|
 Though
Laing did not say so here, the fact that
methodological controversies still bedevil the
field is neither surprising nor cause for reproach.
There are few fields where complete clarity and a
calm, unbroken consensus regarding methodology
prevails for long, even in the natural sciences. On
the contrary, progress depends on them. Moreover,
it is interesting to note that Sartre was quite
impressed with Laing's efforts. In a letter to
Laing, dated Nov. 9, 1963, he wrote
"...
one cannot understand psychological disturbances
from the outside, on the basis of a
positivistic determinism, or reconstruct them
with a combination of concepts that remain
outside the illness as lived and experienced...
one cannot study, let alone cure, a neurosis
without a fundamental respect for the person of
the patient, without a constant effort to grasp
the basic situation and relive it ...I regard
mental illness as the way out that the free
organism... invents...to live through an
intolerable situation. For this reason, I place
the highest value on your researches, in
particular on the study of the family..." (in
Laing & Cooper, 1964).
In
due course, Sartre would employ a very similar
approach in his study of Gustav Flaubert, albeit
with a much more Marxist emphasis. Indeed, during
the late sixties, while Sartre's Marxism was
intensifying, Laing's was rapidly evaporating
(Kirsner, 1976). Another notable disjuncture
between Laing and Sartre was their attitudes toward
psychoanalysis. Being and Nothingness
proscribes the invocation of "the unconscious" to
explain behavior which is the result of
self-deception or "bad faith" (Sartre, 1941), and
there is no evidence that Sartre ever wavered on
this point, despite many other changes and shifts
in emphasis (Kirsner, 1976). Despite his homage to
Sartre, Laing wavered on this point somewhat.
Indeed, in the Introduction to Reason and
Violence: A Decade of Sartre's Philosophy --
which he co-authored with David Cooper -- Laing
remarked
There
is plenty of room for a phenomenological
investigation of 'unconscious phantasy', in so
far as the latter is conceived in its reality as
experience and not as a series of mechanisms to
be imposed on a subject objectified in the
psychoanalytic situation.
This
is a remarkable statement, if you consider that
this same year, in Sanity, Madness and the
Family, Laing declared "the unconscious" is
completely off limits to phenomenological research.
In Reason and Violence, by contrast, it is
kosher, or could be, at any rate, subject to
certain conditions. At issue here is a tension
between a predominantly Husserlian and/or Sartrean
version of phenomenology, where unconscious
processes are deemed worthless (or worse), and one
more akin to the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who
goes curiously unacknowledged here.
Why
was Merleau-Ponty slighted? In all probability,
Laing never accorded Merleau-Ponty's work the
attention it deserved because of the personal and
political tensions that estranged Sartre from
Merleau-Ponty in the mid-1950's. Praising
Merleau-Ponty in a book devoted to celebrating
Sartre's genius would have given offense, and Laing
probably preferred tact to perfect honesty in this
instance.
In
any case, Laing was not really Sartrean in his
views on psychoanalysis. Even when he proscribed
the invocation of unconscious mental processes on
methodological grounds, he granted its existence,
and its central role in human affairs. In
Sanity, Madness and the Family, for example,
Laing cautioned that his findings are presented
with a minimum of interpretation, because
psychoanalysts make inferences and attributions
about motives, meanings and defenses that shape
behavior but which the subjects of such analysis
frequently disavow. By adhering solely to ideas,
motives and experiences that family members freely
concede, he avoided potentially intractable issues
of validation. Nevertheless, he noted, researchers
could not possibly deal with an issue like
sexuality in these families "unless they were
willing to attribute to the agents involved
fantasies of which they themselves are unconscious"
(p.26). As a result, he said, "the reader will find
documented the quite manifest contradictions that
beset these families, without very much exploration
of the underlying factors which may be supposed to
generate and maintain them" (ibid.)
These
caveats are striking. In Sanity, Madness &
The Family, Laing eschewed all conjecture about
allegedly unconscious motives, meanings, but
conceded that phenomenological method, thus
construed, has limitations. Indeed, he said he
hoped to return to these cases to offer a
psychodynamic perspective. Unfortunately, he never
did. But that same year, in Reason and
Violence, Laing declared unconscious phantasy a
legitimate domain for phenomenological inquiry --
in a book on Sartre, no less.
