|
 In
'normal life', a man can return to the office after
an evening of rough-housing with the kids (and the
wife) and feel refreshed by having spent a night
with the family. Since it required the barest
minimum of human relatedness, the self-less man
survived another day without exposing himself to
reality.
Laing
also uses Sartre's discussion of Genet's
masturbating to illustrate pretended sociality
which masks individual isolation. Sartre states
that in masturbation two people are phantasized
(the masturbator and the person being 'made love
to'), yet both are the product of the masturbator
who can call them into being without having to
leave the privacy of his own thoughts. The
masturbator can be with someone while being alone
(just as less perverted people can be alone while
being with someone). Genet can thereby control his
relations with others; there is no uncertainty at
all. He has found the stability he needs plus
companionship.32
There is one difficulty, which is that one's
phantasies do affect one's real life. Laing writes
of one young man who "bumped into a girl in the
corridor whom he had just been fucking in the
office lavatory, and was so embarrassed that he had
to give up that job."33
It seems that even phantasies cannot protect one
from reality.
Exhibitionism
is an alternative mode of engaging on contacts with
others while keeping oneself hidden. A part of the
person is exposed but the self is held in. "The man
who does not reveal himself or is not 'seen' by the
others when he does, may turn, in partial despair,
to other modes of self-disclosure. The
exhibitionist shows off his body, or a part of his
body, or some highly prized function or skill
trying to overcome that haunting isolation and
loneliness of one who feels his 'real' or 'true'
self has never been disclosed to and confirmed by
others. The man who compulsively exhibits his penis
substitutes disclosure through this 'thing' rather
than through living. Analysis of such a person can
show that it is not just this thing that he would
have others gasp at, but himself, whose actions are
'weak', 'phoney', 'unreal', and impress no one. He
wishes to put this would-be 'true' self into his
penis. But instead of making patent this latent
self and thereby 'intensifying' his being, he holds
himself in (inhibits himself) and holds out
(exhibits) his penis."34
A
final form of retaining one's (insecure) identity
while participating in sham personal relations is
where an individual colludes with another to get
the other to see him as he sees himself. If this is
successful, the person feels his identity
validated. Of course, since collusion is a
protection against exposing one's false notions of
himself, insofar as collusion is successful the
individual will never find true fulfillment - he
will be entangled in a game of disguise and evasion
of the truth. "Collusion is always clinched when
self finds in other that other who will 'confirm'
self in the false self that self is trying to make
real, and vice versa.
The
ground is then set for prolonged mutual evasion of
truth and true fulfillment. Each has found an other
to endorse his own false notion of himself and to
give this appearance a semblance of
reality."35
If
the other refuses to collude, self will attempt to
instil guilt in him, or perhaps feel that other is
incapable of a 'decent' relationship. Finally, a
third party is always a danger to a two-person
collusion since there is a danger that he, not
having a stake in the collusion, may not have any
qualms about seeing through it. This is one reason
the 'normal' parents frequently restrict their
child's activities and friendships, and attempt to
keep him as close to home as possible. The further
away from home he gets, the more outside influences
may break through the smokescreen relation they
have set up with him for their own
protection.
When
one person feels that his involvement in a
relationship with another is destroying his
individuality, he may try to diminish the other's
influence over him rather than pretend the
relationship is working out. One attempt consists
of destroying the other in phantasy, another means
is withdrawal from the other. Laing illustrates the
latter with an analysis of sexual frigidity. In the
case of a frigid woman who feels dominated and
oppressed by her man, her frigidity "prevents him
from 'giving her satisfaction'. Thus, he might be
able to cause her to do any number of things, but
one way she can retaliate and limit his dominance
over her is to make it impossible for him to cause
her to climax. "The impotent, analogously to the
frigid woman, is often determined not give the
woman the satisfaction of satisfying
him."36
Destruction in phantasy of the other is also
resorted to when an individual feels that he cannot
hold his own in a relationship, and hence must
limit the potency of the other. However, as Laing
points out, these actions fail to solve the
problem, the reason being that one can feel strong
only if he is confirmed by another, whereas these
behaviors weaken the other (or at least are
designed to). The individual will thus feel less
oriented if the relationship is maintained with a
depersonalized other. A vicious cycle ensues such
that, "The more self destroys other, the more empty
self becomes. The more empty the more envious, the
more envious, the more
destructive."37
Thus
far, all of the attempts to alleviate emptiness and
de-individualization have not only failed, but
engrain the person further in confusion and
irreality, making it more difficult to understand
and strengthen himself. A spiral begins in which
the individual is sucked further into the depths of
mystification which motivates him to try harder to
get out, which drags him further into the morass,
which motivates him even more to escape, etc.,
etc., etc. Thus we find individuals clinging even
more tenaciously to that which is destroying life.
