The Cybernetic Brain

by Andrew Pickering

  20. On Laing, see, for example, Howarth-Williams (1977), Laing (1985), Kotowicz (1997), Miller (2004), Burston (1996), and a biography written by his son, Adrian: A. Laing (1994). I am indebted to Malcolm Nicolson and, especially, Ian Carthy for guidance on Laing and the relevant literature.

  21. Laing trained as a psychoanalyst in London. "This shows in his ample use of psychoanalytical language although it seems that it did not inform the way he worked very much" (Kotowicz 1997, 74).

  22. The term "antipsychiatry" seems to have been put into circulation by Laing's colleague David Cooper in his book Psychiatry and Anti-psychiatry(1967), but Laing never described himself as an "antipsychiatrist."

  23. Laing traveled to the United States in 1962 for discussions with Bateson (as well as Erving Goffman and others; Howarth-Williams 1977, 4–5). Lipset (1980) includes quotations from interviews with Laing that make it clear that he and Bateson became friends. Laing quotes Warren McCulloch disapprovingly on the cybernetics of the brain; a later passage makes it clear that it is the vivisectionist aspects of cybernetics that he cannot abide (which we could associate here with the asymmetric psychiatry of Walter and Ashby; Laing 1976, 107–8, 111ff.).

  24. Likewise, "the 'double-bind' hypothesis . . . represented a theoretical advance of the first order" (Laing 1967, 113). We can note that, like Bateson, Laing understood the double bind in a decentered fashion. Thus, "One must remember that the child may put his parents into untenable positions. The baby cannot be satisfied. It cries 'for' the breast. It cries when the breast is presented. It cries when the breast is withdrawn. Unable to 'click with' or 'get through' mother becomes intensely anxious and feels hopeless. She withdraws from the baby in one sense, and becomes over-solicitous in another sense. Double binds can be two way" (Laing 1961, 129).

  25. Laing and Pask eventually met, years after Pask had begun citing Laing, at a 1978 conference in Sheffield on catastrophe theory. "That night Ronnie, Gordon Pask and I [Adrian Laing] got totally inebriated while intermittently ranting and raving. . . . Ronnie had met a soul mate in Gordon Pask—his bifurcation talk stayed in Ronnie's mind for many years" (A. Laing 1994, 203–4). One can identify at least one further personal connection between Laing and the British cybernetics community. Adrian Laing (1994, 33) refers to his father's friendship later in his life with "the mathematician and author David George Spenser-Brown," and he must be referring to George Spencer Brown (hyphenated by some, à la Grey-Walter), the author of a book on a nonstandard approach to logic and mathematics, Laws of Form(1969). "During the 1960s, he [Brown] became a disciple of the maverick British psychiatrist R. D. Laing, frequently cited in Laws of Form"(en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._Spencer-Brown [accessed 28 November 2006]), The first edition of Lawsin fact cites Laing's The Politics of Experiencejust once, but a later book by Brown, writing as James Keys (1972), links Eastern and Western philosophy and includes a preface by Laing (twenty-nine words, stretched out over six lines covering a whole page). Laws of Formattained almost cult status in second-order cybernetics as offering a formalism for thinking about the constructedness of classifications: "a universe comes into being when a space is severed or taken apart" (Brown 1969, v). On the Web one can find the proceedings of the American University of Masters Conference, held at the Esalen Institute in California in March 1973, in which Brown held forth over two days to an audience including Gregory Bateson, Alan Watts, John Lilly, and Heinz von Foerster. In the first session he derided Russell and Whitehead's theory of logical types, central to Bateson's understanding of the double bind, as contentless (www.lawsofform.org/aum/ session1.html [accessed 28 November 2006]). Stafford Beer (phone interview, 23 June 1999) told me that he twice found paid employment for Brown in the 1960s while he was writing the book, at his SIGMA consultancy and at the International Publishing Company. Brown sued him for wrongful dismissal at the latter but was "seen off by [IPC] lawyers." Beer also told me that Brown was unable to find a publisher for Laws of Formuntil Bertrand Russell put his weight behind it. Beer and Heinz von Foerster reviewed the book for the Whole Earth Catalog,founded by Stewart Brand (n. 17 above), thus bringing it to the attention of the U.S. counterculture.

