Burns (2002, 56) talks about John, who joined the community as one of the sane, a student. He had not been in a mental hospital before or diagnosed as a schizophrenic. But at Archway he, too, took advantage of twenty-four-hour attention and embarked on an inner voyage:
He had moved into his emotional center and he had moved into the space in the common room and accepted the attention and care of guardians who sat with him day and night. He had taken off his clothes. He had shaved his head. He had listened into himself. He had become silent and private, undergoing the inner journey as had the others. . . . Under the attention of those who gathered John experienced a change. To be paranoid means that one feels hostile or malicious feelings directed at one. . . . But it is a different matter to be in a room with a group who are gathered with the expressed purpose of letting one be at the center and to accept their mindfulness. . . . The trembling and insecurity of one's consciousness need not be so intense. One need not fear the unknown other . . . . John found that he need not fear them, that he could trust them, that he could use them for his own purposes of growth. . . . Perhaps it was here that he learned that if people were laughing at him it was a laughter in which he could join. John remained a student but applied his happy new awareness to the way he went about it. He remained in London studying Japanese with the intention of translating ancient Zen manuscripts.
The sane could have transformative experiences in these communities, then, just like the mad, and, in fact, very similar experiences. And this, in the end, is how one should think about the Philadelphia communities. Not as a place where the mentally ill could be restored to some already given definition of normality, but as a place where all the residents could open-endedly explore their own possibilities in an interactive and emergent process with no predefined end point —a collective exploration of nonmodern selfhood. This is the final sense in which these communities staged a symmetric, rather than asymmetric, ontological vision. They aimed to make it possible for new kinds of peopleto emerge, beyond the modern self. And here we could note one final aspect under which Laingian psychiatry went beyond the basic image of the homeostat. As discussed in the previous chapter, Ashby's homeostats as real electromechanical devices had fixed goals: to keep certain electrical currents within preset bounds. Clearly, as ontological theater, Kingsley Hall and the Archway communities acted out a more adventurous plot, in which the very goals of performative accommodation were themselves emergent in practice rather than a given telos. Who knows what a body and mind can do? This is the version of the cybernetic ontology that interests me especially and that will remain at the center of attention in the chapters that follow.
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For the sake of completeness, I want to comment on two further aspects of these Philadelphia Association communities. First, one might wonder whether they worked. This is not such an easy question to answer. I know of no quantitative comparative data which would enable one to say that it was more or less beneficial to spend time at Archway or a conventional mental hospital, and since the mainstream aspiration is to control rather than cure schizophrenia, now with drugs, it seems likely that such data will never be forthcoming.43 It is also clear, I hope, that these communities problematized the very idea of success. If the ambition of conventional psychiatry is to produce people like, shall we say, Ross Ashby, then counting successes is not so much a problem. If the aim is to let a new kind of person in touch with his or her inner self emerge, the counting becomes difficult in the extreme. It is safe to say, I think, that those who spent time at Kingsley Hall and Archway were significantly marked by the experience. David Burns's manuscript is a remarkably lucid and insightful piece of writing by someone who went to Kingsley Hall in search of therapy, and he clearly felt that he benefited it from it enormously. And this is perhaps the key point to grasp. No one made anyone live in these communities (in contrast to involuntary confinement within the British state system at the time). The residents chose to go there and remain there, not necessarily in the expectation of dramatic cures, but in preference to other places such as their family homes or mental hospitals.44 The Philadelphia communities offered them another kind of place to be, to live their lives, however odd those lives might appear to others, and these communities needed no other justification than this choice of its residents to be there.
Second, I should say something more about inner voyages. The visionary aspect of these, at least in literary portrayals, had much to do with the grip of Laing's psychiatry on the sixties imagination. One should not overemphasize their importance in the life of the Philadelphia Association communities. Mary Barnes's transformation at Kingsley Hall seems to have been entirely free from visions or interesting hallucinations, and the Asylumdocumentary depicts life at Archway at its most mundane. There is nothing specifi- cally cybernetic at stake here, except as it concerns altered states and strange performances more generally, but still one wonders whether such visionary experience was ever forthcoming. According to Burns (2002, 64–67, 70),
A number of residents [at Archway] seemed to go through a similar experience in its outward form and I learned that they shared to some degree an inner experience. I came to know Carl best of those who found their way to the center through the tension, violence and turmoil they expressed and the terrible pain and fear they felt. Carl told me his story. Sitting in his room Carl began to feel that he had become transparent, that the barrier between his self and the outside world had faded. He felt that his thoughts were being perceived by others and he heard voices responding to what he was thinking . . . . Carl felt that he was the center of the universe, that he was the focus of loving energy. But it was necessary to move into this other and alien dimension without reservation. . . . This was the difference between heaven and hell. . . . One day . . . Carl felt that a wise old man from China had decided many years ago to be reborn as himself and to live his life with all its ignorance. . . . Everyone in the world except him [Carl] had decided to take on animal form while retaining human consciousness. This was an eminently sensible decision as they would have beauty and resilience and freedom from the oppressions of human culture. . . . [Carl] knew it was really a fantasy but he was fascinated by the truth of this inner experience. He had had glimpses of peace and glory. But now he found that he could inhabit these spaces that he passed through. Especially during the nights when he could let go his defenses and drop his everyday persona he was swimming in a sea of meaning and breathing an air that was more than a mixture of gases. . . . He had been able to inhabit a land of ecstasy and intense feeling where effort had value, where questions of the meaning of life became irrelevant. This was a land to be explored, an adventure that held joys and terrors.
