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 Laing
invariably put his own spin on things, and his
debts to Buber and Bateson are certainly worthy of
further discussion. But we cannot do them justice
here, so suffice it to say that his greatest single
debt was to Sartre. Sartre was dissatisfied with
Marxist theories of ideology, "class
consciousness", and so on, and because of
existentialism's characteristic individualism, its
distrust of collectivism, and Sartre's
anti-essentialist stance, Sartre developed a
concept of human groups as closely interdigitated
series of individuals. He used the word
"series" deliberately to avoid treating a group as
a unified or singular entity, thereby losing sight
of the individuals who compose it.
Sartre's modifications to historical materialism
hinged on the idea that group process, as it is
nowadays called, is really an alienated
apperception of concerted individual
practices. So what appears to happen in a
group anonymously, without anyone understanding or
intending it, can ultimately be traced back to the
actions and intentions of those who compose it,
within the framework of constraints created by
scarce material resources and the simultaneous
efforts and desires of all those who comprise a
group, whether they are competing or collaborating
toward some common goal (Laing & Cooper, 1964;
Burston, 1996).
Though quite schematic and deficient, even for the
purposes Sartre intended, this nominalistic theory
of groups as complex, contradictory multiplicities
appealed to Laing because it avoided positing the
existence of 1) a collective subject, a collective
unconscious or "group mind", or 2) a set of group
"dynamics" separate from and superordinate to the
individuals who compose it, or 3) regulatory
structures or systems -- analogous to organic ones
-- that channel energy and information, operate on
the basis of inertia, homeostatis, etc.
Leaving Buber and Bateson aside, then, the key
elements of Laing's "social phenomenology" are
derived from Husserl and Sartre. From Husserl,
Laing adopted the habit bracketing off theoretical
presuppositions, rather than allowing them to
contaminate what he actually observed. From Sartre
he adapted a method for analyzing anonymous or
unconscious group processes which avoided endowing
the group itself with subjectivity, or an essential
nature or structure that is separate or
super-ordinate to the people who actually compose
it. These influences are vividly apparent
throughout Sanity, Madness & the Family,
where Laing (and co-author Aaron Esterson) wrote:
The
judgement that the diagnosed patient is behaving
in a biologically dysfunctional (hence
pathological) way is, we believe, premature, and
one we hold in parenthesis.
Although
we ourselves do not accept the validity of the
clinical terminology, it is necessary to
establish . . . that the persons whose families
we are describing are as 'schizophrenic' as
anyone is. By 'schizophrenic' we mean here a
person who has been diagnosed as such and has
come to be treated accordingly. . . We reiterate
that we are not using the term 'schizophrenia'
to denote any identifiable condition that we
believe exists 'in' one person. However, in so
far as the term summarizes a set of clinical
attributions made by certain persons about the
experience and behavior of others, we retain the
term for this set of attributions. . .
After
recording these attributions, we have then
described the family relationships
phenomenologically. Neither organic
pathology, nor psycho- pathology, nor
for that matter group pathology is
assumed to be or not to be in evidence. The
isssue is simply bracketed off ... (Laing &
Esterson, 1964, pp.18-19)
In
addition to "bracketing" extensively, Laing and
Esterson reflected on family processes in the
following way.
If
one wishes to know how a football team concert
or disconcert their actions in play, one does
not think only or even primarily of approaching
this problem by talking to the members
individually. One watches the way they play
together.
Most
of the investigations of families of
'schizophrenics', while contributing original
and useful data to different facets of the
problem, have not been based on direct
observation of the members of the family
together as they actually interact with each
other.
The
way in which a family deploys itself in space
and time , what space, what time, and what
things are private or shared, and by whom --
these and many other questions are best answered
by seeing what sort of world the family has
itself fleshed out for itself, both as a whole
and differentially for each of its
members.
One
does not wish, however, to study the
system-properties of a family abstracted from
the experience and actions of the individuals
whose continued living together in a particular
way alone guarantees the continuance of this
system (ibid., pp.21-22).
Phenomenologically,
a group can feel to its members like an
organism; to those outside it, it can appear to
act like one. But to go beyond this, and
maintain that, ontologically, it is an
organism, is to become completely mystified . .
.
The
concept of family pathology is,
therefore, we believe, a confused one. It
extends the unintelligibility of individual
behavior to the unintelligibility of the group.
It is the biological analogy applied now
not just to one person, but to a multiplicity of
persons . . . Not the individual but the family,
therefore, needs the clinician's services to
'cure' it: the family (or even society at large)
is now a sort of hyperorganism with a physiology
and pathology that can be well or ill. One
arrives at a pan-clinicism, so to say, that is
more a system of values than an instrument of
knowledge (Laing & Esterson, 1964, pp.
22-23).
In
other words, clinicians who speak of diverse kinds
of family pathology are not really analyzing
at all. Instead, unbeknownst to themselves, they
are analogizing , and mistaking their
metaphors for existential actualities. These
metaphors may be illuminating and instructive, up
to a point, but taken at face value they are
misleading, and apt to conceal all kinds of
prescriptive value judgements under the guise of
disinterested clinical observation and
description.
These
reflections enable us to discern the areas of
convergence between Laing and other family
theorists, and the areas where they diverge. Like
Goffman and Bateson, and like most family
theorists, Laing insisted that even in deeply
disturbed patients, the locus of disturbance does
not reside within the brain or body of the
individual, or even in their "unconscious". On the
contrary, the irrationality of the identified
patient often becomes vividly intelligible in light
of the various pressures, constraints and anomalies
of communication to which he (or she) is subject to
in his (or her) family of origin, and/or the
custodial institution(s) in which they are
subsequently enmeshed. To illumine these pressures,
constraints and anomalies, it is necessary to study
the family itself in action, and not just to
interview individual members.
However,
in dramatic contrast to his colleagues in family
therapy, Laing eschewed organicist or mechanistic
metaphors for group processes. There is no such
thing as "family pathology", because a family is
not an organism. Nor is it a machine. In the final
analysis, it is a system of relations that is
constructed collaboratively by all members, even in
situations of dire conflict and mutual
misunderstanding.
As
a result, readers of Sanity, Madness and the
Family will search Laing's work in vain for any
taxonomy of family ills, for any (overt or hidden)
prescriptions as to how a "healthy" family
functions, what constitutes a "healthy" or a
"normal" family, etc. In the absense of any
prescriptive "models" of family functioning to
illustrate or promote his ideas , Laing's readers
had to content themselves with some riveting case
histories and a somewhat sketchy outline of a
laborious methodology that dwells on the nuances of
interpersonal experience -- a methodology which, as
Laing freely conceded, is problematic in some
respects. Some of the problems Laing was aware of
are discussed in the introduction to Sanity,
Madness and the Family, and others are merely
hinted at in The Oxford Companion to the Mind
, where he noted that
The
philosophy, anthropology, sociology, and
psychology of interpersonal relations are all in
an unsatisfactory state despite theapercus ,
insights, and intuitions of Hegel, Dilthey,
Buber, Goffman, Husserl, Freud, Schutz, Marx,
Nietzsche, Scheler, Heidegger, Sartre, Foucault,
Merleau-Ponty, Bateson, MacMurray, and others,
in and out of phenomenology, who have influenced
Laing...
...the
problems of method are as vexing as they are
unresolved. In some instances they have not yet
even been explicitly formulated. (Laing,1987,
p.417).
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