  26. Laing (1985, 143), referring to his first university appointment in Glasgow. The quotation continues: "In this unit all psychiatric social-work students have a standing order not to permit any schizophrenic patient in the wards to talk to them."

  27. In 1953, Osmond and Smythies (n. 9) had proposed that psychiatrists take mescaline "to establish a rapport with schizophrenic patients. . . . 'No one is really competent to treat schizophrenia unless he has experienced the schizophrenic world himself. This it is possible to do quite easily by taking mescaline' " (Geiger 2003, 29).

  28. On the history of LSD in British psychiatry, see Sandison (1997). Barnes and Berke (1971) list Sigal (spelled "Segal") among the past and present members of the Philadelphia Association, and Mary Barnes recalled that he was the first person she met at KingsleyHall (Barnes and Berke 1971, 5, 95). Kotowicz (1997, 87) says that Sigal's novel was not published in Britain for fear of libel action.

  29. One can complicate this story further. Laing incorporated LSD into his private psychiatric practice in the sixties and "preferred to take a small amount of the LSD with the patient, and for the session to last not less than six hours. . . . Throughout the early sixties, Ronnie's practice in Wimpole Street gained a reputation verging on the mythological, principally due to his use of LSD in therapy" (A. Laing 1994, 71–72). In these sessions LSD functioned as a technology of the nonmodern self for both psychiatrist and patient.

  30. Shorter (1997, 229–38) gives a brief history, emphasizing the importance of the Tavistock Insitute, where Laing and his colleagues worked.

  31. Ken Kesey's (1962) One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nestis a biting portrayal of a pseudoimplementation of social psychiatry in the United States and as first a novel and then a movie became a key document in the critique of orthodox psychiatry in the 1960s. See also Joseph Berke's account of "social psychiatry" in a U.S. mental hospital in Barnes and Berke (1971, 89–92).

  32. Cooper (1967) is his own account of the Villa 21 experiment. The problems arising from attempts to embed a bottom-up unit within a top-down structure were not peculiar to mental hospitals. I think of the Pilot Program installed at a General Electric plant in the United States in the 1960s, as documented by Noble (1986) and discussed in Pickering (1995, chap. 5).

  33. Adrian Laing (1994, 101) describes these as the core group, and adds Joan Cunnold and Raymond Blake.

  34. Kotowicz (1997, 79–87) discusses attempts to set up institutions analogous to Villa 21 and Kingsley Hall at the Heidelberg University psychiatric clinic in Germany and at the Gorizia mental hospital in Italy, where similar tensions also surfaced. "The hospital embodies the basic contradiction that is at the root of psychiatry—the contradiction between cura(therapy, treatment) and custodia(custody, guardianship). The only solution was to dismantle the institution altogether" (82). The Italian experiment was relatively successful. The German story became entangled with that of the Baader-Meinhof Red Army Faction; some of the leaders of the German project received prison sentences, others went on the run and fled the country.

  35. Asylumwas released in 1972, with introductory exposition by Laing, and is available as a DVD distributed by Kino on Video (www.kino.com). I thank David Hopping for showing me Burns (2002) and Judith Pintar for bringing Asylumto my attention and lending me her DVD. There is an extensive Laing archive at the University of Glasgow, but historians of psychiatry are only beginning to explore this source and seem bent on situating Laing in the history of ideas rather than practices.

  36. Laing's only substantive writing about Kingsley Hall that I have been able to find is a short talk from 1968, Laing (1972), which mentions Mary Barnes's "voyage" at Kingsley Hall and an incident in which one resident (with a bird tied to his head) shot another resident (David, naked and obsessed with fears of castration) in the genitals with a Luger. It
turned out the gun was loaded with blanks, and Laing emphasized the performative aspect of this interaction: "David looked down and saw his genitals were still there. . . . He lost as much of his castration anxiety in that incident as he had done in the four years that I had been seeing him in analysis. No interpretations could be as primitive as that dramatic action, completely unpredictable and unrepeatable. At Kingsley Hall we have hoped to have a place where such encounters could occur" (Laing 1972, 21).