Still,
while convinced of the importance of the
unconscious, Laing did not reduce all family dramas
to a single, Oedipal formula. On the contrary, in
The Politics of the Family, published in
1972, he insisted that every case is unique, and
that the purpose of research is not to confirm or
augment a theoretical preconception, but to
discover "what is actually the case". To discover
what is actually going on in families, Laing
differentiated between the actual, empirical
family, and the collective image or fantasy of the
family internalized by its members, called the
'family'. The 'family' is subject to idealization
and distortion, and is roughly equivalent to what
other family therapists term ' the family myth'.
Laing felt that getting the 'family' out of your
system is an integral part of psychotherapy for
almost any disturbed patient, no matter what their
diagnostic profile might be. Unlike David Cooper,
Laing was not calling for the abolition of the
family per se. But if this process
precipitates the loss of illusions, or creates
greater emotional and/or geographical distance
between the patient and his family, so be it.
Having
said that, Laing also emphasized that the 'family'
is not only internalized by introjection and
identification, as psychoanalysis insists. In
analytic lore, the terms introjection and
identification describe the psychic assimilation of
individual traits that are experienced, idealized,
envied and/or feared in the other -- usually a
parent. Laing insisted that the 'family' does not
merely consist of internal representations of
parents, but of siblings and extended family
members in convergent and conflicting patterns of
relationship -- patterns that are experienced and
suffered passively, at first, but are later
enacted in the bodily symptoms, mood swings
and incessant preoccupations of the patient. Here
is a relatively transparent example.
A
young man feels his life has come to a stop. He
is preoccupied by the conflict between East and
West, the cold war, the balance of terror,
techniques of deterence, one world, the
impossibility of divorce, the need for
co-existence, the apparent impossibility of
co-existence. He has a mission to find a
solution, but he feels hopeless, and paralysed.
he does nothing, but feels crushed by his
responsibility for the destruction he feels is
inevitable.
The
structural elements of his preoccupations --
conflict, the cold war, emotional divorce,
balance of terror, need for coexistence --
resemble those in the relationship between his
parents.
But
he does not see those resemblances. He insists
that his preoccupation with the world situation
is not only entirely justified by the objective
facts but entirely based on them. The world
situation is a fact and thousands of people come
from families like his, therefore there is no
connection (Laing, 1971, pp.8-9).
There
is nothing in this clinical portrait to dismay a
psychoanalyst. Though troubled, this patient is
idealistic, well read, articulate -- in short,
"high functioning". His concerns about the arms
race presumably represent the projection of
intrapsychic "contents" derived from the "cold war"
between his parents, which he suffered in
childhood, and which may persist, in attenuated
form, till today. Despite a pervasive depressive
theme, and intermittent episodes of mild panic,
helplessness, hopelessness, etc., there is no
evidence of regression or paranoia, and the
congruence between his unconscious representations
and the pattern of world events is so close that he
must be quite intelligent. His "ego" is relatively
intact, and possibly much better than average in
certain respects. A good candidate for treatment,
evidently. The question then emerges -- which world
power represents the mother, and which the father?
Which does he fear most? And in the event of a
serious conflict, to whom does he give his primary
allegiance -- mother Russia, or Uncle Sam?
(Probably the old Oedipus at the root of it
all.)
But
suppose this patient -- call him Edward -- who
impressed us with his moral earnestness and
diligent command of facts suddenly claims that he ,
and he alone, has the formula for world peace: that
unbeknownst to their own governments, rogue
elements of the CIA and KGB have developed a plot
to discredit, persecute and kill him, if need be.
These delusions -- of grandeur, persecution,
reference, and so on -- will probably be attributed
to a failure of reality testing occasioned by
regression to a pre-Oedipal level. The presumption
now is that Edward's phantasies and projections are
more pathological, more distorted and more
"primitive", due to impaired ego functioning.
Right?