In Carl's case, then, which Burns thought was typical, a resident did go through a voyage with the otherworldly quality that fascinated Laing. That said, one should also recognize that after inhabiting a land of ecstasy and intense feeling, Carl eventually found himself "cast out. Perhaps he was only living in the everyday world once more but it seemed worse than he remembered it. It seemed a place of filth and degradation and trivia. A place of confusion and obsession. . . . If he had been 'schizophrenic' before and had been able to learn from it and glory in it, then he was 'obsessive-compulsive-neurotic' now" (Burns 2002, 70). The moral of his story for psychiatry, then, is hardly a clear one, though Carl himself found some virtue in it. Carl "survived and he told me that although he still did not understand why it had been necessary he had learned some invaluable lessons from the experience. . . . He began to learn to forgive. This came about because he had realized that he could never know what someone else might be going through. He knew a depth of suffering he had not known before. More important, he told me, he began to learn to forgive himself" (71–72).
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There are two other aspects of the story that I should not leave hanging: what happened to the Archway communities, and what happened to R. D. Laing?
The Archway communities closed down in 1
980 (A. Laing 1994, 207). The Philadelphia Association still exists and continues to run community houses.45 I have no detailed information on life there, but it is clear that the character of the communities changed after Archway. "Along the years what we were offering changed from a model, which valued the free expression of emotions in whatever extreme form it might unleash, to one which prioritised containment and worked with respected concepts psychoanalysis was using widely, such as transference, repression and repetition. . . . In the end we were funded by local authorities, something Laing had always opposed. . . . One change we also faced was that psychotic episodes were not welcomed by the community but feared instead; the prospect of broken windows in the middle of winter, sleepless nights and keeping constant vigil were no longer an activity the community or the PA at large regarded as desirable. These days florid psychosis ends up controlled by psychiatric care" (Davenport 2005). As I said earlier, life at places like Kingsley Hall and Archway was not a picnic. In the sixties that was no deterrent; in the Thatcherite era it became insufferable.
As far as Laing himself is concerned, his life and work changed direction after Kingsley Hall shut down in 1970. In July 1971 he left England for the East, spending six months in a Buddhist monastery in Sri Lanka, where he was reported to spend seventeen hours a day in meditation, followed by seven months in India and a brief visit to Japan to study yoga and Zen (Howarth- Williams 1977, 5, 97). Returning to Britain, he was less actively involved with the Philadelphia Association, his writings lost their overtly social and political edge, and he became less of a public figure: "With hindsight it is easy to realize that by the late seventies Ronnie was becoming more and more marginalized" (A. Laing 1994, 202).46 He remained as radical as ever in psychiatry, but in the early 1970s came to focus on "the politics of the birth process and the importance of intrauterine life. Inspired by the work of American psychotherapist Elizabeth Fehr, [he began] to develop a team of 'rebirthing workshops' in which one designated person chooses to re-experience the struggle of trying to break out of the birth canal represented by the remaining members of the group who surround him/her" (Ticktin n.d., 5). Laing's The Facts of Life (1976) elaborates on this new perspective, including the story of his first meeting with Fehr, in New York, on 11 November 1972, and emphasizing, for example, the effects of cutting of the umbilical cord: "I have seen a global organismic reaction occur the instant the cord is cut. It would appear to be neurologically impossible. There are no nerves in the umbilical cord. But it does happen. I've seenit happen" (1976, 73). Characteristically, however, the book gives no details of the practice of rebirthing.
What interests me about these shifts is that they parallel the moves at Archway, away from language and toward performance, revealing, and technologies of the nonmodern self.47 Meditation as a technology for exploring the inner space of the therapist (echoing LSD ten years earlier), prelinguistic experiences in the womb and at birth as the site of psychiatric problems in later life (rather than communicative double binds), physical performance as therapy—staging rebirths. As I said about Archway, the detour through interpersonal communication also shrank to almost nothing in Laing's post–Kingsley Hall psychiatry. Like the residents at Archway, Laing's life and work came to stage a relatively pure form of a performative ontology.