There is no lack of examples from 'normal',
everyday life. Suffice it to recall the My Lai
massacre in which ordinary, 'good', 'god-fearing',
American boys systematically murdered over five
hundred Vietnamese women and children simply
because they were told to. This kind of occurrence
being almost too terrifying to think about, Laing
presents the results of a laboratory experiment in
social psychology which confirms the existence of
this kind of mentality in an astonishing proportion
of 'normal' Americans. Stanley Milgram at Yale
University contrived a setting where people thought
they were participating in a study testing the
effectiveness of shock as a stimulant to learning.
Whenever a 'student' answered a question
incorrectly, the experimental subject was
instructed to shock him. If he got the next
question wrong, the voltage was increased, and so
on, until the voltage reached four hundred and
fifty volts which was marked 'severe shock'.
Twenty-six out of forty subjects delivered the
maximum four hundred and fifty
volts,38
and only five refused to carry on after three
hundred volts were apparently received. Some of the
subjects who continued to the end showed definite
signs of conflict and concern, however they
completed the task anyway. Laing comments: "The
conflict that the subjects faced in this experiment
was between obeying an authority they trusted and
respected, and doing something they felt to be
wrong. The real-life situation is more horrible.
There is, for many, perhaps no conflict at all. My
guess is that most people feel guilty at
not doing what they are told, even though
they think it is wrong, and even though they
mistrust those who give the orders. They feel
guilty at trusting their own
mistrust."39
A
feature of the experiment Laing doesn't include is
that some of the subjects placed the responsibility
for what they'd done with the experimenter. The
following was one exchange between an interviewer
(who was not the experimenter) and one of the
subjects. "I'd like to ask you a few questions.
How do you feel? I feel all right, but I don't
like what happened to that fellow in there (the
victim). He's been hollering, and we had to keep
giving him shocks. I didn't" like that one bit. I
mean, he wanted to get out, but he (the
experimenter) just kept going, he kept throwing
450 volts. I didn't like that.
Who
was actually pushing the switch? I was, but he
kept going…
Why
didn't you just disregard what the experimenter
said? He said it's got to go on, the
experimenter."40
(Emphasis added.)
Another
aspect of the experiment was that, "When persons
who have not performed in the experiment are
provided with a description of the experimental
situation and are asked to predict their own
performances, almost all subjects see I themselves
as defying the experimenter at some point in the
command series. Moreover, they justify their
hypothetical behavior in terms of positive
qualities of character, employing such statements
as 'I'm not the kind of person who is willing to
hurt others even for the cause of science'."
"Yet
there is a marked discrepancy between this value
judgement and the actual performance of subjects in
the laboratory."41
II
Laing
and his colleagues are perhaps best known for their
investigations on schizophrenia, and what they seek
is to comprehend why someone living the 'normal'
life would break down and become insane. In every
piece of his writing Laing emphasizes that the
schizophrenic is comprehensible only if considered
in light of the 'normal' family (and, more
generally, in light of the society-at-large) in
which he lives. Laing contends that if this
perspective is utilized, schizophrenia may be
understood as an attempt to survive in the midst of
an unbearable situation. Accordingly, madness is
not 'in' a person but in a system of relationships
in which the labelled 'patient' participates:
schizophrenia, if it means t anything, is a more or
less characteristic mode of disturbed group
behavior.42
The
potential schizophrenic comes from a family that is
hypernormal in the sense that it embodies to a
greater extent the attributes found in the normal
family. The double binds are more frequent, the
parents more confused, anxious, uncaring and
oblivious, and the child's life more restricted.
