The Cybernetic Brain
Page 24
What should we make of this? Evidently, northern California was a key site at which cybernetics crossed over into the broader field of the counterculture, as it hung on there into the 1970s and mutated into New Age.19 Gregory Bateson was at the heart of this, and the medium of exchange was a shared interest in what I called earlier the performative brain but which is better described in Bateson's case as the performative self—a nonmodern self capable of strange performances and the achievement of altered states, including a pathological disintegration into madness in one direction, and dissolution into nirvana in the other. There is one other link between Bateson and the counterculture that will get us back across the Atlantic. He was friends with R. D. Laing.
R. D. Laing
I WAS TRYING TO DESCRIBE THE FAMILY "MANGLE," THE WAY FAMILIES MANUFACTURE PAIN FOR THEIR MEMBERS.
R. D. LAING,INTERVIEW, QUOTED IN BURSTON (1996, 101)
R. D. Laing (as he was named on his book jackets and known to popular culture), Ronald David Laing, was born in Glasgow on 7 October 1927 and died playing tennis in the south of France in 1989 (fig. 5.2).20 He studied medicine at Glasgow University from 1945 to 1951, when, after six months of neurosurgical internship, he was called up by the army and "summarily informed" that he was now a psychiatrist. He left the army in 1953 and found a position at Glasgow Royal Mental Hospital. In 1957 he headed south, joining the Tavistock Institute in London in 1957 and remaining there until 1967 (Howarth-Williams 1977, 4–5).21 During the 1960s he published seven books and many articles while developing and implementing an increasingly radical psychiatric stance, becoming a key figure in what is often referred to as the "antipsychiatry movement."22 He also became a central figure in the British "underground" scene, and the publication in 1967 of his popular book The Politics of Experience brought him national and international attention and even notoriety.
Figure 5.2. R. D. Laing. Used courtesy of University of Glasgow Library.
Laing's writings portray him as a scholar and an intellectual, drawing upon works in Continental philosophy and current sociology to construct a "social phenomenology" that might inform our understanding of mental illness and psychiatric practice (see Howarth-Williams 1977, on which I have drawn extensively). Laing did not describe himself as a cybernetician, but his work was certainly cybernetic, inasmuch as from 1958 onward he was strongly in- fluenced by Gregory Bateson, which is why he bears attention here.23 Laing's second book, Self and Others, for example, includes a long discussion of the double bind, including the statement that "the work of the Palo Alto group [Bateson et al.], along with Bethesda, Harvard, and other studies, has . . . revolutionized the concept of what is meant by 'environment' and has already rendered obsolete most earlier discussions on the relevance of 'environment' to the origins of schizophrenia" (Laing 1961, 129).24
Laing was not uncritical of Bateson, however. Bateson had a fondness for formal logic and wanted to understand the double bind on the model of a logical paradox—the Cretan who says "all Cretans are liars," and so on. Laing put something more empirically and phenomenologically satisfying in its place. His 1966 book Interpersonal Perception, for example (written with H. Phillipson and A. Robin Lee), explores the levels and structures of interpretation that go into the formation of "what he thinks she thinks he thinks," and so on. The end result is much the same as the double bind, though: pathological reflections back and forth in communication, "whirling fantasy circles," Laing calls them, from which escape is difficult or impossible, and that are "as destructive to relationships, individual (or international), as are hurricanes to material reality" (Laing, Phillipson, and Lee 1966, 22). As it happens, this is the context in which Laing came closest to explicitly cybernetic language. When he remarked of these spirals that "the control is reciprocal . . . the causality is circular" (118), he was echoing the subtitle of the Macy conferences: "Circular Causal and Feedback Mechanisms in Biological and Social Sciences." It is also worth noting that this strand of Laing's work fed straight back into the mainstream of cybernetics: Gordon Pask made it the basis of his formal theory of "conversation," meaning any kind of performative interactions between men and machines.25
But it was Bateson's notion of madness as an inner voyage that Laing really seized upon, no doubt because it spoke to his own psychiatric experience, and that contributed greatly to Laing's reputation and impact in the sixties. Two talks that Laing gave in 1964, which were revised in 1967 as the key chapters (5 and 6) of The Politics of Experience, take this idea very seriously (reproducing my Bateson quote in its entirety) and offer vivid elaborations, with strong echoes of Huxley's The Doors of Perception: the space of the nonmodern self as experientially a place of wonder and terror, "the living fount of all religions" (131), schizophrenia as an unexpected and unguided plunge into "the infi- nite reaches of inner space" (126–27), the need for a "guide" to inner space— Laing's colleague David Cooper was the first to invoke the figure of the shaman in print, I think (Cooper 1967)—modernity as a denial of the nonmodern self and nonmodern experience which leaves the voyager at a loss: modernity as, in this sense, itself a form of madness.
