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R.D.
Laing: The Uses of Madness
 R.D.
Laing is a forty-year-old English psychiatrist who
has been making a name for himself as an unusually
lucid and humane student of schizophrenia, as one
of the more articulate exponents of the school of
thought known as existential psychoanalysis, and as
an imaginative member of the English New Left. More
generally, Laing can be said to belong to the small
band of intellectuals found in each major culture
today who are trying to create a new humanism in
the face of the pieties and defeats that have
undermined the old; who are searching for a faith
in man that can withstand the acids of nihilism
that modem experience continually secretes. Like
them, Laing is struggling to make a new basis for
the unity of body and spirit, mind and heart, that
our society seems committed to dismember, and to
redraw the lines of sanity in an age that has seen
"normal" men destroy nearly a hundred million of
their fellow men.
All
of this makes him a deviant member of his
profession, to say the least: contemporary
psychiatry being one of the most conservative,
complacent, and narrow of the intellectual
professions-and, increasingly, a symptom of the
illness of the alienation, to paraphrase Karl
Kraus, that it seeks to cure. Except for a few
voices here and there (most of them belonging to
men trained in Europe, such as Bruno Bettelheim,
Erik Erikson, Erich Fromm), the psychiatrists seem
content to accept the reality principle as given by
society, no matter how pathogenic the realities of
our society have become. The enormous influence
they wield in tlie private lives of the educated
middle class is only matched by their silent
acceptance of a public world that is, quite
literally, driving more and more of us crazy in the
effort to adjust to it.
Laing's
relatively brief career has been marked by a steady
expansion of interests from the clinical to the
social and by a personal development from the
detachment of the analyst to the passionate
inwardness of the critic and lately of the prophet.
"Detachment" is not quite the right word, though.
Laing's first book. The Divided Self, is for
all of its calm, dispassionate tone, one of the
most moving accounts of madness I have ever read as
well as the clearest. Its strength derives from
Laing's insistence on viewing his schizoid and
psychotic patients as persons rather than as cases.
He explains their behavior as an effort to preserve
their lives in a world that has been made unlivable
for them by their early formative
relationships-relationships that have bred an
anxiety that pervades their existence as thoroughly
as coldness pervades the existence of an Eskimo.
This state of "ontological insecurity" creates a
terrible logic; to preserve his small sense of
aliveness, reality, and integrity, the person
constructs a "false self" that draws attention and
threat away from his "true self" and also enables
him to function to the extent that he can in the
real world. At the same time, however, this
splitting of the person's being progressively
worsens the problem that it sought to manage by
depriving the "true self" of any sustenance save
that of fantasy and by making the functioning of
the false self increasingly compulsive and
artificial. This basic dilemma spawns a variety of
subsidiary ones, and when the torments of the
division become intolerable, the schizoid person
will decide either to murder his self or abruptly
begin to act out his true self despite everything.
Either decision is likely to produce a
psychosis.
All
of which is meant to describe not a "disease" but
rather a state of radical privation (and a
desperate struggle to cope with it) that is all too
human. Laing beautifully fleshes out this analysis
by descriptions of the character and experiences of
his patients that are to the usual case histories
what Hamlet is to those scholarly disquisitions on
his motives. Indeed, Laing's portraits of "David,"
"an adolescent Kierkegaard played by Danny Kaye";
of "Peter," an apparently robust young man who was
at home only with dogs, who lived, as he put it,
"on the fringe of being," and who was "driven by a
terrible sense of honesty to be nothing"; of
"Marie," a girl suffering from acute
contactlessness who cured herself by going for a
week to see La Strada-these and others form
a gallery in The Divided Self of the
radically abused and injured victims of the common
life that not only demonstrate Laing's theories
about the integrity of madness but also make the
book a deep literary experience.
