by Jenny Diski
Laing’s ideas came when the time was absolutely right for them. Politics was experience, experience was political. I saw people not being healed, but kept quiet, being made more convenient, sometimes with the best will in the world, but always, it seemed to me, with ears and eyes closed to what the distressed and the mad were actually experiencing. I read Laing’s books as if they were a road map of my life. I wanted to be part of it (even though I was just a humble depressive and he was only really interested in exciting schizophrenics). But when, as an outpatient at the Tavistock Clinic in the mid-Sixties, I said that I wanted to go and work as a volunteer at Kingsley Hall, my psychiatrist responded (quite correctly, of course, it wouldn’t have been very good for my own mental health), ‘If you try, I’ll have you sectioned.’ The threat to lock up and give enforced treatment to wilful patients was always readily available in the psychiatrist’s medical bag and a gift to any anti-authoritarian patient or theoretician.
Laing fused the notion of liberation of the insane with the buzz that was already beginning to be heard about the liberation of the mind in a broader sense, and it was thrillingly cogent. At least in theory. Laing was a brilliant theoretician; but as a practitioner, Dr Ronnie’s patients were often dumped back into institutions or left to cope for themselves when they became too hard even for him to handle. He called in the men in white coats and walked away more than once to my knowledge. Drugs, drink, general craziness and a phenomenal amount of ego mixed with the theory and made some dangerous black holes in the practice.
Even aside from Laing’s own limitations, there was the matter of pain. While we romanticised madness, he and those of us who supported him failed to take seriously the excruciating pain of the mad. Pain was existential truth, so the anti-psychiatrists permitted them to go through it; indeed, insisted that they did. In fact, as anyone stuck in the middle of a severe depression or a terrifying psychotic episode would have told their champions if they’d really been listening, people suffering from severe mental illness would do anything to make the anguish stop. Most of those having ECT, lobotomies, and mind-numbing drugs were voluntary patients, as McMurphy found out, prepared to have whatever treatment it would take to stop the nightmare. The anti-psychiatrists took other people’s pain too philosophically. Nevertheless, for all that, read those early books by Laing and Esterson, even parts of Laing’s later increasingly gnomic, not to say crazy, or faux-crazy writings, and see if they aren’t still powerful, intelligent and compelling.
In just the same way as it happened with politics and education, liberation got confused with libertarianism. And in the area of psychiatry, too, Thatcher and Reagan in the Eighties took up our slack thinking, to transform the rhetoric and turn it into their own special form of radicalism, all the while blaming the chaos caused by the permissiveness of the Sixties for their harsh ‘necessities’. We were guilty of woolly-mindedness: and as in politics and education, the upshot of libertarianism was there to be seen at the time. We didn’t see it, or if we did, we didn’t think about it enough. Thomas Szasz’s book The Myth of Mental Illness,28 was read as another book, along with those of Laing and friends, that promoted anti-psychiatry and the freeing of the mad from the shackles of the medicating doctors. It was, in its way. At least in theory. Mental illness was a category of control by institutions of the individual. Shut down the mental hospitals, free the madmen, they were no more mad than you and me, said Szasz. It looked on a not-careful-enough reading just like the liberating theses of the Good Doctors. How carefully did we read the passages where he said that if the so-called mad behaviour of those pushed out on to the streets was causing civil difficulties, it was simple misbehaviour, and should be treated as such: delinquents should be locked up in prisons, dealt with by courts? And perhaps it wasn’t actually so far from Laing’s position, certainly not so far from his practice. But it’s easy to see now that this view (and perhaps, indeed, the Good Doctors’ views) could sit happily to the far right of the political spectrum. Szasz wanted to get rid of the ‘namby-pamby caring’ that was precisely what us namby-pamby carers in the Sixties were wanting to achieve more of. We were (those of us not aligned to strict Marxist or Trotskyist groups who took more care in analysing what they were reading) profoundly naïve, the wishy-washy liberals, the wets, so sneered at by the Thatcher government. Thomas Szasz wanted no kind of doctoring at all of the mind. Let people be free to roam the streets and cause trouble, and let those who didn’t like it deal with them as individual nuisances. There was no such distinction as bad or mad. The State had no business interfering with matters of the mind, or even supposing that Mind existed. Along with the behaviourist psychologists, like B. F. Skinner and John B. Watson, Szasz’s point was to reject the notion that mind had any meaning at all. He didn’t want to help the mad or listen to them, or offer them asylum; he wanted to abolish the idea of them. He refuted the concept of madness in order to refute any claim for civic responsibility towards others. Close the hospitals, let the mad walk free. Everyone made their own individual choices: the rich, the poor, the mad, the sane. That was their problem. Charles Shaar Murray assessed it correctly when in 1988, after the libertarian Right had done its worst, he noted:
The line from hippy to yuppie is not nearly as convoluted as people like to believe and a lot of the old hippie rhetoric could well be co-opted now by the pseudo-libertarian Right – which has in fact happened. Get the government off our backs, let individuals do what they want – that translates very smoothly into laissez-faire yuppyism, and that’s the legacy of the era.29
The argument limps on, between generations now, about the legacy of the permissive Sixties. There are two accusations: that we caused the greed and self-interest of the Eighties by invoking the self, the individual, as the unit of society and setting up individualism for the Right to pick up and run with; or that we caused it by being so permissive, so soppy about matters that needed hard, firm handling, that a reaction was inevitable if the West wasn’t to sink into a morass of self-indulgent chaos. But, we cry, that wasn’t what we meant. And it wasn’t. We had hardly invented the idea of Self, nor the idea that the individual had a right to respect and equality. Nor is it, anathema though it might be to the communitarian Left, such a terrible notion so long as the bad guys don’t get hold of it. We were, and some of us still are, namby-pamby. We certainly believed very definitely that there was such a thing as society, and that attending to its most vulnerable members was one of its main tasks. But we were guilty, I think, of not imagining the Eighties, of not being able to visualise what David Widgery calls Thatcher’s ‘appalling candour’30 in denouncing society as a myth, and the greed and self-interest (not the same thing as an interest in the self) that could be and was unleashed in the name of sacred individualism. We didn’t really believe in the existence of the bad guys. We were guilty, too, of failing to understand the power of capitalism, the pull of material well-being, because many of us had had it much of our lives and could therefore easily enough imagine something different. We thought we would be happy to share our goods and our relationships. Mostly, we weren’t, but even if we had been, the promise of wealth for all, of owning property rather than having housing provided by councils at fair rents, was too desirable for those that had been left out of ownership. And most people didn’t have either the time or the inclination to devote themselves to listening for the underlying sense the mad might be making. They didn’t want lives that included allowing individuals all the time in the world they needed to regress, to paint and to smear the walls with shit. They weren’t interested in the mental travellers coming back with remarkable tales to tell; they wanted, as people seem always to want, to get on, and getting on meant focusing narrowly on the vital business of getting things (money, success, objects) and not worrying too much about those who didn’t, unless they needed sequestering. Truth (whatever it may be), art (whatever that may be), consideration at a cost to yourself, none of those were priorities compared to a decent standard of living and
the promise of ever better, ever more to come.
