Audio Colloquies An Interview With R.D. Laing

recorded 1987 (?) Harper & Row [*Notes]

RDL: [...cont'd] As a clinical psychiatrist we see a lot of people who look as though, you might say, they look as though they've regressed to an intrauterine state and they're often catatonic, regressed schizophrenic often referred to as lying there in a fetal position and so on. And so simply to summarise my clinical experience and giving weight to the work of a number of people like Stanislav Grof for instance, who've recently, he in particular with LSD therapy in Czechoslovakia and later in America have gotten an enormous amount of data now about adults who curl up and go through all, etc. etc., so it seems to be a physicalised, dramatised and ritualised, anthropologists are very familiar with the metaphor, way of working through something or going through something. And of course in order to be born one's got to go back to before birth, I mean you've got to get inside the womb in order to come out of it again. And it seemed with this to be such a common pattern, it's one of the patterns that in our society, there's no cultural place for it within the normal framework. When some, say, possibly very valuable ritual pattern is cultured out of a particular society it's possible that it's needed and it's possible that we haven't got any alternative ordered recourse to what is being worked through in that pattern through in some other way. So in the absence of this avenue to go through... you see I wonder if we had an ordered initiation ceremonial at a teenage, adolescent phase, how many teenagers that have sort of schizophreniform episodes who go to pieces and into some sort of set of experiences that society has got no coherent way of responding to in such a way that brings order to it and a method into it, if it wasn't obviously present in the first place, so some people might be stumbling willy-nilly into this territory that society not having an adequate response to it, what we have is a schizophreniform breakdown. Of course, in dreams, and myths and metaphor there is an endless amount of material that one can construe in birth and pre-birth terms but that's of course open to all the problematic of what criteria one uses to justify a particular construction and the evidence in that direction is much thinner. Freud looked at all the evidence and rejected the balance of construction I would place on it. I wonder what Freud would make of the re-enactment of so much birth material nowadays and growth and development groups and primal therapy and all that sort of thing where it seems to be the day-in and day-out experience.

DK: It seems that you've used it as a particular therapeutic maneuver. How do you actually do that with a person?

RDL: I've done it in a number of different ways. In the first place we did it being very much defined as a birth ritual in a workshop in a place that might accommodate thirty or forty people in tracks suits, dressed for a workout as in a gym. And we had long strip of Dunlow pillow matting on the floor, a person would lie down on that, and people could either make a tunnel with their legs, or they could just shut their eyes and go into it. I needn't describe here the precise details but simply by giving someone who really wanted to do it the go-ahead with their eyes shut, so the simple injunction to "go" is sufficient. And people then go into an imaginary or self-made tunnel or space. What you see someone doing is on their back, usually on the floor with someone with their hand say on the crown of their head or jamming their head through someone's legs, or burrowing their head into the floor, starting to writhe and grimace, twist and contort and sweat and heart usually starts to beat very much faster, and people in the course of ten to twenty minutes report that while they're doing that with people around them that they have a vivid sensation, or a vivid subjective feeling as though it is very familiar and what they're going through is what they say is the experience of being born. They're very specific about it, they go on and on and on with considerable intensity usually for quarter of hour, twenty minutes, very seldom longer, pressing or feeling themselves, even if there aren't any actual legs there or hands there to provide the impression of a narrow thing that they're going through, they feel it or they say they feel as though they're being crushed, or they feel a band passing over their body, sometimes that band gets stuck. People usually are able while they're immersed in this inner subjective experience tend to say a few words to people what they want them to do sort of pull them out. So there's a very human, sweaty, close thing that happens for about twenty minutes and then the person feels that the struggle suddenly is over and they're out. The person can often move their legs for the first time or that they can breathe for the first time, but just like that, it's over and they're out. Some people at that point do further twitches or jerks which they say is the further feeling of being turned up and smacked or the umbilical cord... some people suddenly get very cold, some people hear sounds or voices in a hallucinated way within that span of time, ten or twenty minutes and then they come out of it. Well. That is a device. What all that is about and I'm being quite explicit that I don't know, the point is that it is a number that I found it comparatively easy to set the scene for people going in, and then one observes people going in this and takes their report that what they think has been happening is some birth experience and they feel new and different and all the rest of it. I've certainly been impressed that in a remarkably short period of time people can look so different from one side of this to another. Some people said that they felt permanently different. But I don't want to represent this as some sort of new, gimmicky miracle cure, it's far from that, but it does do something for some period of time, and it's something the person seems to do pretty well entirely on their own initiative. In a way it doesn't look the least like birth, because when one is being born one doesn't go through all these muscle movements, one is passively fairly well impacted upon, and the struggle for breath and the grimacing and teeth and pressure... is not actually what I would think is directly mimicking the actual movements that one made at birth, although people habitually feel that they can't use their arms, they're pinned, they can't move their legs until they're out, some people go through very vivid feelings of confusion because they'll report that they've been turned around and they don't know which way up they are, and people reporta detailed feelings that it's come too late or it's come too soon. People start to check up on their hospital records, etc., etc., try to correlate... I've got no systematic data however on that.

