his best books is a commentary with David Cooper on Sartre called “Reason and Violence” (1964), which has just been published for the first time in this country by Pantheon and Vintage Books. But as a writer he has become the worst of existentialists, one of the “spectators” Sartre so detests. How can a writer be an existentialist when he discounts himself?

Secondly, Laing talks about how emotions get twisted, but seldom talks about what emotions there are in the heart to twist. A reader who wants to find out about the range of feeling involved in human trust, in friendship, in sensuous pleasure, will not find it in Laing. “The Divided Self” described an idea of “ontological security” in which men felt able to take a wide variety of risks; the books since “The Politics of Experience” show a writer who can imagine only one.

This is to say, finally, that Laing has lost that capacity to dream which is necessary in any enduring radical vision. Critics like Marx and Freud did not content themselves with saying justice would reign when the old abuses disappeared.. Each of them tried to create a scenario for a just life that was greater than a mirror image of the old. For Marx, socialism ended the abuses of capitalism, but Communism instituted human relationships of a wholly new order. The acts of intelligence Freud called ego strengths were not compromises between the warring factions of instinct and external circumstance; they were creative powers to make new meanings, new satisfactions. Because Laing now has lost the power to dream and make his readers dream and desire, his catalogue of abuses is losing its power to anger.

What has gone sour in Laing is not unique to him, but is representative of the deadening of sentiment in the last few years that has seized us, his contemporaries. His refusal to think about the enemy mirrors our own: white racism, genocide, monopoly capitalism these are the villains and what more do we need to know about them but that they must be destroyed?

In truth, the resistance each man can mount to repression has to be renewed in his life, not by repeated declarations of will, but by continual doubts about what and why he is fighting. “A revolutionary is motivated by great feelings of love,” said Che, but he is also moved by curiosity; I think a man is liberated not by becoming completely absorbed in the fact that he is oppressed, but in exercising his power to understand with a certain grim disinterest the forces impinging on him. Political sensitivity thrives on uncertainty because the possiibility to be moved, to revolt, and be moved again, comes only from a deep distrust that at last one has settled what is

Intellect keeps uncertainty alive, and the failure to use it closes one up in the room where Laing is imprisoned. White, middle‐class persons who have come to sense what blackness means to an American black, or warfare to a Vietnamese, now speak of “identifying” with these struggles. Few of us in Laing's generation speak of identifying with the middle class, because we don't like it, and we think we can make change only by orienting our sensibilities around persons or conditions ineradicably different from ourselves. When Laing crossed that barrier and began to live through others, he went dead inside, could not speak of himself as probingly as he could speak for his patients, lost the power to create anger at the world which held them both so harshly in its grip. I wish I knew where it would lead to think out the realities of our lives as persons who are not dramatically suffering, but I do know that until we stop this' presumptuous sentimentality, until uncertainty and curiosity about who we are ourselves return, we will become increasingly bored with our own “causes” and tolerant of the society that brings them into being.■