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R.
D. Laing was not a systematic thinker. One of the
more controversial figures in psychology and
psychiatry, both as a result of his efforts and in
spite of them, he remains a difficult theorist to
nail down. Laing preferred to cover a broad area of
inquiry rather than work any specific idea out to
its logical conclusions and fine-tune it to
perfection. His best known and perhaps most
promising work, an existential theory of the
genesis of schizophrenia, was never fully
developed; it was abandoned in favor of an
exploration into interpersonal defenses (Burston,
1996, p. 58). Indeed, Laing's career and written
works are marked by radical shifts in subject
matter, position, writing style, intended audience,
and interest-- producing a book of logical poems,
an exploration into pre-birth experiences, a
commune for the mentally ill, a psychedelic
treatise (which led to investigations into his own
mental stability), and an extended hiatus to India
and Sri Lanka to practice Buddhist
meditation.
Moreover,
upon closer inspection, it soon becomes apparent
that Laing's work is not only non-systematic, but
that there are irresolvable tensions in his
thought. Even if one takes his intellectual
development over the duration of his career as
psychiatrist and theorist into account, one will be
hard-pressed to create any sort of final
philosophical anthropology or theory of mental
health, illness, or therapy. This of course has not
stopped us from trying; numerous books that have
been written about Laing both during and after his
lifetime struggle to make sense of his
frustratingly diverse and sometimes chaotic career.
Some attempt to work out a unified Laingian theory
(or at least say what is "important" in Laing's
thought), while others take a more historical or
biographical approach, comparing Laing's earlier
projects to his later projects and teasing out
influences and patterns. These endeavors have been
more or less successful, depending on what one is
looking for. For example, Andrew Collier's
discussion of Laing's social phenomenology closes
with the claim that "in the end, one has to choose
what one wants from Laing," rejecting what does not
coherently fit and emphasizing what works (1977, p.
196). On the other hand, Daniel Burston, at the end
of his exploration into Laing's approach to
psychotherapy, urges that Laing should ultimately
be read in the more disseminated style of
Kierkegaard and Nietzsche rather than in that of a
systemetizer such as Kraepelin or Freud (2000, p.
146).
Although
some complain about Laing's inconsistencies and
lack of a coherent system, I believe that this is
where his strength lies. What we have to learn from
Laing's work is not so much a statement about how
the world is as much as an attitude or
method of approaching it. a way of looking. Laing's
thought in this way is fundamentally open-ended.
His preference for smaller phenomenological
inquiries instead of the construction of grand
narratives allowed him to remain open to the
possibility of being surprised. Thus, in spite of
having a reputation for a quirky personal
arrogance, Laing had a humility before the
phenomena he investigated; an awareness of the
mystery that remained after his investigations, of
what he could not see.
There
will always be phenomena and experiences that stand
outside of our theorizing, surprising or even
resisting our attempts to make it all fit together.
But the possibility of our being surprised is
shrinking as we mold the world to our expectations.
In our present situation, the hegemony of the
"objective" viewpoint threatens to foreclose any
deeper exploration into human experience as we
search for a unified theory that will explain
everything. Psychology is falling fast into the
service of the grand narrative of pharmacology. To
resist this, we would do well with more
microanalyses, as Foucault called them, that stand
outside these totalitarian theories and allow what
would be invisible to appear. Laing did not allow
himself to be led by a drive to describe the nature
of the whole. If it is true that the importance of
his work lies in his way of looking at phenomena. a
way of looking that reveals what other ways of
looking pass over. then the complaint that Laing
does not attempt to complete a system that will
reveal everything may lead us to wonder
about the motivations of those who would have
everything given over. Rather, his tensions and
contradictions shed light, reflecting the tensions
and contradictions of human experience.
With
this in mind, I want to turn to a few examples of
how Laing has been picked up, particularly in the
service of revolutionary metaphysical systems.
Laing's early affiliation with Marxism ended on a
sour note. The Marxists he dialogued with generally
painted him as having failed in what they took to
be his theoretical project and criticized his
abandonment of the political sphere. In this vein,
Laing has been charged with being lukewarm and
inconsistent in his commitments, ultimately
allowing his social constructivism to be corrupted
by an existential personalism he could never free
himself from.
The
fact that these critics are Marxist revolutionaries
is not in itself a problem; Laing himself was a
revolutionary of sorts, and used many Marxist ideas
and terms on his own initiative. In fact, many of
those who criticized Laing were inspired by him in
the first place. The problem, rather, is that his
critics are often working to construct a closed
metaphysical system: they have goals based on grand
narratives as to how the world looks-- or rather,
should look-- from outside any concrete
point of view within it. Laing, being a
phenomenologist, would never allow such an
"objective" point of view to take precedence. He
did not try to see the world from the outside.