In
a recent preface to a new edition of The Divided
Self, however, Laing expresses a
dissatisfaction with the book: "I was already
partially falling into the trap I was seeking to
avoid. I [was] still writing . . . too much
about Them and too little of Us." Much of his
intervening work, particularly that in Reason
and Violence, which he wrote with David Cooper
and directly under the influence of Sartre, has
sought to relate the sources of individual
alienation not only to the family background but
also to the broader social norms that govern the
relations between the individual and others. In his
new book, The Politics of Experience, Laing
has reached the extreme position to which many
younger intellectuals are being driven today by the
manifest brutality and absurdity of these
norms:
We
do not live in a world of unambiguous identities
and definitions, needs and fears, hopes,
disillusions. The tremendous social realities of
our time are ghosts, specters of murdered gods and
our own humanity returned to haunt and destroy us.
The Negroes, the Jews, the Reds. Them. Only you and
I dressed differently. The texture of the fabric of
these socially shared hallucinations is what we
call reality, and our collusive madness is what we
call sanity.
The
Politics of Experience thus goes well beyond
the Freudian resolution of civilization and its
discontents. Laing argues that society is not only
sexually and instinctually repressive but also that
its steady barrage of pseudo-reality alienates us
from our senses and sense, impoverishes and
destroys our experience. This "condition of
alienation-of being asleep- of being unconscious,
of being out of one's mind, is the condition of the
normal man. ... If our experience is destroyed, we
have lost our own selves."
The
Politics of Experience is both a technical and
prophetic exploration of the processes of this
destruction: of what we do to each other and to
ourselves as alienated beings. There are the
defense mechanisms that keep the Other off, that
protect us by means of self-mystification from the
fear and trembling of what little freedom to be
ourselves and to relate positively to others
survives. Such mechanisms, as Laing keeps
insisting, are not merely personal but
trans-per-sonal: in insidiously aggressive ways
they distort the Other's experience and turn him
into a thing. Similarly, Laing wishes us to realize
that the largest sum of these trans-personal
alienating mechanisms is the society, the state.
How much alienation, for example, is being
inflicted at present both on the Vietnamese and on
ourselves by those mystified defense mechanisms
with which we are "containing Communism"? "in order
to rationalize our industrial-military complex,"
Laing says, "we have to destroy our capacity to see
clearly any more what is in front of, and to
imagine what is beyond, our noses. Long before a
thermonuclear war can come about, we have had to
lay waste our own sanity."
Such
assertions are, of course, prevalent today.
Contemporary politics makes apocalyptics of us all.
The question is how much authority Laing's picture
of our alienation carries. The Politics of
Experience suffers from being made up of papers
that were originally intended for special
audiences, whether those that read psychiatric
journals or the New Left Review. As a
result, the writing tends to be often baldly
assertive and elliptical and often lacks the
rigorously sustained development of his ideas that
one finds in The Divided Self. But, more
crucially, I think Laing has fallen victim to the
kind of literary terrorism that our chronic
desperation encourages: what might be called the
"signaling through the flames" school of writing.
The trouble is that desperation is not enough. We
arc all desperate. The notions of freedom on which
Laing grounds his analysis of man-good
existentialist that Laing is-require that we be
responsible for the attitude we bring to the
experience of fragmentation, contactlessness,
violence, that we try to hold together the whole
man in ourselves, in all his ambiguities, even as
he is being daily torn apart. In a sense we are, as
Laing says, "all murderers and prostitutes ... no
matter how normal, moral, or mature we take
ourselves to be," just as we are all, to a greater
or less degree, schizoid. But we merely begin to
mystify ourselves, and to foster further
alienation, when we try to substitute these
definitions for our experience of being in the
world. The ugliness of one feeling does not cancel
out the decency of another, just as the
dehumanization of children in one household does
not mean that pre-psychotics are also being created
next door.
The
overwhelming problem that all sensitive men face
today is to maintain their balance, and not to con
themselves by believing, as Laing says he does,
that the worst has already happened. Curiously
enough, the most convincing pages of The
Politics of Experience are those devoted to the
sanity and spirituality of "madness," rather than
those that seem devoted to driving the rest of us
out of our "wretched minds." Which is perhaps only
to say that Laing writes best when he writes from
the integrity of his own experience and eschews the
temptation to make a total, vague, and baiting
politics of it.
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