Audio Colloquies An Interview With R.D. Laing

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

DK: What are the points of difference between yourself and an American with whom you're often associated by reviewers, Thomas Szasz?

RDL: Well in relationship to Thomas Szasz I'm not quite sure if I'm attributing to him something that he would disclaim, I get the impression, I don't know what you would say about this, he writes sometimes as though he didn't really feel in this crazy world it's appropriate to call anybody, specifically, crazy. Now, if that's the case, I really do think that it's indispensable, to me anyway, to retain the category of madness, craziness, out of one's wits, out of one's senses, daft, verruckt. That there are some people, it could be any of us, who at some time could lose the place, become disorientated in terms of time, place and person, take things that we're not going to abandon common sense entirely, to be real which we wouldn't say are real, etc., etc. Well, I would say that there is this domain. Now, Szasz seems to have given the impression, to some of us, anyway, that he doesn't really think there's any separable domain in that territory in the whole continuum of the vicissitudes of the human mind. I think it's useful to retain a distinction, I agree, however, that the exclusive medicalisation of that distinction is… I agree with that criticism. In other words I avow severe dysfunctional states and it's a matter of debate whether all dysfunction in the organism is automatically pre-empted by the medical way of looking at pathology, at dysfunction. However I do very much agree with him about human liberty, libertarian side of this, and that we're often very, very too casual about stripping someone on that pretext of their liberty and all their human rights and sometimes it takes years and years and years before they can ever get them back again once that's happened.

DK: How do you see the role and function of the psychiatrist in western society?

RDL: There are so many things that psychiatrists actually do, there's child psychiatry, there's psychiatrists concerned with mental defect, there's the problem of people crumbling into ruination in mental and physical functions as they get older, there's all sorts of known organic conditions that produce behavioural and mental transformations, etc., etc. I think that there's a clear role for a psychiatrist insofar as he remains a proper doctor and as a physician. Then I think there's a role that the medically-trained man has to win for himself or herself an open competition, in terms of a domain of distinctive competence that has to do with the understanding of disturbances in communication between people. There's no particular reason why the people who become the 'elite' in that respect, students of human communication, need be medically trained. But at the moment, a lot of the people who are in this field regard themselves as primarily… the real matrix of psychiatry, is communication according to some people. Harry Stack Sullivan and Ruesch and other people would argue that there's a misalliance between neuro-psychiatry and the study of interpersonal relationships, that they've really got very little to do with each other. I think that if we take both of these as a continued role for both these functions, there's a clear role for a medically-trained man, in one of them, and there's a clear role for a medically-trained man if he amplifies his medical training to be ambidextrous as it were.

DK: In the United States, as here, Transcendental Meditation is being put to a wide variety of uses never dreamt of by its first users. Even businessmen are employing it at their desks, as a means of both relaxing and restoring their energy. Following your recent visit to India and Ceylon, do you see any applications of TM to psychiatry, Dr. Laing?

RDL: Well I wouldn't say that the way these things are being used was never dreamt of by the original users. Transcendental Meditation is the use of a, well let's call it a vibration, a particular sonic pulse that can be alluded to by a word, but the word is only the opening of that pulse which one repeats to oneself and can locate it one's mental space in any part of the body and just let it purr away, and also just see where it goes, and what it does. Different of these mantras have got different effects, some are very sharpening, induce a lot of energy, others are very calming. These mantric, sonic vibrational things have been used in a common way in India for as long as any contemporary Indians assume, I mean millions of people in India, taxi drivers, shopkeepers have got their mantras, from childhood, and they repeat them to themselves day in and day out. Any time they feel like it, tune in with this mantra, or that. It's traditional that… there's a boon which will open out to the person… facility in life, in the direction of business, in the direction of trading, in the direction of this, etc., etc. It's a boon, without any restraint. Well of course one's not encouraged to technicalise this, they simply use it in an instrumental way, for one's own advantage, but the devotion to the mantra may bring with it all sorts of happy, fortunate, material side effects.