Thus, their complaints against him are not so much
about his inconsistency as the fact that he doesn't
stand where they would like him to. Their efforts
to give an account of Laing's thought have failed.
His excess has no place in their systems. They
mistook Laing's less ambitious method for a
metaphysics.
Laing's
Self-Understanding
How
did Laing understand his own project? Although he
complained that what he was saying was constantly
being misunderstood and misappropriated, Laing
understood himself as something other than the
founder of a coherent theory. In a short
third-person summary he wrote of himself for The
Oxford Companion to the Mind (1987), Laing
presents the critical stance he took against the
theoretical foundations and practices of the
existing medical establishment rather than any
positive work he developed. In fact, he devotes as
much space in the entry to actually
criticizing the establishment as he does to
outlining his critical stance. Ultimately, though,
he positions himself as a "social phenomenologist"
who "has been mainly concerned to see and to
describe what goes on in people's experience, as
mediated by their interactions" (p. 417). Although
the method of the analysis of interpersonal
relations has yet to be fully developed, he says,
he nevertheless "has studied various facets of very
disturbed and disturbing personal relations." At
the end of his summary, Laing has more questions
than answers, giving himself over to a necessary
ignorance that realizes "there is so much that goes
on between us which we can never know" (p. 418).
And this unknown factor will not go away, he
scolds, simply because the existing empirical
sciences refuse to look at it. Thus Laing presents
his project as attempting to bring into view what
he can from this realm of uncertainty-- even though
many resist this goal and would rather pretend that
the unknown does not exist. His closing line
indicates, after all the misunderstanding and
confusion, that what he wants to be remembered for
is not so much what he said about what he saw, but
how he went about it: "It therefore may turn out
that the main significance of Laing's work lies in
what it discloses or reveals of a way of looking
which enables what he describes to be seen"
(p.418). That is, the legacy he leaves behind is
his phenomenological method of looking at an
individual's experiences in the context of his or
her interpersonal relationships-- not a particular
statement about the nature of reality as a
whole.
But
not only did Laing not see himself as a
metaphysician; he saw himself expressly as
anti metaphysical. Over the last two years
of his life Laing gave a series of interviews with
his would-be biographer, Bob Mullan. What was
published from these conversations serves us as the
closest available approximation to Laing's
intellectual memoirs, giving his reflections upon
his career and body of work. as well as his
childhood and many other more personal subjects.
Here, he takes his position of not knowing even
further. Where he earlier presented himself as
non-systematic and critical of the establishment,
his interviews emphasize his position as a negative
thinker of sorts in the style of Foucault,
Nietzsche, and Kierkegaard. Laing thought these
thinkers wrote closer to life and in a more
accessible way than did systematizers such as Hegel
and Heidegger.
Because
there is no longer a single cultural worldview to
support them, Laing explained, the days of building
grand metaphysical schemas and all-encompassing
explanations are over. Different views create an
excess of meaning. Thus, when one discusses issues
of ultimacy such as the meaning of existence or the
nature of things, the words one uses have so much
invested in them throughout the diversity of
individual listeners that "the meaning of all the
words disappears into other people," who hear in
them only what they themselves mean when they use
the terms (Mullan, 1995, p. 37). In other words,
you can't control meaning. The intention of the
speaker is lost, making it difficult, if not
impossible, to articulate a single coherent answer
to the big questions. One simply can't communicate
the whole of it. Even the last great systematizers,
Laing says, such as Heidegger and Adorno, had to
invent so much jargon in an attempt to control how
they were received that they were incoherent to all
but professional academics. Perhaps, he suggests, a
musician or poet would have better luck at
communicating such an ambitious undertaking as the
meaning of the whole. But since he was a writer,
Laing thought it better to stick to smaller,
clearer projects. the "needles" of precision that
Foucault, Nietzsche, and Kierkegaard preferred.
Laing saw himself as a literary minimalist, getting
to the point and getting out: "I want to use the
simplest everyday language in a coherent way" (p.
38).
This
being said, Laing was still adamant about one
project in particular throughout his career-- that
of the social contextualization of experience. In
The Divided Self , he argues in the
beginning that in trying to make the schizophrenic
(or any other person's) experience comprehensible,
"any theory that begins with man or a part of man
abstracted from his relation with the other in his
world" will necessarily fail to understand the
workings of the human psyche (1960, p. 19). As time
went on, Laing sharpened his focus on the social
network, turning away from the description of
individual experience and toward the ways that we
use "interpersonal actions" to shape each other's
experiences. This "social nexus" was the primary
theme of Self and Others (1961), his follow
up to his first work. He became more scathing in
The Politics of Experience (1967), where he
asserts that the behavior of the supposed
schizophrenic is "a special strategy that a person
invents in order to live in an unlivable situation"
(p. 115). This puts the blame, or at least the
source of a person. s suffering, on his or her
conscious or unconscious treatment at the hands of
others.
