R.D.LAING,
who died on Wednesday at the age of 61, did much
to demystify mental illness before mystifying
his own admirers in his later writings. Along
the way he outraged psychiatry, but left the
profession a good deal more humane than he found
it.
FRANCIS
HUXLEY here recalls working with Laing in his
therapeutic community at Kingsley Hall in the
Sixties
 Ronald
David Laing was born in Glasgow. His father was an
engineer, who otherwise filled his life with music
and became a professional baritone of some note.
Laing himself had large gifts as a musician, and
was well on the way to becoming a concert pianist
when his love for vigorous activities made him play
one game of rugby too many, during which the bones
of his right had were crushed.
This
put paid to any professional ambitions he had,
though all his life he would play Bach, all with
spirit and intelligence, and sometimes with
majesty. I do not think that music alone would have
satisfied him, however, for he also had a mother
whose mind was very much not that of an engineer or
musician.
Laing
published a number of wry anecdotes about his
childhood, both in The Facts of Life and Wisdom,
Madness and Folly. The ones that really made the
mouth pucker he told only to his friends, as befits
the darker skeletons in the family cupboard, and I
have no wish to say more about these saddening
vehicles of psychological inheritance than that
they were of a particularly anguishing kind.
He
read widely Hume, Sartre, Nietzsche, Calvin,
rationalists and Buddhists he got his degree
as a doctor and became a psychiatrist. As such he
found himself dealing with many a fellow victim of
the same torment who in addition had to suffer the
indignities of prejudicial diagnosis and treatment.
He himself had a wonderfully attentive ear and soon
trained himself to speak and understand
schizophrenese; and when he read Bateson’s
theory of the double bind and its action in
schizophrenic families he at once saw that this was
indeed the master engineer’s blueprint of the
mad-machine.
The
Divided Self was an extraordinary fruit of this
moment, in which many a leader as yet undiagnosed
found their predicament writ large and with deep
empathy. Here was one of the clearest voices of the
sixties, which immediately gathered allies to its
cause.
The
cause, of course, was to exorcise the double bind
from civilised life, and this meant not only
diagnosing its presence but breaking the habit in
oneself. There is no way to do this but in company,
and so Kingsley Hall was set up, that first
household for those who either feared for their
sanity or looked for something better, while
longing for conviviality and meaning. It was run,
as were its successors , on two major principles.
The first was: “It’s all up for
grabs”; the second, “Everything that is
not forbidden is allowed, and everything that is
not allowed is forbidden”.
Axioms
such as these produced a great deal of animation,
and if some of it was confusing the general effect
was all that a therapeutic household might
reasonably ask for. Indeed, it was much more, for
Kingsley Hall was one of the centres of
sixties’ life; it attracted a wildly
interesting network of people who, once fallen
under Laing’s spell, gave life to the place
and between them gave birth to other ventures, such
as the conference on the Dialectics of Liberation.
Ah,
the dear dead days! It was then that I first met
Laing, who later invited me to join the
Philadelphia Association. He did so because of my
interest as a social anthropologist in such things
as shamanism, which I had recently come into
powerful contact with. Laing, there is not doubt,
had the shamanic temperament and recognised the
fact. This gift, which so often begins as a
disorder, is not recognised as such in western
psychiatry, which therefore cannot use its
therapeutic advantages: a fact which, of course,
underlies so much of Laing’s writing on
‘anti-psychiatry’ which surmounts to no
less than what psychiatry should be doing if it
truly understood the facts of the case.
At
any rate, this gift of his was often difficult to
live with both for himself and for those around
him. I once accused him of hitting below the belt
during a business meeting. At which he snarled that
I should know by now that there was no difference
between above and below. He was a master in this
form of psychic aikido, as her termed it, and the
Chinese restaurant round the corner from his house
saw many such an encounter, as when he told a
visiting bigwig that though he might work with him,
he didn’t see how he could ever be his friend.
It reminds me that some years ago we were talking
of Californians and he asked me whether I could
really ever befriend such nice, normal, eager,
boring people. How he enjoyed making mischief in
such company, given less than half a chance, for
what annoyed him in the conventional was not only
that it was boring, but that it was full of lies.
As
for real, thick, black lies, they always roused his
combativeness and his ire, and he could hunt them
down mercilessly. Lies destroy love, whether they
be in the family or in the institution: and as far
as institutional life is build on lies, it should
be destroyed, was his constant argument.
He
was himself a deeply loving man, if often rough,
and one who fought his way continually back to
moral principles: I shall not easily forget the
time at the Ojai Foundation when he allowed himself
to be made into a scapegoat for the complaints of
all and sundry at the conference, suffered some
grievous blows at the hands of a would be exorcist,
and brought understanding at the end through an
extraordinary sermon on unconditional love. He did
many unconditional things in his life but this was
his finest and his saving grace.
Ronald
David Laing, born October 7, 1927; died August 23,
1989.
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