Where the normal child has some minimum degree of
freedom, autonomy, and ego, the potentially
schizophrenic child has virtually no experience he
can call his own, no sense of himself as an
individual, no orientation by which he can make
sense of the world. He comes to feel that as a
person he does not exist, he feels lost. As Laing
says, "The loss of the experience of an area of
unqualified privacy, by its transformation
into a quasi-public realm, is often one of the
decisive changes associated with the process of
going mad."43
The child can not cling to his parents (as the
normal child can) because they simply are too
unapproachable, and because their view of reality,
being too distorted, confused, and fearful, doesn't
provide the security he needs. Consequently, he
constructs for himself an explanatory schema
of what the world is like and why it is that way.
Laing emphasizes that this schema is the person's
own and that it is different from the parents'.
This rejection of the parents' world-view is
threatening to them so they have him examined by
the proper psychiatric authorities who label his
world-view crazy, and the parents (and the proper
authorities) are reassured that anyone differing
from their Weltanschauung must be severely
disturbed.
Laing
devotes Sanity, Madness, and the Family and
The Divided Self to exploring the
circumstances surrounding the breakdown and the
nature of the breakdown itself. In the first place,
the schizophrenic is attempting to understand why
his 'normal' life was so strained and confused. To
reiterate, his existence was so extremely chaotic
that he could not accept it and cover it up the way
the ordinary person could. He was simply forced to
escape it, and this entailed repudiating it. Many
of the schizophrenic's statements reveal his
attempt at understanding what his life was like. It
is not surprising to find frequent accusations
about the parents' callousness, weakness, and
hypocrisy, and about the estranged quality of life
in general. The following interpretation of a
seemingly deranged statement is predicated upon
this conceptualization. It is presented in full
because it so clearly exemplified Laing's perfectly
sublime manner of relating the degree of insanity
and obtuseness in the 'normal' world.
"A
nurse was engaged to look after a somewhat
catatonic, hebephrenic schizophrenic patient.
Shortly after they had met, the nurse gave the
patient a cup of tea. This chronically psychotic
patient, on taking the tea, said, 'This is the
first time in my life that anyone has even given
me a cup of tea.' Subsequent experience with
this patient tended to substantiate the simple
truth of this statement.
"It
is not so easy for one person to give another a
cup of tea. If a lady gives me a cup of tea, she
might be showing off her tea-pot, or her
tea-set; she might be trying to put me in a good
mood in order to get something out of me; she
may be trying to get me to like her; she may be
wanting me as an ally for her own purposes
against others….The action could be a
mechanical one in which there is no recognition
of me being given a cup of
tea.
"In
our tea ceremonial, it is the simplest and most
difficult thing in the world for one person,
genuinely being his or her self, to give,
in fact and not just in appearance,
another person, realized in his or her
own being by the giver, a cup of tea,
really, and not in appearance. This patient
is saying that many cups of tea have passed from
other hands to hers in the course of her life'
but this notwithstanding, she has never in her
life had a cup of tea really given her."
In
separating himself from the 'normal' world, the
schizophrenic thus comes to achieve some insight
into the world he has left. However, Laing is quite
clear about the gulf between these insights and
sanity: the schizophrenic has been invalidated for
many years and he is confused. Consequently his
awareness is tenuous and uncertain; he does not
definitely and firmly confront reality. The
schizophrenic distrusts himself, which is one
reason why his perception of reality has a
metaphorical quality: he does not feel sufficiently
strong to fully explore the world, so his awareness
of it is vague and partial. Laing's interpretation
of the above statement brings this out, and he
feels the same way about what it means when a
patient reports believing the walls are talking,
people want to poison her, etc. In virtually every
case, these delusions are metaphorical expressions
of what is occurring in reality. In one instance
the parents were continually gossiping about - the
child, in another they were resentful of
her.44
Rather than directly acknowledge the gossiping
parents, the patient attributed the behavior to the
walls, or, rather than admit the parents' hatred of
her, the patient believed that mysterious others
wanted to poison her. As Laing says about patients
who have retreated into their own inner space and
time, "They clutch at chimeras. They try to retain
their bearings by compounding their confusion, by
projection (putting the inner on to the outer), and
introjection (importing the outer categories into
the inner). They do not know what is happening, and
no one is likely to enlighten
them."45
In
separating himself from the normal world, the
patient constructs a false self which the world can
confront and place demands upon, while the true
self is inside, unexposed to and protected from the
unbearable reality. The inner self disengages
itself from the body and is thereby unreachable and
invisible. The schizophrenic solution to
deindividualization and depersonalization then is
to withdraw from the circumstances contributing to
such a state of existence.