This
locating the source of one's suffering in his or
her social situation, along with his career-long
criticism of the medical establishment in their
treatment of those labeled mentally ill, led Laing
to be lumped in with radical Marxists and
anti-psychiatrists. But in spite of his virulent
attacks on the established understanding of mental
illness (as a problem within the individual's
psyche), Laing's inclusion into the anti-psychiatry
movement came to pass only to his chagrin and in
spite of his defensive assertions to the contrary.
Laing was still an avowed existential
phenomenologist, greatly influenced by existential
writers such as Kierkegaard, Sartre, and Heidegger,
and shared their personalist point of view and
understanding of subjectivity.
Obviously,
this refusal to reject existentialism was not
agreeable to those who labored to show how
anonymous ideology constitutes what the individual
mistakes for his or her personal experience, which
is how much of Marxist thought has constituted the
subject since Althusser. It is indicative of the
difficulty Laing would face on this front that the
principal text in which he emphasized the
importance of social context was not a
social critique, but a phenomenological description
of the schizoid experience. And even in Self and
Others , while he is turning towards a more
socially constructed understanding of the self,
Laing speaks of that which is radically private in
a person's experience-- to the point where the loss
of this "unqualified privacy" of first-person
experience is a considerable factor in madness
(1961, p. 36). Despite his emphasis on the role of
the social, he never gave up his existential bent
and his concern for personal experience. His
critics took this as a weakness, seeing Laing as a
developing social critic who was never able to
purge himself of his personalist starting point. as
if one should not speak about social experience and
personal experience without ultimately reducing one
to the other.
Laing's
Systematic Appropriation
Laing's
deliberate lack of ultimate coherence has not
stopped his being picked up and pressed into the
service of the metaphysical projects of others. The
irony here is that Laing shared the same fate as
the heroes he cited in his interviews with Mullan.
Indeed, it seems that an unfortunate consequence of
being a non-systematic thinker has been that others
subsequently appropriate one's thought into a
system. even if one's initial project was the
destruction of systems. The will to system may
indeed be irresistible. Foucault complained about
this tendency even during his lifetime, and we are
just beginning to realize the damage that has been
done to Nietzsche's thought by condensing it into a
neat and palatable package. Kierkegaard seems to
have been luckier in this regard, perhaps because
he has instead been boiled down to a few
disconnected, trite slogans.
Even
stranger (and more infuriating), this appropriation
into a system in turn leads to charges of
inconsistency when disparate facets of the thinker.
s ideas fall outside of that purported system.
which, in the end, turns out to be nothing more
than the editor's agenda. Peter Sedgwick, for
example, in his Psycho Politics , accuses
Laing of having deceived and disappointed his
followers by "returning" to psychiatry in the
seventies and abandoning what he, Sedgwick, saw as
the important revolutionary (that is, Marxist)
element of Laing's work (1982, p. 102).
Indeed,
Laing's ambivalence toward the "revolution" is
apparent. Burston reports that Laing's strong
association with the Left and his emphasis on
social activism in the sixties had all but
disappeared by the mid-seventies, during which he
"lost no opportunity to emphasize his indebtedness
to Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Freud, distancing
himself from Marxist politics" (1996, p. 109). With
this came Laing's turn towards Buddhist mysticism
and his trip to the East. In spite of this, Laing
never lost his socially critical tone; still, he
rejected any affiliation with revolutionary social
movements. Although Laing sympathized with Sedgwick
and respected his commitment to his cause, he
resented Sedgwick's demand that he stay within his
categories of what a revolutionary should be.
Discussing this issue with Mullan, he reacted to
Sedgwick's charge with the countercharge of trying
to pigeonhole him: "I thought of writing him and
saying you. re putting some sort of ideological map
in front of you, in terms of what you see in me,
but it doesn't correspond" (Mullan, p. 357).
Laing's resentment of such charges ran deep, as
they conflicted with his own identity as an
independent thinker. Sedgwick assumed that Laing
was on their side from the beginning, and took any
departure from that as a betrayal. But Laing wasn't
so impressed with "their side" in the first place.
or even so sure that such a side actually existed.
So not only was his turn to the East not a
"betrayal of the cause" (p. 356); he called
Sedgwick impertinent in assuming that he, Laing,
should follow any sort of preset "correct Marxist
line" (p. 91).
Laing's
own personal experience taught him that the world
is too complicated to fit into "proper" theory; in
his University days in Glasgow, he had been
involved in various groups who read Marx and tried
to apply it to their own local situation. Laing
told Mullan of the difficulties he had found trying
to apply such abstract ideas to social change:
"Scotland wasn't capitalist . . . and we couldn't
rely on what Marx had written over 100 years ago
simply applied to different circumstances" (p.
