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·
Commentary
·
 Sanity,
Madness, and the Family was published in 1964,
and co-authored with Aaron Esterson. Like Laing,
Esterson was a Glaswegian psychiatrist who was
deeply versed in existentialism, whom Laing had
befriended at University. With the help and
encouragement of John Bowlby, Director of the
Tavistock Clinic, Laing and Esterson began studying
over one hundred families in which one member was
diagnosed with schizophrenia in London's East End.
Twenty-five families were eventually selected, and
hundreds of hours of interviews took place, most of
them in the family's own homes. The interviews were
taped and the recordings were transcribed and
analyzed with the help of social worker Sydney
Briskin. This process took five years, from 1958 to
1963, when the original group of 25 families were
finally whittled down to 11 for brevity's
sake.
In
conversation with Daniel Burston in July of 1992,
John Bowlby allowed that Sanity, Madness and
the Family may be "the most important book on
families written in the 20th century". This is
great praise, even when you consider that Bowlby
himself never cited Sanity, Madness and the
Family in print. But it was not well received
by the rest of the psychiatric profession, who
believed that Laing and Esterson were blaming the
family members of mental patients for their misery
and confusion. This is a common misreading. In
fact, Laing and Esterson were not offering a new
theory on the etiology of schizophrenia, since they
doubted its existence in the first place. Instead,
Laing said, "Our question is: are the experience
and behavior that psychiatrists take as symptoms of
schizophrenia more socially intelligible than has
come to be supposed?" For example, why does a
patient vehemently insist that her mother murdered
her a decade ago, and vent her anger at mother for
that alleged offense at almost every
opportunity?
Another
common misreading of Laing and Esterson's work is
that they said regarded mental patients as being
"rational". But as Laing and Esterson admitted,
there is nothing rational about a woman who accuses
her mother of murdering her. The charge is so
plainly at variance with the facts that, taken at
face value, it is easily dismissed. However, the
fact that the accusation is not rational does not
mean that it is meaningless. And the meaning of
delusions, they said, can be established by placing
them in the (public and private) contexts in which
the mother and daughter interacted historically.
Unfortunately, said Laing and Esterson,
psychiatrists who employ the medical model lack the
time, the training and the incentive to discern the
social intelligibility of their patients' symptoms,
and usually end up collude with parents and
siblings who want to invalidate the patient's
ranting completely.
To
view the strange ideas, utterances and experiences
of mental patients through fresh, unbiased eyes,
Laing and Esterson devised a method called "social
phenomenology" that brackets 1) all medical model
preconceptions about schizophrenia as a
neurobiological disorder, and 2) all psychoanalytic
theories about unconscious motivation, but
nevertheless 3) attends faithfully to the conscious
thoughts, feelings and experiences of the various
family members, paying close attention to the
points of convergence and divergence in their
accounts of their shared history. Sometimes the
differences in perspective between various family
members are so dramatic they are difficult to
believe, much less comprehend, and remain somewhat
mysterious until the researchers can pinpoint the
patterns of mystification, denial, and
occasionally, frank deception (or self-deception)
that gave rise to them. Then low and behold, in
case after case, ideas and utterances deemed
bizarre (by family members and psychiatrists alike)
became readily intelligible in light of a shared
history and "family dynamics" that are disowned or
denied by the "sane" ones.
Whereas
The Divided Self and Self and
Others used case history material to illumine
Laing's theoretical positions, Sanity, Madness
and Family said relatively very about theory,
and let the case history material speak for itself.
The eleven case histories that Laing and Esterson
presenting are riveting, but also profoundly
disturbing, and apt to polarize readers, who are
left to draw their own conclusions.
·
Contents
·
Preface
Preface to the Second Edition
Introduction
FAMILIES
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
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The Abbots
The Blairs
The Churches
The Danzigs
The Edens
The Fields
The Golds
The Heads
The Irwins
The Kings
The Lawsons |
Appendix
Index
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