Wrong,
said Laing. Laing usually regarded unconscious
fantasy as an alienated appreception of features of
interpersonal experience deemed invalid by others,
rather than of "intrapsychic conflict". Even in
psychotic individuals, Laing linked phantasy to the
texture of lived experience -- experience lost to
consciousness because of the conjoint effects of
mystification, invalidation, injunctions and
attributions, rules and meta-rules, which
reverberate through the whole family system (Laing,
1971). Undoubtedly, as Freud and his followers
insisted, mother and father are the principle
figures in these family romances. But aunts,
uncles, siblings and cousins are also frequently
involved. In Edward's case, for example, the rogue
elements of the CIA and KGB might represent his
parents' parents, or their siblings, or others with
power and influence in the extended family who
prefer that the marital couple remain
estranged, and do not reconcile, but who
keep their intentions concealed, even from
themselves, in order to succeed.
In
any case, the point is that in Laing's able hands,
patients' phantasies acquired an uncanny degree of
intelligibility in light of their parents
phantasies about them, and indeed, their own
parents -- the patient's grandparents (or the
like). So if, on inquiry, a parent insisted that
his or her disturbed child "takes after" their own
mother or father, grandmother or father, great aunt
or uncle, etc., it often transpired that the
patient had been scripted -- or perhaps,
unwittingly conscripted -- into the performance of
roles in an intergenerational drama of
unknown age and provenance. To keep a drama this
complex going , the various participants have to
internalize more than mere imagos of their
significant others: they have to internalize the
rules regulating the commerce and conflicts between
them all, and induce others, usually children or
spouses, to embrace and embody the characteristic
attitudes and behavior of people they have
frequently never even met. To try and reduce the
complex interpersonal and multi-generational
processes involved here to a single, Oedpial
plot-line would be manifestly absurd.
But
Laing did not break with Freud entirely. The
function of family research, said Laing, is to
determine "what actually is the case", i.e. what is
really going on in the family. Granted, this
kind of clarity is not always possible, due to
scarcity of time and reliable information, and the
density and opacity of the knotted passions and
unconscious agendas of various family members. Even
so, Laing's belief that, in principle, the
researcher could differentiate between truth
and fiction, between the family and the 'family',
is at variance with constructivist, hermeneutic and
narrative-based theories of therapy which contend
that there is no way to reliably ascertain what
"really" happened, or indeed, what is happening
right now. By these accounts, no amount of
sifting factual information, of disentangling
assertions about events and experiences of various
family members, of recombining or "totalizing"
partial perspectives, will ever yield "the truth".
It only generates another narrative -- one
that may (or may not) have healing properties for
those concerned.
Laing,
by contrast, continued to believe in the
disillusioning function of therapy as
understood by Freud -- that the only sure way to
rid oneself of psychic suffering is to divest
oneself of illusions. There is thus a profound
tension between the critical and realist elements
of Laingian theory and therapy, and the more
constructivist and postmodern features encountered
along the way.
Laing
never acknowledged, never mind addressed these
epistemological issues directly. But the most
puzzling thing about his work with families
nowadays is how widely discredited his ideas are,
and how little reflection is devoted to revisiting,
revising and updating his methodology. Most family
therapists cannot be bothered because it is too
labor-intensive, and because they lack the time and
the practical incentive to elucidate the processes
of collusion, mystification, reification,
invalidation (and so on), that Laing deftly brought
to light. They may be aware of their existence, but
whether from preference or necessity in the present
clinical climate, focus chiefly on the present in
time-limited clinical encounters. And though they
never say so, of course, Laing's nominalist
critique of organicist and mechanistic metaphors,
rooted in Sartre's anti-essentialism, would be bad
for morale, and perhaps bad for business, if taken
too seriously. After all, if "family pathology" is
merely a metaphor to describe a particularly
vicious form of human entanglement, why bother
training and credentialing people to "treat"
it?