89-90). Since the world didn't fit into Marx, it
would be better to fit Marx into the world. Such an
approach allows (and requires) a decentering of
one's politics; simply belonging to the correct
party is not enough. Bluntly put: "What the fucking
hell is a correct Marxist line?" (p. 91).
Laing's
refusal to commit in his political affiliations was
reflected on the theoretical level as well. Laing's
lifelong theoretical project certainly had a
critical voice in it; contextualizing his
patients-- symptoms within their social situations
and familial systems in order to make sense of them
led him to describe how these contexts often
contribute or even constitute the patients.
identity and experience as mentally ill. This
naturally led to his criticism of those systems
and, as said before, to his being taken up by
radical social theorists. But Laing was suspicious
of the high level of abstraction Marxism attained
to gain its theoretical justification in the first
place. What interested him in Marx was not the
materialist dialectic, but the desire to change
people's concrete situations for the better.
The
ambivalence with which Laing used Marxist theory is
borne out in the tension he saw between the young
Marx, which he read as a sort of humanism, and the
later revolutionary works he characterized with the
well known phrase "you can't make an omelette
without breaking eggs" (Mullan, p. 89). Although he
was impressed with the seriousness of the latter
approach, he was very aware of the danger of
working with such a totalizing logic and the harm
it can bring to people in the world. He was highly
critical (and he is not alone in this) of the way
he saw Marxist theory taken up on the abstract
level of ontological forces in their historical
culmination. bourgeois subjective idealism. rather
than being motivated by a concern for the suffering
of real individuals in their concrete
circumstances. Classes, as abstract categories,
don't suffer. People do. And when the logic takes
priority over the reality, it becomes "a
simple-minded formula" where one thinks he or she
can simply "turn the handle" and it will apply to
everything (p. 90). The individual is thus lost in
the machine. As an existentialist, Laing's concern
was for the individual experience, not the
completion of history through the correction of
social conscience. The abstraction that Marxist
theory reached in order to justify itself was
ultimately too convoluted for Laing. He grounded
his activism at the level of the concrete, citing
the example of the French worker priests who
interpreted the gospel as telling Christians to
dive into the trenches because, as he liked to say,
"Jesus Christ has no other hands but ours" (p. 88).
The work is to be done in front of the curtain, not
behind it.
Still,
Andrew Collier, in his R. D. Laing: The
Philosophy and Politics of Psychotherapy
(1977), spends the entire book trying to fit Laing
into a materialist dialectic. Collier's text is a
good example (indeed, almost a caricature) of how
the will to systematize can lead one to overlook
the complexity of another's thought. to say nothing
about the complexity of the world of human
experience. Collier asserts that "Laing's own
theory and practice cannot be understood except as
a version of psychoanalysis, however unorthodox"
(p. 39) and then proceeds to select what he can use
from Laing to serve his Freudo-Marxist project.
Further, Collier charges that "the 'existentialism'
which Laing finds in the pain of his patients.
self-experience . . . infect[s] his own
method about theorizing about psychological
matters," and that these contaminations have no
place in an objective explanation of reality. Thus,
while there are plainly both personal and social
strains in Laing's thought, Collier strives to
rescue Laing from the former "existential" camp.
His Marxist and scientistic lenses lead him to see
only those aspects of Laing's thought that lend
themselves to his materialist dialectic. Not
surprisingly, he comes up in the end with a reading
of Laing that simply confirms his worldview. There
is no danger of Laing's excesses and contradictions
shaking up his predetermined view of the way the
world is: The phenomena that are brought to light
are the ones he expects to see.
Collier
wants to show how much Laing has to offer this
"scientific" project of moving history forward,
awarding Laing's social phenomenology an
instrumental role in his plan. For Collier,
phenomenology in and of itself is insufficient to
analyze the world of our experience. Collier, in
fact, is not interested in the world of experience
at all, since the task of science is rather "to
find out what the world is like independently of
us" in order that we may change it to suit us
better. hardly a phenomenological task (p. 196).
Thus, though Laing's method is descriptively
helpful in that it makes the schizophrenic's
behavior intelligible where it was previously
impenetrable, mere description is not enough. It is
actually dangerous, Collier says, because it may
stop us from seeking the "real" explanation of the
phenomena. Collier thinks it an essential task to
go further in order to "distinguish real from
spurious intelligibility" so that we can finally
grasp the objective truth of the matter (p. 55).