  37. There is a good description of the building and its history in Barnes and Berke (1971, 215–18). Kingsley Hall's most illustrious previous inhabitant was Gandhi, who lived there for six months in 1931 and met representatives of the British government there, while sharing his room with a goat and living on its milk. See also Kotowicz (1997, 76).

  38. Burns (2002) goes into the mundane details. One important asymmetry concerned money: the mad, who typically could not hold down jobs, had less of it than the others. See also Barnes and Berke (1971) on a split between Laing and Esterson concerning the need for organizational structure at Kingsley Hall. Here and below I follow the standard usage of Laing and his colleagues and refer to "the mad" instead of "the mentally ill" or similar formulations. This seems appropriate, as part of what was contested at Kingsley Hall was whether "the mad" were indeed "ill."

  39. A central character in the Asylumdocumentary talks almost continuously in a way that relates only obscurely, if at all, to remarks addressed to him, frequently driving the other residents to distraction in their attempts to communicate both with him and each other.

  40. Howarth-Williams (1977, 5) notes that Laing moved into Kingsley Hall on his own, without his wife and five children, and that his return home was a period of family and personal crisis for him, coinciding with his separation from his family. Kotowicz notes, "Laing left after a year, Esterson did not last any longer, and the maximum any therapist stayed was two years. Does it say something that the only person who stayed from the beginning to the end wasMary Barnes?" I am grateful to Henning Schmidgen for an illuminating personal account of his stay at a comparable French institution, the Clinique de La Borde at Courvenchy.

  41. Burns (2002) begins: "For more than fifteen years an experiment has been carried out in London. . . . I lived in these communities for five years, from early 1970 until late 1975 and was in association with them until late 1977." We can thus date his manuscript to around 1980. Of the period of transition, Burns (1–2) recalls, "the group living at Kingsley Hall toward the end had lost cohesiveness and the therapists known as the Philadelphia Association decided, after some hesitation, to continue the experiment with a new group. Only three of us, therefore, moved into the new community. This consisted of two houses in a deteriorating neighbourhood. Since these houses were scheduled for demolition we had to move to new homes of the same nature, again and again. This was difficult and painful but the advantages were that any damage done to the structures was relatively unimportant and that there was somewhat less than the usual necessity for residents to keep up normal standards of behavior on the streets."

  42. Despite its asymmetry in singling out specific individuals at any given time, on Burns's account it could be applied to or invoked by all of the members of the community, so the underlying symmetry remains.

  43. A biography of Laing records that "Kingsley Hall had a dreadful record when it came to documenting therapeutic sucesses. The whole ethos of the experiment was against documentation." On the other hand, Loren Mosher implemented "a rigorous research program" in two therapeutic households in the United States between 1971 and 1983 and "demonstrated that therapeutic households that make minimal use of medication and extensive use of suitably trained paraprofessionals are just as effective as standard psychiatric facilities—sometimes more effective—and can circumvent the toxic side effects of neuroleptic drugs or electroshock." Returning to the topic of marginality, the same work continues: "Mosher's experiment was inspired by his brief stay at Kingsley Hall and is well documented elsewhere. But . . . it has been studiously ignored by the psychiatric community" (Burston 1996, 244–45).We can also return to the Esalen Institute at this point (nn. 18 and 19 above). At Esalen in the midsixties, Richard Price "was beginning to think about starting, perhaps as an annex of Esalen, a treatment center modelled on Kingsley Hall," and was joined in this by Julian Silverman, a clinical psychologist from the National Institute ofMental Health in Bethesda, Maryland. Murphy, Price, and Silverman were interested in Laing's work. Laing visited Esalen in 1967 and was expected to figure centrally in a major Esalen seminar series in 1968, although in the event he did not appear. Silverman subsequently left Bethesda for a position at the Agnews Hospital in San Jose, California, where he attempted to explore the efficacy of the Kingsley Hall approach to psychiatry in a project sponsored by the state, the National Institute of Mental Health, and Esalen (Laing was invited to join this project and again refused to travel to the United States). LikeMosher's, the findings of Silverman's three-year project were positive: "Follow-up research . . . reported that those who had been allowed to recover without medication showed more long-term clinical improvement, lower rates of rehospitalization, and 'better overall functioning in the community between one and three years after discharge' " (Anderson 2004 [1983], 214–18). Silverman became the director of Esalen from 1971 to 1978 (Kripal 2007, 179).