ON THERAPY
DR. LAING, I AM TOLD THAT YOU ALLOW YOUR SCHIZOPHRENIC PATIENTS TO TALK TO YOU.
A CHIEF PSYCHIATRIC SOCIAL WORKER,QUOTED IN LAING,
WISDOM, MADNESS AND FOLLY (1985, 142)
This quick sketch of Laing's thought and writing is enough to establish that his understanding of madnesss and therapy was in very much the same cybernetic space as Bateson's. Now I want to see what this approach looked like in practice. I can first sketch the basic problematic in general terms and then we can look at a series of implementations.
My quotation from Bateson included the idea that psychotic inner voyages have their own endogenous dynamics. This is integral to the idea of psychosis as an adaptive mechanism. But the example of the Zen master and Laing's idea of "the guide" both entail the notion that one can somehow participate in that dynamics from the outside, even if one cannot control it (which is, again, the sense of the word "steersman," from which Wiener derived the word "cybernetics"). The question for Laing and his fellows was, then, how to latch on, as it were, to schizophrenics—how to get in touch with them, how to adapt to them—when schizophrenia was more or less defined by the disruption of conventional patterns of communication. The only answer to that question that I can see is trial-and-error experimentation with behavior patterns to see what works. One thus arrives at the symmetric image of sufferers and psychiatrists as assemblages of homeostats running through sequences of configurations in pursuit of a joint equilibrium, with this difference: Ashby's homeostats were hard wired to be sensitive to specific variables, whereas the psychiatric experiment necessarily included a search for the relevant variables. In Ashby's terms (though he himself did not think of psychiatry in this way), the psychiatrists had to expand the variety of their performances in their attempts to latch onto schizophrenia. Now we can look at some examples of what this meant in practice.
1. An enduring thread in Laing's psychiatry was that it might help to treat the mentally disturbed "simply as human beings" (Howarth-Williams 1977, 8). This seems quite an obvious thing to do and hardly radical until one remembers that that it was just what orthodox psychiatry did not do. Laing talked to his patients, an activity strongly discouraged in orthodox psychiatric circles as stimulating the "schizophrenic biochemical processes" that drugs were intended to inhibit.26 And it is worth noting that Laing undertook such interactions, both verbal and nonverbal, in a performative spirit, as a way of getting along with the patients, rather than a representational and diagnostic one (Laing 1985, 143):
In a recent seminar that I gave to a group of psychoanalysts, my audience became progressively aghast when I said that I might accept a cigarette from a patient without making an interpretation. I might even offer a patient a cigarette. I might even give him or her a light.
"And what if a patient asked you for a glass of water?" one of them asked, almo
st breathlessly.
"I would give him or her a glass of water and sit down in my chair again."
"Would you not make an interpretation?"
"Very probably not."
A lady exclaimed, "I'm totally lost."
In this instance, then, latching onto schizophrenics involved just the same tactics as one might deploy with the girl or boy next door. Hardly radical in themselves, as I said, but utterly divergent from the mainstream psychiatry of Laing's day. The expansion of the therapist's variety in performance, relative to standard practice, is evident. As usual, we see that ontology (the symmetric rather than the asymmetric version of cybernetics) makes a difference.