Actually,
I can think of several good reasons why people
should be trained to work with families, even if we
abjure the medical model completely. And in
fairness to all concerned , Laing could too. The
problem now is that family research carried out
under the auspices of the medical model has
completely usurped our attention. Mainstream
methodologies devoted to studying the families of
schizophrenics ask fundamentally different
questions, and pursue different objectives, than
Laing and his colleagues did (e.g. Leff &
Vaughn, 1985; Fort, 1990). Not that the recent
interest in the impact of "expressed emotion" on
recividism rates necessarily lack merit, or are
invalid as a consequence. But these studies are all
based on the a priori assumption that
"schizophrenia" is a neurophysiological disorder,
and that disturbances in the family are the result
of disturbed brain chemistry, in the first
instance, and never vice versa. Laing had the
courage to suggest that certain neurological
disorders ae caused by disturbances in the family,
rather than the other way around, and his theory
has yet to be addressed cogently, never mind tested
empirically, by the current crop of researchers.
When all is said and done, their studies are just
not equipped to address the questions Laing raised,
and to offer either credible support or a
compelling refutation of his work on the role of
invalidation, mystification, collusion and other
"interpersonal defenses" in the troubled family
milieu. Perhaps one day things will change, and
we'll all have another look.
References
Bateson,
G., Jackson, D., Haley, J. & Weakland, J.,
1968. "Toward a Theory of Schizophrenia" in
Jackson, D.,1968. ed. Communication, Family
& Marriage. Palo Alto: Science and
Behavior Books.
Binswanger,
L. 1963. Being in The World: Selected Papers
of Ludwig Binswanger, New York: Basic
Books.
Burston,
D. 1996. The Wing of Madness: The Life and
Work of R.D.Laing. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press.
Burston,
D. in press. The Crucible of Experience: R.D.
Laing and the Crisis of Psychotherapy.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Cooper,
D. 1971. The Death of the Family. New
York: Vintage Books.
Dilthey,
W. 1989. R. Makkreel and F. Rodi, eds.
Introduction to the Human Sciences.
Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Fort,
D. C. 1990. "Parent-Child Effects on
Performance, Thinking and Communication in
Families of Normal and Schizophrenic Sons".
The Journal of the American Academy of
Psychoanalysis. 18, 1, 73-98.
Goffman,
I. 1961. Asylums: Essays on the Social
Situation of Asylum Patients and Other
Inmates. Chicago: Aldine.
Husserl,
E., 1934. Cartesian Meditations.
Husserl,
E., 1939. The Crisis of the European Sciences
and Transcendental Phenomenology. trans D.
Carr, Evanston:Northwestern University Press,
1964.
Jaspers,
Karl, 1913, General Psychopathology.
Reprinted University of Chicago Press.
Kirsner,
D. 1976. The Schizoid World of Jean-Paul
Sartre and R.D. Laing. Brisbane: University
of Queensland Press.
Laing,
R.D. 1960. The Divided Self. London:
Tavistock Publications. Harmondsworth: Pegnuin,
1990.
Laing,
R.D. 1961. Self and Others. London:
Tavistock Publications. Harmondsworth: Pegnuin,
1990.
Laing,
R.D. 1964a. "Review of General Psychopathology
by Karl Jaspers. International Journal of
Psychoanalysis, 45.4
Laing,
R.D. & Cooper, D. 1964b. Reason &
Violence: A Decade of Sartre's Philosophy.
New York: Pantheon.
Laing,
R.D. & Esterson, A. 1964c. Sanity,
Madness & The Family. London: Tavistock
Publications: Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990.
Laing,
R.D. 1967 The Politics of Experience and The
Bird of Paradise. New York: Pantheon.
Laing,
R.D. 1972. The Politics of the Family and
Other Essays. New York: Vintage
Books.
Laing,
R.D. 1987. "Laing's Understanding of
Interpersonal Experience". The Oxford
Companion to the Mind. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Leff,
J. & Vaughn, C. 1985. Expressed Emotion
in Families. New York: Guilford Press.
Poster,
M. 1980. Critical Theory of the Family.
Boston: Beacon Books.
Sartre,
J-P., 1941. Being and Nothingness. tr.
Hazel Barnes.
New York: Washington Square Books.
Simon,
R., 1983. "Still R.D.Laing after all These
Years". Family Therapy Networker,
7.3.
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