This
'solution' however, resembles those undertaken by
'normal' individuals, since the attempt is not to
find experiences which will confirm and validate
one's identity, but rather to protect oneself from
disconfirming, invalidating experiences. The
emphasis is on survival rather than development,
and this must fail since survival entails
development. Stagnation is regression. A person
must have experiences with others in order to
become himself and know who he is, so that the
individual who covers himself as protection from
the other can never be confirmed or revealed by the
other. Consequently, the schizophrenic, like the
normal, becomes more confused as a result of his
attempts to avoid confusion. As Laing says, "Hence,
what was designed in the first instance as a guard
or barrier to prevent disruptive impingement on the
self, can become the walls of a prison from which
the self cannot escape."46
"That is to say, the 'true' self, being no longer
anchored to the mortal body, becomes 'phantasized',
volitized into a changeable phantom of the
individual's own imagining. By the same token,
isolated as is the self as a defense against the
dangers from without which are felt as a threat to
its identity, it loses what precarious identity it
already has. Moreover, the withdrawal from reality
results in the 'selfs' own impoverishment. Its
omnipotence is based on impotence. Its freedom
operates in a vacuum. Its activity is without life.
The self becomes desiccated and
dead."47
"The
tragic irony is that even finally no anxiety is
avoided whereas every anxiety and all else
besides becomes even more tormenting by the
infusion into all experiences in waking life and
in dreams of an abiding sense of nothingness and
deadness."
"Thus
the point we have already got to is that the
self, being transcendent, empty, omnipotent,
free in its own way comes to be anybody in
phantasy and nobody in reality."
48
Laing
is explicit about the futility of simply
substituting one's own conception of oneself for
the invalidated self resulting from the influence
of another. This is illustrated in the case of John
who, in a psychotic state, believed that he could
be anyone he wanted, merely by snapping his
fingers. This was supposed to be an antidote to
John's father's attempt to define John's
personality. Thus, originally John thought he was
who his father said he was. He negated this by:
'No, I am who I say I am.' Laing comments that,
"True sanity lies at the other side: the negation
of the psychotic negation of the false original
premise. I am not what they say I am, nor what I
say I am."49
It
should be clear that for Laing, true sanity entails
a dialectical relationship between individuals such
that each person is simultaneously 'for-himself and
'for-others'. One comes to be oneself and know
oneself through interaction with others, yet one
must not permit the other to totally constitute
oneself: The self must also participate in
constituting itself by picking and choosing from
other's reflections of him, those he wishes to
incorporate into his self-image. This means that
the sane individual has an identity he can call his
own. It means that he has an inner time and space
which is private, and which he can use as the basis
of his choosing those encounters with the world
which he desires to pursue further. Now it is
precisely because the schizophrenic seeks to
establish this kind of private domain that Laing
feels psychosis is one path toward sanity, and the
beginning of some awareness of reality. The
schizophrenic seeks to live totally in his own
private realm, and in this respect he will fail to
find the sanity that is the only solution to his
confusion. But he at least takes the first timid
steps toward establishing himself as a unique and
independent being, which is more than the 'normal'
individuals do in their protective actions. This is
why Laing states, "The madness that we encounter in
'patients' is a gross travesty, a mockery, a
grotesque caricature of what the natural healing of
that estranged integration we call sanity might
be".50
The sane person, possessing an inner realm of his
own, can voluntarily estrange himself from his
day-to-day routines to get a new perspective on his
life and thereby develop and extend himself in new
directions. However, he has the strength and
self-control to return from his 'inner voyage',
whereas the schizophrenic doesn't.