And in order to reach this final point of a full
explanation, Collier states apodictically, we must
uncover "a process governed by causal laws
connecting the behaviour of the part . . . with the
structure of the whole" (p. 52). That is, unless
one shows that what we are looking at is another
example of universal processes governed by
universal laws, one has failed to throw light upon
it. For Collier, this top-down explanation of
psychic phenomena takes the form of a causal link
to anonymous unconscious processes: the economy of
psychosexual energy (p. 66). He is partial to a
rather extreme Freudian reduction of human behavior
to processes analogous to biological ones. A
"subjective" explanation in terms of the
individual's experience, then, is nothing more than
a rationalization (p. 53). Laing's subjective
protocols thus don't have much to offer him.
Obviously, if the goal of science is to view the
world as if we humans weren't in it, the discourse
of personal experience will not lead us to any
"real" explanation. A true explanation must be said
in terms of impersonal processes governed by
universal laws; it must be shown how the phenomenon
fits into the structural whole, which logically
precedes it. Only then does one have sufficient
understanding of the process to be in a position to
change it. (In which direction we should change it,
it seems, is not open to discussion since,
presumably, that is a part of the structure as
well.)
Nonetheless,
Collier sees a place for Laing in this process.
Although Collier sees social phenomenology as
restricted in that it does not account for the
"real" unconscious processes that cause behavior,
it does have the benefit of being able to
contextualize the individual in his or her social
situation. And because psychoanalysis as it stands
can only explain intra personal causes of
experience, Laing's method, when reinterpreted as a
causal explanation, is a useful supplement to
psychoanalysis because it can illuminate the other
interpersonal causes of experience: "Thus
psychoanalysis can allow for the fact that although
all mental phenomena have their psychological
causes, some are adequately explained by the
external reality with which the person in question
is confronted and therefore do not have to be
interpreted as symptoms" (p. 73). The subjective
protocols become the raw data that the therapist or
caregiver (who, oddly, seems to enjoy a subjective
agency the patient does not) uses to discern the
pathological processes from the interpersonal. The
former is to be dealt with in analysis. The latter
is dealt with by the revolutionary process of
changing the oppressive social structure
surrounding the individual: either by educating the
family into better behavior (reducing double binds
and disconfirmations) or, if possible, by removing
the patient from his or her destructive environment
(p. 81).
Thus
Collier can now explain all psychological conflict
as a combination of internal Freudian drives and
their interrelations with other sets of internal
Freudian drives. He begins and ends on the level of
abstract universal processes, never treating the
person as if his or her experiences were real. This
reductive goal runs so counter to Laing's original
phenomenological project that one wonders if
Collier was even interested in it in the first
place. But, since Collier says in the end that one
must choose what one wants from Laing, we cannot
charge him with a non-charitable reading; he merely
takes what he wants (p. 196).
Although
Collier sees an ally in Laing's revolutionary
leanings, he charges him with being on the wrong
side of the fence as far as his metaphysics is
concerned. Laing begins and remains in existential
phenomenology, which Collier sees as a threat to
the scientific project of seeing things as they
"really are." Phenomenology, Collier says, though
helpful to his psychoanalytic explanation, "must
remain however a supplementary discipline . . . it
is not an autonomous new science, still less a
rival alternative to psychoanalysis" (p. 82).
Laing's personalism reeks of subjectivity, which
for Collier counts as tainted evidence for any
scientific exploration of the world, human or
otherwise.
Dialectic,
Methods, and Metaphysics
But
Laing wasn't trying to develop metaphysics. He was
developing a method through which to approach
phenomena. Collier wants Laing's social
phenomenology to function in the service of
metaphysical social theory, showing how the social
environment affects (or rather effects) the
individual. But Laing never worked out a final
theory as to how the two relate, as Collier did,
except to say that one cannot view a person in
abstraction from his or her context and that that
context, at least in part, constitutes the
individual. This is a point of view on experience,
not a dogmatic statement about reality. And as we
have seen, even though Laing had Marxist
sympathies, he does not feel the need to toe the
proper party line. Nonetheless, Collier holds that
in order to fully understand Laing's "system," one
must use a Marxist analysis "based on a Marxist
account of how capitalist society works" (pp.
ix-x). This, ultimately, means accepting Collier's
interpretation of the dialectical movement of
history and historical change.
Collier
sees two ways to understand the historical process
of conflict. In the first, the unifying principle
is ultimately preferred in that all conflict is
considered to be an illusion. The contradictions
that appear do so within a totality, which is in
the end, as it was originally, essentially one.
Thus, contradictions are only apparent and can be
overcome in pure thought (p. 29). Collier
attributes this understanding of dialectic (that
prefers the whole) to Hegel and Sartre, the former
with his emphasis on the historical self-completion
of Geist and the latter with the unity of
consciousness. In his view it leads to abandoning
the world in quietism. as, he thought, Laing did.