2. It once surprised to me to discover the enormous amount of serious scientific, clinical, and philosophical attention that was generated by LSD in the 1950s and 1960s (see, for example, Solomon 1964; and Geiger 2003). In psychiatry, LSD figured in at least three ways. One was as a psychotomimetic, capable of inducing psychotic symptoms in the subjects of laboratory experiments. Another was as yet another weapon in the arsenal of psychic shocks—as in Ashby's inclusion of LSD in his blitz therapy. But third, from the other side, LSD also featured as a technology of the nonmodern self, a means of destabilizing the everyday self of the therapist and thus helping him or her to gain some sort of access to the experiential space of his or her patients.27 Laing never wrote about this, as far as I can ascertain, but it is clear from various sources that he was indeed heavily involved with LSD in the early 1960s. Martin Howarth-Williams (1977, 5) records that in 1961 Laing was "experimenting with the (legal) use of hallucinogens such as LSD" and that by 1965 he was "reputedly taking (still legal) LSD very frequently." In what appears to be a thinly disguised account of the period, Clancy Sigal's novel Zone of the Interior (1976) has the narrator doing fabulous amounts of acid supplied by a therapist who sounds remarkably like Laing, and often wrestling naked with him while tripping.28
Here, then, we find the cybernetic concern with altered states in a new and performative guise, with LSD as a means to put the therapist into a new position from which possibly to latch onto the patient. We are back to what I just called the gymnastics of the soul, and the contrast with orthodox psychiatric therapy is stark. Likewise, LSD exemplifies nicely the idea of expanding the variety of the therapist as a way of coming alongside the sufferer—entry into an altered state. We could also notice that while I described verbal communication earlier as a detour away from and back to performance, here LSD features as a dramatic contraction of the detour—a nonverbal tactic for getting alongside the sufferer as a base for not necessarily verbal interaction (wrestling!). This theme of curtailing the detour will reappear below.29
3. The two examples so far have been about microsocial interactions between therapist and patient. Now we can move toward more macrosocial and institutional instantiations. Laing's first publication (Cameron, Laing, and McGhie 1955) reported a yearlong experiment at Glasgow Royal Mental Hospital in which eleven of the most socially isolated chronic schizophrenics spent part of each day in a room with two nurses. The nurses had no direct instructions on how to perform, and Laing and his coauthors regarded this project simply as an experiment in which the patients and nurses had a chance "to develop more or less enduring relations with one another" (Cameron, Laing, and McGhie 1955, 1384). This "rumpus room" experiment, as it has been called, was Laing's tactic of relating to patients as human beings writ large and carried through by nurses instead of Laing himself. Over a year, the nurses and patients were left to adjust and adapt to one another, without any prescription how that should be accomplished. And, first, we can note that this tactic worked. The patients changed for the better in many ways (Cameron, Laing, and McGhie 1955, 1386): "They were no longer isolates. Their conduct became more social, and they undertook tasks which were of value in their small community. Their appearance and interest in themselves improved as they took a greater interest in those around them. . . . The patients lost many of the features of chronic psychoses; they were less violent to each other and to the staff, they were less dishevelled, and their language ceased to be obscene. The nurses came to know the patients well, and spoke warmly of them." Second, we can return to the image of interacting homeostats searching for some joint equilibrium and note that the nurses as well as the patients changed in the course of their interactions. In the first few months, the nurses tried giving the patients orders, sedated them before they walked over to the allotted space, and so on. But after some time (1385), "the [two] nurses [became] less worried and on edge. They both felt that the patients were becoming more 'sensible,' From a survey of what the patients were saying at this period, however, it is clear that the change lay with the nurses, in that they were beginning to understand the patients better. They ceased always to lock the stair door, and to feel it necessary for the patients to be sedated in the mornings. They began to report more phenomenological material. They became more sensitive to the patients' feelings and more aware of their own anxieties." Third, this change in nursing practice again points to the fact that ontology makes a difference. Giving orders and sedatives and locking doors were standard ways of handling "chronic deteriorated schizophrenics" (1384) (who were presumed to be beyond the help of ECT, etc.), but in the new experimental setup, nursing grew away from that model as the nurses and patients adapted to one another. Fourth, we should note that this experiment provoked institutional frictions, inasmuch as it departed from the usual practices of the hospital (1386): "The problems which arise when a patient is felt to be 'special' caused difficulty. Comments that all the 'rumpus room patients' were being specially treated were common among the staff. The group nurses, who did not work on a shift system but were free in the evenings and the weekends, were considered to have a cushy job. The group nurses reacted in a defensive way to this, adopting a protective attitude when their patients were criticized during staff discussions." This quotation points both to the fact that symmetric psychiatry differed in institutional practice from orthodox psychiatry and to the frictions that arise when one form of practice is embedded within the other. Laing and his colleagues remarked, "Tensions of this kind are lessening" (1386), but they will resurface below.