DK: Do you think we will use it more in psychiatry?

RDL: Yes, I think that as the world opens out and we discover what our fellow, our brothers have been doing across the other side of the globe and they discover what we've been up to, etc., eventually we'll have a transglobal array, we'll have the pick of the best elements from all traditions will suffuse every tradition.

DK: Dr. Laing, as early as 1960 you were questioning some of the basic assumptions of the behavioural sciences. Would you care to elaborate on how this skepticism originated?

RDL: Well I don't know whether I can put my finger on a spot, but the issue is that what we have got as most immediately available to us to study and understand is our own experience. For instance, as we are sitting here just now, my precise experience of being here is only mediated through my conduct to you as yours is to me. We don't have a direct, immediate objective observation of each other's experience. And experience covers a great deal. Now it doesn't seem that in the rest of the physical world, which the physical sciences are concerned with, there's any complexity of this order, we're only looking at how things behave. And there's no problem of correlating that behaviour with experience, of the object. But we can't say "the object" now we've got to say the human being, the sentient creature, the person, and so on. So it's not an objection to a science of behaviour as such, but to the theoretical presuppositions the methodological practices of a certain school of the science of behaviour that seemed to me to, while studying behaviour, not be prepared to see behaviour as intelligible in referring how we conduct ourselves to how we experience ourselves and the world. So there's some behaviour scientists who are very sensitive to that and some who are not.

DK: If you were to redefine some of the basic assumptions behind the behavioural sciences, how would you do so?

RDL: I don't think it's possible to find a sufficient homogeneous ground between the different behavioural sciences because we have to go all the way from sociology all the different schools of sociology [inaudible]…. History, anthropology, to animal experimental studies in laboratories to ethology, I don't think there's a single body of presuppositions, in fact it is absolute babble of contradictory contentious argument and many behaviour scientists never read anything of what someone in another school is on about even though they're crossing territories all the time.

DK: You've had a very varied career so far, where do you see yourself going in the next five years from a professional point of view?

RDL: I'd expect to be continuing as I'm doing, which is a rather straightforward, orthodox private practice, and contact with residental context that we have, the particular programme that I've planned for myself is that I'd like to take the chance now to go over my records for the last 25 years or so and comb through them and see what I can go back and bring that up to date instead of leaving too much behind me that I haven't had a chance to look at. I'd like to take the chance to look back and sift it through and see what out of that I can present to my colleagues as worthy of their interest.

DK: Looking back to do you see any steps as professional disasters or professional faults, possibly?

RDL: I don't see anything as gross as disaster, I regretted very much that in order to pursue what I wanted to pursue, I had to step out of the National Health Service to do it because there were no contexts within the National Health Service for such practice. So I've had to be a bit more out on a limb than I was used to, and feel comfortable with, and don't regard myself as that sort of person… This is one of the things that I would hope to make a list of, there are a number of things I would do differently if I had a chance to do them over again. In a way I'm still too much in mid-stream to know exactly, I think, where I've made a mistake, I often go where one side of my brain says 'that was a disaster' and look at it from another point of view and think well, that was a great learning experience. I haven't had time, yet, in a way to look back on my life, and make that sort of assessment. I don't carry along with me either notable feelings of 'this was absolutely right' or 'this was absolutely wrong', it's still to me very much the answers as I learn them.

DK: Well for me this afternoon has been very much a learning experience. Dr. Laing, thank you very much indeed.

RDL: Thank you, Dr. Kelly.

*Notes:
This transcript is provided from a taped recording and subject to error. Every effort
has been made to provide a faithful transcription. Pauses and bridging phrases
have been edited for the sake of readability. For further information please contact
Harper & Row for a copy of the cassette at the address provided in the recording:

Department of Educational Media
Harper & Row Publishers Incorporated
10 East 53rd Street
New York, New York
122 USA