DK: Do you think that it's a personal memory rather than an archetypal memory?

RDL: Well that's a major unanswered question. See if it's an ancestral memory, then that ancestral memory would have to have been carried through the nucleus and cytoplasm of the zygote. If an ancestral memory of an archetypical order, it's the only link through actually one cell, and it seems to me just as plausible that one cell in its prenatal derivatives could receive some registration of patterning before the neural tissue is... you've got the one cell must somehow carry the genetic memory that is mapped into the nervous system if it's archetypal when the nervous system is developed. It seems quite plausible that certain bio-patterns could be, well are carried before our nervous system is differentiated and imprinted into the nervous system from pre-neural system.

DK: I'd like to change the subject slightly, many argue that neurosis is a historical phenomenon, that the kind of neurosis described by Freud was created by the conditions of his time. Would you extend this to say schizophrenia, if we may use the label, might this also be a historical condition?

RDL: Well in the sense that we believe that the gene pool is reasonably constant, but our environment, particularly the artifactual, human environment that we create for ourselves in terms of culture, is in the process of continued change, so one would think that there would always be shifting nuances, the outcome of the product of our genetic response system to changing environmental circumstances, though, so what is 20th century schizophrenia is possibly a variation on a theme which is a product of our genetic constitution and our 20th century environment. Another variation would be the 16th century environment in other words that the clinical picture of certain conditions where the relevant environmental variable is our cultural variables rather than physical constants, would be open to transformation with transforming environmental circumstances. Of course it's very difficult with Freud's terminology because if we go back in Freud's five original studies of hysteria and the people he called hysteria, a fair number of them would now be called schizophrenia. Among these five hysterics if I remember there's one who had visual hallucinations one had olfactory hallucinations and quite a lot of schizoid phenomena I think one committed suicide eventually I think one ended up in a mental hospital. We remember that, say, what American psychiatrists now call schizophrenia, has a big overlap with what Freud was calling hysteria. It just adds a bit more piquancy to the semantic confusion of the subject.

DK: Yes. I'd like to stick with the diagnostic dilemma. Do you feel that diagnosis is actually helpful to psychiatrist and patient or do you think it's merely a label which disguises a complex reality?

RDL: Well I think that reality is very complex and I think that there can be some labels that disguise complex reality and other labels that bring out clarity within and enable us to see in an articulated manner the complexity. And I have got absolutely no objection to naming, to classifying, to ordering our universe, including the domain that psychiatry is concerned with. To giving it an order and to putting it in sets where there's a homogeneity to all the members of the one set. The argument is not against the process of naming or ordering specifically, but on two scores. The naming and ordering of phenomenon in the sphere of psychiatry, this naming and ordering regarded as a branch of medicine means that we have to suppose that the phenomena that are being named are of the same order as the phenomena studied in the rest of medical pathology. Now the phenomena aren't quite of the same order because we're studying a person's words, of course we study a person's word neurologically and so on but it's a person's words not so much in terms of indications of an organic order through the words but confusion with I suppose in the connotation or significance of words both as heard and as uttered.

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