In the second sort of dialectic, with which he
credits both Marx and Freud for decentering the
self, it is rather the unity that is
illusory. Quietism will not help here: Thought
cannot grasp any underlying unity in the parts
because the contradictions are not just pieces in
the care of a preexisting whole. Rather, Collier
says, "it is the task of science to pierce through
this appearance of unity" and to grasp its
underlying contradictions. This then gives us the
leverage to bring about historical change. For
Collier, it is not pure thought at the unity pole,
but historical practice at the level of difference
that unifies and changes the world.
Still,
it may be fruitful to hesitate before we commit to
one side or the other, especially since there are
more than two sides to consider. There is an
oversight in both of Collier's understandings of
dialectic in that both of his
conceptualizations posit plurality, whether
illusory or real, as being eventually subsumed into
the one. Unity is achievable through contemplative
or philosophical thought in the first, or through
historical praxis in the second. But Collier fails
to give consideration to the possibility that there
might not be any final resolution at all, through
thought or practice. While the origin of
activity might change hands in Collier's
estimation, the direction of the activity leads to
the same assumed goal.
This
blind spot is due to top-down thinking, a
methodological rather than a metaphysical issue. In
spite of his apparent preference for plurality over
unity, Collier is working from the vantage point of
a preset metaphysics: he presumes to know the
ultimate end of the dialectic of history (unity),
no matter how it is achieved. That is, while his
system begins with plurality, his
systemizing begins with the one. And his
desire to present a unified theory, no matter what
the cost, leads him to reject all that doesn't fit
as inconsistent. This of course is reminiscent of
his assertion that explanation needs to be done in
terms of universal processes in order to yield
reality. He speaks from the point of view of the
whole. One can only imagine what is passed over in
the process.
Laing,
on the other hand, is saved from this presumption
by the "personalism" (his refusal to give up the
primacy of the individual's experience) with which
Collier finds him so infected. When Laing speaks of
Marxism, he does not speak about history moving
forth. He speaks about liberating, or at least
easing the plight of, the oppressed. And when he
speaks of the oppressed, he is talking about
people--concrete people in terms of their
lived experience, not in terms of their "objective"
existence. Collier's metaphysic, on the other hand,
considers the individual only after reducing him or
her to hydraulic processes and subsuming these
processes into the movement of the whole. A
person's experience is another example of a
universal movement.
As
a phenomenologist, Laing cannot claim to speak from
an objective point of view of the whole. He speaks
from the messiness of human experience. Such is the
existentialism that Collier rejects as
unscientific. But it seems more realistic to
theorize with an awareness that we don't actually
know where history is going. This may be
less scientific if one considers the point of
science to eliminate the human perspective (a
contradiction, to say the least), but it is
certainly more human in that it remembers that the
scientist speaks from within the world. In
presuming to speak from an outside perspective, not
only does Collier assume that the whole can be
spoken for; he assumes that it is a closed process
tending toward unification. When method is ruled by
parsimony and a desire to have a closed system,
real excess (such as the person who is
systematizing) is lost in the methodological
attempt to clean up the loose ends.
Such
teleological optimism is certainly not the product
of scientific objectivity; it is a human event.
Laing's hesitation over the possibility of a final
unification is due to a concrete realism that
refuses to give up the experiences of the scientist
who theorizes. Laing doesn't know the direction of
the whole; it remains a question for him. Because
of this, Laing's science is much more sensitive to
subtlety and difference. and thus rife with loose
ends. In keeping closer to experience, it is
possible to consider the possibility of a more
playful (or tragic, depending on your disposition)
dialectic without seeking the final unity that
Collier hoped for. One can hold the tension of
difference itself as the stuff of life. The
"whole," then, at least from our point of view, is
a non-teleological historical process that prefers
difference per se to any overarching ideal
process, logical or material. Thus our historical
efforts to bring about a final unity may in the end
ultimately fail. The direction of our movement is
far more open to question than any utopian theorist
might hope. This is not to say that there can't be
a final goal. just that we don't know it. This way
of looking is a possibility, with far-reaching
consequences, that is by definition overlooked by
the will to systematize.
Gilles
Deleuze and Félix Guattari, in
Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia
(1972/83), champion Laing in this vein, taking a
stance that is opposed in the extreme to any
unified goal of history. For them, history is not
moving towards anything, but rather is an infinite
process of change and regeneration, of the
destruction and construction of new identities. But
while they hold with Laing the tension of an
open-ended universe, they share with Collier the
same scorn for Laing's existential personalism.
Laing represents to them a pioneer of social
constructionism who does not go far enough.