4. We can contextualize the rumpus room. British psychiatry in and after World War II included a variety of developments in "social" or "communal psychiatry." These entailed a variety of elements, but we should focus on a leveling of the social hierarchy and a transformation of power relations within the mental hospital.30 As discussed already, the traditional mental hospital had a top-down power structure in which doctors gave orders to nurses who gave orders to patients. Social psychiatry, in contrast, favored some measure of bottom-up control. Patients and staff might meet as a group to discuss conditions in the hospital or individual mental problems.31 The Glasgow rumpus room experiment can be seen as a radical early variant of this approach, and one later development from the early sixties is particularly relevant here— David Cooper's experimental psychiatric ward, Villa 21, at Shenley Hospital, where patients were encouraged to take care of their surroundings and each other. "The venture, while it lasted, was a modest success and many interesting lessons were learnt," but it ran into many of the same problems as had the rumpus room before it: embedding this kind of a bottom-up structure within a top-down institution created all sorts of problems and tensions, nicely evoked in Zone of the Interior. Villa 21 and its inmates made the whole hospital look untidy; the patients disrupted the orderly routines of the institution; nurses feared for their jobs if the patients were going to look after themselves. "Cooper concluded that any future work of this kind had to be done outside the great institutions" (Kotowicz 1997, 78).32
This gets us back to Laing. In 1965, Laing, Cooper, Aaron Esterson, Sidney Briskin, and Clancy Sigal decided to found a therapeutic community entirely outside the existing institutions of mental health care in Britain.33 In April 1965, they established the Philadelphia Association as a registered charity with Laing as chairman,
and with the object of taking over, two months later, a large building in the East End of London, Kingsley Hall, as the site for a new kind of institution (Howarth-Williams 1977, 52).34 Kingsley Hall itself closed down in 1970, but the Philadelphia Association continued the project into the 1970s with a series of therapeutic communities that moved between condemned houses in Archway, north London. Life in these communities is the best exemplification I know of what a symmetric cybernetic psychiatry might look like in practice, and I therefore want to examine it in some detail. The proviso is, alas, that documentary information is thin on the ground. The only book-length account of life at Kingsley Hall is Mary Barnes and Joe Berke's Two Accounts of a Journey through Madness (1971), though Zone of the Interior is illuminating reading. On Archway, the only written source is The David Burns Manuscript (Burns 2002), written by one of the residents, unpublished but available online. There is also a documentary film made at one of the Archway houses over a period of seven weeks in 1971, Asylum, by Peter Robinson.35 This lack of information is itself an interesting datum, given the impressive amounts of time and emotional energy expended at Kingsley Hall especially, though I am not sure what to make of it. The obvious interpretation is that even people who are committed to transforming practice remain happier writing about ideas.36
KINGSLEY HALL
ALL LIFE IS MOVEMENT. FOR INSTANCE, ONE MAY BE HIGH OR LOW, BE BESIDE ONESELF . . . GO BACK OR STAND STILL. OF THESE MOVEMENTS, THE LAST TWO IN PARTICULAR TEND TO EARN THE ATTRIBUTION OF SCHIZOPHRENIA. PERHAPS THE MOST TABOOED MOVEMENT OF ALL IS TO GO BACK. . . . AT COOPER'S VILLA 21 AND IN OUR HOUSEHOLDS, THIS MOVEMENT HAS NOT BEEN STOPPED. IF ALLOWED TO GO ON, A PROCESS UNFOLDS THAT APPEARS TO HAVE A NATURAL SEQUENCE, A BEGINNING, MIDDLE AND END. INSTEAD OF THE PATHOLOGICAL CONNOTATIONS AROUND SUCH TERMS AS "ACUTE SCHIZOPHRENIC BREAKDOWN," I SUGGEST AS A TERM FOR THIS WHOLE SEQUENCE, METANOIA.