III
"My
experience and my action occur in a social field of
reciprocal influence and interaction. I experience
myself, identifiable as Ronald Laing by myself and
others, as experienced by and acted upon by others,
who refer to that person I call 'me' as 'you' or
'him', or grouped together as 'one of us' or 'one
of them' or 'one of you'."51
David Cooper expresses the same thought: "What goes
on in the reciprocal relation of a two-person
transaction is as follows: I totalize you, but you,
in your reciprocal totalization of me, include my
totalization of you, so that my totalization of you
involves a totalization of your totalization of me,
and so on."52
These
statements express the fact that for me to have
experiences which reveal to me who and what I am,
you must have experiences of who and what I am,
since I see myself (to some extent) through the way
you see me. The more intimately I know you and your
experience, the more I know myself. Hence, you must
be willing to experience me and to enter into an
intimate relationship with me if I am to know
myself, but you won't be willing if you are like
the 'normal' person. You will impose mediations
between us. This means that I cannot be sane, in
the sense of having a confirmed, validated, and
clear identity, unless you are -- i.e., unless you
have a clear grasp of who you are so that you will
not fear exposing yourself to me in an intimate
relationship. And this means that I cannot be
understood in the absence of the social context
surrounding me, which was the opening note of this
review. It also points up the fact that to the
extent that I treat you as a non-experiencing
object, to that extent I diminish my own experience
of myself and become an object. This has profound
implications for the social scientist since he
typically regards his subjects as objects.
According
to Laing, virtually every school of psychology
neglects personal experience.53
Behaviorists repudiate experience on 'scientific
grounds', ie., that they don't know how to
get at it with their technology, and Freudians
bypass it in their concern with unconscious
material and psychic 'mechanisms'. In any case, the
individual is regarded as relatively passive, and
determined by forces over which he has no control.
In this light the human being does not (cannot)
strive to "develop himself, nor to achieve
self-awareness through intimate relationships, nor
I to integrate his experiences into a whole which
stabilizes his identity and gives his life
direction and meaning, nor to alter the conditions
surrounding him. Laing questions this: "Why do
almost all theories about depersonalization,
reification, splitting, denial, tend themselves to
exhibit the symptoms they attempt to describe? We
are left with transactions, but where is the
individual? The individual, but where is the other?
Patterns of behavior, but where is the experience?
Information and communication, but where are the
pathos and sympathy, the passion and
compassion?"54
According
to Laing: "People may be observed to sleep, eat,
walk, talk, etc. in relatively predictable ways. We
must not be content with observation of this kind
alone. Observation of behavior must be extended by
inference to attributions about experience. Only
when we can begin to do this can we really
construct the experiential-behavioral system that
is the human species."55
Indeed,
this is the only approach by which schizophrenia is
comprehensible, since it is clear that even the
terribly invalidated pre-schizophrenic, with
virtually no ego at all is capable of finding
within himself the wherewithal to repudiate
alienating conditions and begin constructing a
world for himself. Obviously he is not conditioned
to do this since the 'reinforcing community' is
totally opposed to his breaking down. There is some
experience of his own which serves as the basis for
his creations and his strength. Perhaps Laing's
showing us this will encourage us to
act.
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32
Laing, R. D., Self and Others, Pantheon, N.
Y., 1969, pp. 39-41.
33 Ibid., p.
42.
34 Ibid., pp.
112-113.
35 Ibid., p.
93.
36 Ibid., p.
69.
37 Ibid., p.
68.
38 The experiment was
rigged, of course, and the student did not actually
receive any shock. However, the subjects thought he
was being shocked and continued anyway.
39 Laing, R. D., "The
Obvious," in D. Cooper, To Free a Generation,
Collier, p. 32
40 Milgram, S.,
"Liberating Effects of Group Pressure", Journal
of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 1
(1965), pp. 127-134.
41 Ibid.
42 Laing, R. D.,
Self and Others, Pantheon, N. Y., 1969, p.
21.
43 Ibid., pp.
88-89.
44 Laing, R. D. and A.
Esterson, Sanity, Madness and the Family,
Basic Books, N. Y., 1964.
45 Laing, R. D.,
Politics of Experience, Pantheon, N. Y.,
1967, p. 87. 46. Laing, R. D., Divided Self,
Penguin, 1960, Md., p. 138. 47. Ibid.,
p. 141.55. Ibid., p. 9.
48 Ibid., p.
142.
49 Laing, R. D., Self
and Others Pantheon, N. Y., 1969, p. 80.
50 Laing, R. D.,
Politics of Experience, Pantheon, N. Y.,
1967, p. 101.
51 Ibid., p.
9.
52 Cooper, D.,
Psychiatry and Anti-Psychiatry, Tavistock,
London, p. 7.
53
Laing states, "As a whole, we are a generation of
men so estranged from the inner world that many are
arguing that it does not exist; and that even if it
does exist, it does not matter." Politics of
Experience, Pantheon, N. Y., 1967, p. 33.
54
Ibid., p. 31.
55
Ibid., p. 9.
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