Deleuze
and Guattari are grateful to Laing for showing them
that "it is certain that neither men nor women are
clearly defined personalities, but rather
vibrations, flows, schizzes, and -- knots.. "
For them, the self is not a real entity; rather the
term "refers to personological co-ordinates from
which it results" (p. 362). Thus for them it is not
enough to say that the self is constructed through
its relations with others. For Deleuze and
Guattari, the "self" is the residue that results
from the intertwining of multiple drives that,
while seeming to speak with a more or less unified
voice, are actually anonymous. Contra Laing they do
not consider the distinction between the self and
the other to be any more interesting, important, or
real than the plurality of competing drives that
compose this so-called self. Thus there is no
distinction between the inter- and intrapsychic in
their theory: the self is at best temporary, and at
worst to be disposed of into the infinite
flux.
Therapy
in turn becomes the same as revolutionary activism,
breaking up what we assume is unified and
liberating the chaotic multiplicity that underlies
it. And this is precisely what they are calling
for: "Schizoanalysis" is a full frontal assault on
identity in the name of difference. Deleuze and
Guattari call for the dissolution of the self into
the plurality, vapor, and field of play that it is.
And since this field of play is not
distinguishable from other fields of play,
their project expands into social action until they
would reach the chaotic celebration of what one of
their translators calls "the schizophrenic process
of desire" (1983, p. xvii). The aim, then, is a
sort of endless revolution with no reintegration, a
dialectic of change with no final unity.
Obviously,
then, Deleuze and Guattari have no patience for
Laing's more Sartrean leanings. They criticize
Laing's well known characterization of psychosis as
metanoia, a breakdown of the individual leading to
a breakthrough (an idea he borrowed from Jung and
Winnicott), as hesitating before the possibility of
true liberation:
At
the very moment he breaks with psychiatric
practice, undertakes assigning a veritable
social genesis to psychosis, and calls for a
continuation of the "voyage" as a process and
for a dissolution of the "normal ego," he falls
back into the worst familialist, personological,
and egoic postulates, so that the remedies
invoked are no more than a "sincere
corroboration among parents," a "recognition of
the real persons," a discovery of the true ego
or self as in Martin Buber. (p. 360)
Here we
see a complaint similar to Collier's: Laing's
personalism leads him to speak of psychic
liberation in terms of self liberation,
while they would rather address the anonymous
processes underneath. Laing's existentialism not
only slows the process of true liberation; his
colluding with the fantasy that the self should be
preserved works to perpetuate the oppressive regime
of identity and sameness Deleuze and Guattari are
fighting against. Deleuze and Guattari blame
Laing's return to the self not only for his
eventual "retreat to the Orient," but for the
failure of the antipsychiatry movement as a whole
as well.
Laing,
in turn, was not fond of their extremism. Laing
thought Guattari (the psychiatrist of the pair;
Deleuze was a philosopher) a phony who worked at a
hospital giving electric shocks like the rest of
the establishment (Mullan, p. 182 & 365).
Furthermore, Laing's therapeutic and political
goals were far more complex and varied than those
of Deleuze and Guattari (and Collier's, for that
matter). Laing avoided such a totalizing project as
the dissolution of all identity (Burston, 2000, p.
124). In the same way that his theorizing was not
determined by an idea of the whole, his therapy was
more open ended as well. In fact, he was reluctant
to give any sort of model for therapy because he
was afraid of its subsequent codification into a
set method. When Mullan asked Laing to characterize
his style of therapy, Laing replied that though he
could tell us what he has said to clients,
he could not say what one should say
(Mullan, p. 319). Nor was he consigned to the idea
that what he had to offer was necessarily
therapeutic. or even helpful. Laing was quite aware
that when one claims to know the purpose of the
whole, anything one does can be justified in the
name of its service.
Putting
aside the curious irony of Deleuze and Guattari's
accusing Laing of being inconsistent when their own
project is the destruction of identity itself, we
can see here another example of Laing's hesitation
before the complexity of the phenomena being passed
over by those who claim to be able to see the world
as a system from outside any point of view in it.
Although Deleuze and Guattari are radically against
any final telos, they still present the
revolutionary process itself as the unifying
principle that justifies their project. And in
building this system, they take what they need,
rejecting what they cannot use. Unfortunately in
doing so they leave some fundamental questions
about the world of experience unaddressed. Who is
it writing the book, if not some sort of self? Is
this entire level of explanation to be rejected?
Their critical questioning of the establishment
turns into a metaphysical treatise. There is no
sense of wonder here; indeed, Anti-Oedipus
reads like a manifesto. Perhaps the wonder of
this text is that it tries to build a system out of
excess. But excess, it seems, resists even
this.