Whether it was our fault, or the fault of those other radicals of the Eighties and Nineties, the current situation seems to be that those who are looking to be in charge of the world next are actually facing the prospect of not much world at all. There are small signs that a new radicalism is developing, or at least desperate attempts, here and there, to resist the dying of the planet. Gathering force, I hope. The Sixties generation are getting to an age where the world is beginning to look quite baffling and alien. It happens to everyone as they grow older. People don’t notice you in the street, they aren’t very interested in what you have to say. We complain about how things used to be and how they are now – better then, terrible now. And it feels as if this is true. But perhaps it always feels true as the centre drifts away from you. Anyway, no one takes much notice – they make TV programmes called Grumpy Old Men, as we used to sit around laughing at Alf Garnett and his ever-baffled missus.*
What alarms me is how little has actually changed. There are new laws governing what can be said and ensuring that minorities are treated better in the workplace, but even in the developed nations women are still paid considerably less than men for the same work, millions of people are starving around the world and most of them are black, the wife of the first minister of Northern Ireland felt able to call homosexuality ‘an abomination’ in 2008, the Market, whether it is up or down, controls the lives of individuals, and vast corporations have consolidated their power over elected (and unelected) governments. In addition the planet is frying. Some fine souls are still battling; most of us who had the good fortune to be part of the Sixties are plain discouraged.
* Schizophrenics, specifically; those of us who were depressives were merely dull.
* In a British sitcom called Till Death Us Do Part, which portrayed a viciously racist, sexist working-class anti-hero as a lovable idiot, patronised by all around him.
NOTES
Introduction
1 Rodrigo Fresàn, Kensington Gardens, translated by Natasha Wimmer, New York, Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2006.
Consuming the Sixties
2 Leviticus, 19:19.
Altering Realities
3 Timothy Leary, in Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain, Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD: the CIA, the Sixties and Beyond (New York, Grove Press, 1985), quoted in Jonathon Green, All Dressed Up: The Sixties and the Counterculture, London, Pimlico, 1999.
Body Work
4 Erica Jong, Fear of Flying, New York, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1973.
5 Jonathon Green (ed.), Days in the Life: Voices from the English Underground 1961–1971, London, Minerva, 1988.
6 Ibid.
7 Roy Jenkins, Is Britain Civilised?, 1959, quoted in Green, All Dressed Up.
Remaking the World
8 Tariq Ali, Street Fighting Years, London, Collins, 1987.
9 Ibid.
10 Henry James, The Princess Casamassima, London, Macmillan, 1886.
11 Oz, 32, quoted in Green, All Dressed Up.
12 The Times Leader article, written by William Rees-Mogg on 1 July 1967, quoted Alexander Pope in asking ‘Who Breaks a Butterfly on a Wheel?’ in response to the prison sentences handed out to Mick Jagger and Keith Richards for possession of drugs.
13 David Widgery, Preserving Disorder, London, Pluto Press, 1989.
14 Peter Buckman, The Limits of Protest, London, Gollancz, 1970, quoted in Green, All Dressed Up.
15 Widgery, Preserving Disorder, London, Pluto, 1989.
16 Ibid.
Projecting the Future
17 Leila Berg, Risinghill: Death of a Comprehensive School, London, Penguin Books, 1968.
18 Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society, New York, Harper & Row; London, Calder & Boyars, 1971.
19 Paul Goodman, John Holt, for example.
20 Illich, Deschooling Society.
21 Ibid.
22 Ibid.
Changing Our Minds
23 R. D. Laing, The Divided Self (London, Tavistock, 1960), Penguin Books, 1965.
24 R. D. Laing, The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise, London, Penguin Books, 1967.
25 Joseph Cambell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1949.
26 Mary Barnes, Joseph Burke, Two Accounts of a Journey Through Madness (1971), Free Association Books, 1991.
27 Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, New York, Viking, 1962.
28 Thomas Szasz, The Myth of Mental Illness, New York, Harper & Row, 1961.
29 Green (ed.), Days in the Life.
30 Widgery, Preserving Disorder.