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· Abstract
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This
paper 1) examines Laing's critique of the
neuro-biological model of schizophrenia, and 2)
explicates the roots and ramifications of his
"social phenomenology" as a method for the study
of schizophrenia in Sanity, Madness and the
Family. It attempts to show some of the
inherent strengths, limitations and ambiguities
in Laing's methodology as regards organicist
metaphors of "family pathology" and the status
of psychoanalytic theory in phenomenological
research. Finally, it poses the question: why
has Laing's work on families and schizophrenia
been so neglected of late?
Family
therapy is a relatively new specialization in the
mental health field. Though it has attracted some
philosophically educated minds over the years, none
achieved more fame or notoriety than R.D. Laing.
Yet oddly enough, Laing never wrote a single word
about the actual practice of family therapy.
And when Richard Simon drew attention to this fact
in an interview for The Family Therapy
Networker, Laing said he did not want other
therapists making their careers and reputations
pedaling diluted and distorted versions of his
ideas -- particularly in socialist or social
democratic countries, where family therapy might be
compulsory, and where failure to follow a
therapist's directives could lead to state enforced
sanctions of various kinds (Laing, in Simon, 1983).
Laing needn't have worried, because family therapy
never really caught on in Europe. But the reason he
was so vehement on this point was that in 1983,
when this interview occurred, Laing's work was
still frequently associated with Leftist critiques
of the family. For example, in 1980, in Critical
Theory of the Family, Mark Poster commended
Laing for offering an alternative to the
psychoanalytic theories of Nathan Ackerman, Theodor
Lidz and the more recent (and more popular)
structural and systemic approaches. Poster said
that despite their disparate methods, these
approaches all foster conformity and support of the
status quo. Though too mystical for his taste of
late, said Poster, Laing's early work offered a
viable way out of the family straitjacket (Poster,
1980, chapter 5).
Poster's appraisal was fairly representative for
that particular period of history. Though Laing
never mentioned Poster by name, he probably would
have, eventually, had Poster not linked Laing's
work with that of his erstwhile colleague, David
Cooper. In the fall of 1967, Laing became deeply
disenchanted with Cooper's handling of The
Dialectics of Liberation Conference, and he
deplored Cooper's second book, The Death of the
Family, published in 1971. By his own
admission, Laing never dissociated himself from
Cooper in an open or vigorous fashion, and because
of the extensive collaboration between them
spanning the years 1963 to 1967, when Laing vaulted
to fame, the lines of cleavage between Cooper and
he, while crystal clear to Laing, were murky to
outsiders. And with good reason, too. Look at
The Politics of The Experience, published in
the spring of1967. Laing talked about families in
two sections of this book. Chapter three, entitled
"The Mystification of Experience", was the chief
source of difficulty. There he characterized the
average family to a "mutual protection racket",
whose function is
to
repress Eros; to induce a false consciousness of
security; to deny death by avoiding life; to cut
off transcendence....to promote respect,
conformity, obedience...(and) respect for
"respectability" (p. 55).
While
he rattled on against the family, Laing also
attacked Theodor Lidz, who saw the primary function
of the family as facilitating the process of
adaptation. "Adaptation to what?" asked Laing
indignantly. "To society? To a world gone
mad?"
Despite his shrill tone, Laing was making a valid
point. You cannot be for adaptation to prevailing
social norms and be value-neutral at the same time,
as Theodor Lidz claimed to be. Granted, the
spurious notion that you can be both "value
neutral" and supportive of the status quo was a
commonplace delusion among social scientists in the
1960's. Lidz was certainly not alone. Even so, the
fact remains that disavowing one's bias is not real
science, but pseudo-objectivity masquerading as the
real thing. That said, Laing's antinomian view of
adaptation, in which we trade security and
pseudo-sanity for authenticity, while less
disingenuous, is also problematic, and does not
always hold up under deeper scrutiny. From a
Darwinian standpoint, adaptation per se is neither
good nor bad. It is a purely neutral and a-moral
process. It is not "progressive" or "positive". It
just is what it is. From an ethical or
psychological standpoint, adaptation is actually an
ambiguous notion, denoting transformations which
may enhance or diminish our humanity, depending on
circumstances. Before we reach any conclusions on
this score, we must always specify what we are
adapting to, and how we are adapting to it, before
we can determine whether "adaptation" is good or
bad for our mental health. Absent these clear
specifications, debates about adaptation in the
abstract rapidly degenerate into ideological rants
of one sort or another.
Unfortunately, chapter 3 of The Politics of
Experience lacked this kind of clarity and
specificity, by linking his denunciation of
"adaptation" to a jeremiad against the family,
Laing won momentary acclaim, while contributing
greatly to his posthumous neglect. Fortunately,
chapter five of The Politics of Experience was less
polemical, and a lot more pertinent to our
purposes. Here Laing gave a brief overview of
research on the families of schizophrenics, which
emphasized his affinities with Erving Goffman
(Goffman, 1961) and Gregory Bateson (Bateson et
al., 1968). The key similarity , he noted, is a
strategic shift from traditional attempts to
pinpoint the locus of "pathology" within the brain
-- or the unconscious -- of the identified patient,
and to see the patient's psychological disturbance
(and its neurophysiological correlates) as
symptomatic of disturbances within the family --
disturbances which place the identified patient in
an unlivable or "checkmate" situation s/he cannot
understand, tolerate or change. When the raw,
disturbing truth of their situation begins to dawn
on patient's, said Laing, their desperate attempts
to formulate or act on their intuitions disturb
others profoundly, eliciting gestures of
invalidation to silence them.
One
of the challenges in psychotherapy research has
been finding ways to investigate not just the
outcomes of therapy but the process whereby those
outcomes are achieved. This challenge is becoming
increasingly pressing as the need to demonstrate
the effectiveness of therapeutic approaches has
increased with the growth, and what some see as the
encroachment, of managed care. This special issue
of Methods contains a set of papers that, both
individually and collectively, illustrate one
approach to the study of therapeutic process. It is
a hermeneutic approach, employing an interpretive
methodology. This approach focuses on what people
do: on the phenomena of human action and
interaction. Such action is, we presume, situated
in its character, practical before it is
theoretical, organized by ongoing tacit concerns
rather than reflective plans, negotiated and
improvisatory, and open to historical and cultural
contingencies.
In
broad terms our hermeneutic approach seeks to
uncover and elucidate the ontological work that
people accomplish in their everyday practical
activity, including the interchange that takes
place in therapy. This work includes the ongoing
construction and reconstruction of social reality,
and especially the production and reproduction of
persons. Much of this work is done by means of
(through the medium of) language, and so our
interpretive methodology incorporates the analysis
of language pragmatics: the conversational actions
that make up
discourse.
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