Phenomenology
and the Will to System
Thus
we see Laing's treatment at the hands of grand
metaphysical narratives. What fits is lauded for
its insight, and what remains is dismissed as
backwards thinking; his excess is rejected as
inconsistency. But Laing's social phenomenology was
a much more humble project than those who used him
would like to admit. Rather than trying to describe
everything, he offered a method to look at
individual experience in a way that reveals the
interpersonal aspect. And though Laing shares with
the Marxists an awareness that the self is
constituted from its social context, he was not
ready to reduce the former to the latter or
discount the legitimacy of the self and its
experiences simply for the sake of systematic
cohesion. For Laing, Marxism isn't a metaphysical
model of what is; rather, it sheds light on how we
are currently and contingently organized (Mullan,
p. 309). Laing resolved to keep his experience of
the world a human one, from the point of view of
one who lives in it. Contra Collier, he must be
read as a phenomenologist. In spite of his unending
criticism of the current nature of social world, he
remains at the level of the particular phenomena
with his microanalyses rather than jumping to the
structure of the whole. Questioning at this level
reveals far more subtle differences than can be
seen from the outside, letting the phenomena "be"
in the double sense of allowing things to be seen
and not presuming to know where they should be--
even if one has the sense that things still aren't
as they should be at the present moment.
How
is this to speak to those of us already in the
practice of phenomenology, who agree that science
must be done from a human point of view and that
the particular is more important and interesting
than the whole? Phenomenology is, after all, not a
system. It is a method of inquiry. If we keep this
in mind and let the phenomena lead, aren't we free
from the will to systematize and unify, the desire
to build up a theory of everything?
Interestingly,
not even fellow phenomenologists escape the wrath
of Laing in this regard. When Mullan asked him if
anyone had been following up on the
phenomenological exploration he left behind with
The Divided Self, Laing took the opportunity
to lambaste some of the work being done in America
in the name of social phenomenology:
There
is an American journal of-- I don't know what
they called it perhaps, Existential
Psychology-- that has got completely
unreadable gobbledegook in it which they think
is following it up. Simply Heideggerian
jargonese, drowning the visibility of the other
person through their haze of existentialese they
regard as following it up. (Mullan, p.
335)
Exactly
which journal he means to slur here remains
ambiguous. But this should burn the ears of those
of us who are predisposed to writing in broad
strokes about a person's "being-in-the-world" or
"being-with-others," and any hyphenated extensions
in this vein.
Laing
is not simply complaining about the technical
jargon of phenomenology. Although phenomenological
vocabulary can reveal what was previously unseen,
it also functions to obscure. Subtle yet important
differences are steamrolled when it becomes a quest
to show how an individual yields another case of a
given universal structure. The method of
phenomenology is turned into a metaphysic, and the
theory leads the phenomena and determines even more
strictly what can be seen. hardly the "needles" of
clarity and precision that make small, less
centered projects fruitful.
This
of course is not to say that Laing himself had no
metaphysical assumptions; rather that he was not
trying to build an all encompassing view of the
world. In fact, he was attempting the opposite:
loosening the security of prevailing metaphysical
dogma. The essence of negative thinking, it seems,
is that one continually question and shake up one's
foundations without falling into the trap of
building a new set to replace them. Although this
can be an annoyingly destructive project for some,
it has the benefit of emphasizing what remains
outside of our theorizing, no matter how radical it
may be. Thus, though Laing revealed interesting
interpersonal dynamics, we have much more to take
from him by way of his approach in itself and his
attention to the excess: pluralism, a more humble
wondering attitude, a critical voice, a more
sensitive ear for the other, and perhaps even a
greater appreciation for the tragic aspects of our
experience. Laing had more questions-- and
complaints-- than answers.
Likewise,
our own projects as phenomenologists should not be
to build a "phenomenological worldview" that will
describe everything in toto with the same
voice. If phenomenology is a method, we would do
better to stick with more pluralistic, local
microanalyses, looking for that which
doesn't fit into our present way of seeing.
This would amount to an active attempt to upset our
own theorizing, continually overturning the
ever-sedimenting interpretations of our experience.
Just as we cannot and should not fit the world into
Marx, we should not fit the world into Heidegger.
Heidegger, rather, fits into the world. Because
human experience is often contradictory, we should
leave the possibility open that the whole (if we
can speak of such a thing) is contradictory as
well.
This
refusal to commit metaphysically should not be read
as defeatism or a lack of commitment to the world.
Laing was extremely committed to his projects,
often overextending himself to the breaking point
for such humanist concerns as shedding light on the
meaning of madness. Instead, this hesitation is a
refusal to speak for the whole, to say that there
is a last word on an issue, or think that the book
can be closed on something so varied and mysterious
as our experience. There is a playful yet
challenging freedom in striving to remain
open-ended, where one makes it a negative project
to ask questions and challenge what we take for
granted. As Laing told Mullan when asked what
fundamental ideas he wanted to take to the grave
with him, "I don't feel obliged to believe
anything -- which doesn't mean I don't
. . ."
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