PSYCHIATRY AND THE SIXTIES
We can turn now to the social basis of Laingian psychiatry up to and including Kingsley Hall and look at it from two angles—as psychiatry and as a part of the sixties. The first is important but can be covered briefly, since we have already gone over much of the ground. We have seen before in the cases of Walter, Ashby, and Bateson that ontology and sociology hang together, with practice as the linking term. All three men encountered mismatches with both the substance and the institutional forms of the fields they crossed, and in all three instances the response was to improvise some novel but transitory social base, picking up support wherever it could be found and setting up temporary communities transverse to the usual institutions, in dining clubs, conference series, and societies. Laingian psychiatry illustrates this socioontological mismatch starkly in the contrasting social forms of the Philadelphia Association communities and established mental hospitals, and in the problems experienced in embedding one form within another (especially at Cooper's Villa 21). Beyond that, though, these communities displayed a rather different kind of accommodation to the social mismatch between cybernetics and modernity. Instead of an opportunistic and ad hoc response, the Philadelphia Association paid serious attention to the social side of its work, and attempted, at least, to create at Kingsley Hall and Archway an entirely new and stable social basis where its form of psychiatry could sustain and reproduce itself outside the established system. Like the Santa Fe Institute, Bios, and Wolfram's NKS initiative in later years (chap. 4), Kingsley Hall, we could say, sketched out another future at the social and institutional level as well as that of substantive practice. Kingsley Hall was an instance of, and helped one to imagine, a wider field of institutions existing as a sort of parallel world relative to the mainstream of Western psychiatry and so on.48 We can continue this thought below.
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Now for the sixties. I have concentrated so far on the specifically psychiatric aspects of Laing's (and Bateson's) work. But, of course, I might just as well have been talking about the psychedelic sixties and the counterculture. Altered states; technologies of the self; an idea of the self, social relations, and the world as indefinitely explorable; a notion of symmetric and reciprocal adaptation rather than hierarchical power relations; experimentation with novel forms of social organization; a mystical and Eastern spirituality as a counterpoint to madness—all of these were just as much the hallmarks of the sixties as they were of cybernetic psychiatry. And the basic point I want to stress is that these resonances are again markers of the ontological affinity that we have met before between other strands of cybernetics and the sixties. In different ways, Laingian psychiatry and the counterculture (and situated robotics, complexity theory, and Ashby on planning) staged much the same ontological vision: of the world as a multiplicity of exceedingly complex systems, performatively interfering with and open-endedly adapting to one another.
In this instance, though, we can go beyond ideas of resonance and affinity. One can argue that Laing and his colleagues had a constitutive role in shaping the counterculture itself; they helped to make it what it was. I want to examine this role briefly now as the furthest I can go in this book in tying cybernetics and the sixties together. It is ironic that this example concerns technical practice that did not explicitly describe itself as cybernetic, but I hope I have said enough about Laing and his colleagues and followers to make the case for seeing their work as a continuation of cybernetics, as playing out the basic cybernetic ontology.
We can begin with Laing himself. It is said that in the late 1960s Laing was the best-known psychiatrist in the world. I know of no hard evidence to support that, but it certainly points toward his prominence (and to the fact that the sixties were perhaps the last time the world was much interested in psychiatry—as distinct from pharmaceuticals). And his public fame and notoriety derived from his writings, rather than his day-to-day practice, and especially from his 1967 book The Politics of Experience.49 Politics therefore bears examination. The first few chapters are cogent, but hardly best-seller material. They run through social-constructivist and labeling theories of madness, drawing on Laing's earlier work as well as the work of now-eminent scholars such as the sociologists Howard Garfinkel and Erving Goffman. None of this seems remarkable in retrospect. The book explodes in its concluding three chapters, however, and these are the chapters in which Laing quotes Bateson on the "inner voyage" and then embroiders on the theme, focusing in particular on the inner experience of the voyage and "transcendental experience" (the title of chap. 6).
I mentioned chapters 5 and 6 before, and all that needs to be added concerns the book's last chapter—chapter 7, "A Ten-Day Voyage." Origi
nally published in 1964 (before the establishment of Kingsley Hall), the chapter consists of extracts from Laing's tape recordings of his friend Jesse Watkins's recollections of a strange episode that he had lived through twenty-seven years earlier.50 Watkins's experiences were certainly strange (Laing 1967, 148, 149, 153–54, 156, 158):
I suddenly felt as if time was going back. . . . I had the—had the feeling that . . . I had died. . . . I actually seemed to be wandering in a kind of landscape with— um—desert landscape. . . . I felt as if I were a kind of rhinoceros . . . and emitting sounds like a rhinoceros. . . . I felt very compassionate about him [another patient in the hospital to which Watkins was taken for observation], and I used to sit on my bed and make him lie down by looking at him and thinking about it, and he used to lie down. . . . I was also aware of a—um—a higher sphere, as it were . . . another layer of existence lying above the—not only the antechamber but the present. . . . I had feelings of—er—of gods, not only God but gods as it were, of beings which are far above us capable of—er—dealing with the situation that I was incapable of dealing with, that were in charge and were running things and—um—at the end of it, everybody had to take on the job at the top. . . . At the time I felt that . . . God himself was a madman.
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