  44. Burns (2002) mentions that residents would sometimes get into trouble with the police—for wandering naked down the street, for example—who would turn them over to the local mental hospital. But after a brief stay there, they would often elect to return to their communities. Sigal (1976) helps make such a choice very plausible in relation to Villa 21 in the early 1960s.

  45. www.philadelphia-association.co.uk/houses.htm.

  46. "A new Philadelphia Association [had] virtually emerged (most of the original members having left and gone their separate ways), one which [was] somewhat less focussed on families and schizophrenia and much more organized, with a wide-ranging study programme" (Ticktin n.d., 5).

  47. In a 1974 interview on "radical therapy," Laing described his work in almost entirely performative terms. In rebirthing sessions, "People would start to go into, God knows what, all sorts of mini-freak-outs and birth-like experiences, yelling, groaning, screaming, writhing, contorting, biting, contending." He continued, "I should mention massage, bodily sculpture, improvised games, etc, are all part of our ordinary, ongoing culture: wearing masks, dancing. . . . We are not identified with any special technique but we are into it, as the saying goes, for me particularly, music rhythm and dancing. When I go into one of our households for an evening usually music, drumming, singing, dancing starts up" (quoted in A. Laing 1994, 180).

  48. For two U.S. projects modelled on Kingsley Hall, see note 43 above.

  49. By 1971, Politicshad sold four hundred thousand copies in paperback (A. Laing 1994, 161).

  50. Laing published his first account ofWatkins's voyage in 1965.Watkins appears as a visitor to Kingsley Hall in Barnes and Berke (1971).

  51. J. Green (1988,178–80, 167) quoting Alan Marcuson and Peter Jenner; Leary (1970), quoted by Howarth-Williams (1977, 1).

  52. Laing first met Ginsberg in New York in October 1964, where he also met Joe Berke (for the second time), Leon Redler, and Timothy Leary (A. Laing 1994, 98).

  53. Before the Anti-University, there was the Notting Hill Free School, founded in 1965 and inspired by similar institutions in the United States. Joe Berke, newly arrived in London, was among the organizers. It was "a scam, it never really worked," but it somehow mutated first into the Notting Hill Fayre and then into the Notting Hill Carnival, which is still very much with us (J. Green 1988, 95–103; the quotes are from John Hopkins on p. 96).

  54. The Huxley in question here is Francis, son of Sir Julian and nephew of Aldous, who met Laing around this time and whom Laing invited to become a member of the Philadelphia Association (F. Huxley 1989). An anthropologist, Francis studied Amazonian Indians in th
e early 1950s, "developed an interest in LSD and mescaline" through his uncle, and worked with Humphrey Osmond in Saskatchewan in the late 1950s and early 1960s (Melechi 1997, 48).

  55. Byatt's (2002) fictional evocation of an antiuniversity in the north of England likewise includes a commune at its core. As the Anti-University became a commune—"dosshouse" was Jeff Nuttall's word—Berke, worried about who would pay the bills, "blew his top one night. He picked up one of these guys bodily and threw him out. Then he did this strange boasting thing: 'Who's the biggest guy on the block, who can throw anybody here? I can beat you! I'm the biggest guy on this block!' It was really dippy. He just regressed. Very sad" (Nuttall, quoted in J. Green 1988, 238–39).