Do not adjust your mind the fault is in reality: RD Laing and the Politics of the Anti-Psychiatry Movement

Do not adjust your mind, the fault is in reality: RD Laing and the Politics of the Anti-Psychiatry Movement

‘Do not adjust your mind, the fault is in reality’ was a slogan of the 1960s Anti-Psychiatry Movement. Socialists would have no problem in readily agreeing with the spirit of the slogan. The premise of socialism is that individuals change when you change their environment. The aim therefore of socialism and also Marxist political theory is to create the social conditions in which every individual human being can flourish.

However, given developments in evolutionary psychology, genetic theory, and neurology in recent years the statement from the 1960s can appear naïve. The available scientific evidence points to the conclusion that it is simply incorrect to assume that human beings are born as a blank slate upon which society writes its narrative. The aim of this article, therefore, is not to offer a rerun of the outdated nature versus nurture debates. In fact this article will argue that it has been a mistake of the social sciences to dichotomise the two. Cultural determinism, a position which the left has all too easy been seduced by, is just as mistaken as its philosophical opposite - biological determinism. This is sometimes a difficult argument for the left. Socialists will correctly point out that socio-biological arguments informed the eugenics movement and the concept of scientific racism. However, despite these abuses of science, socialists need to recognise that the culturally determinist arguments of Marx and the many others who followed him need to be reviewed and placed in the context of what has been revealed by modern biology and evolutionary science.

The starting point is to accept that human nature exists. In addition to this, socialists need to take psychology seriously. The big question, which has haunted the Marxist left, is this: why have the working class, the harbingers of socialism and the historical agent of the new society, failed to create a revolution in the West? Any attempts to answer this question which neglect the realm of psychology are incomplete. Socialists therefore need to understand Freud just as much as Marx. This is not a new argument. Many socialists have attempted a synthesis between Marxism and Psychoanalysis, the most obvious examples being Wilhelm Reich Jean-Paul Sartre and Erich Fromm.

The subject of this article is the Scottish psychotherapist RD Laing. Laing’s legacy is associated with the Anti-Psychiatry movements of the 1960s. Laing, who was a psychiatrist, never actually used the term ‘anti-psychiatry’. His intention was not the abolition of psychiatry; instead he wanted to humanise psychiatric practice and the ways in which society understands mental illness. Moreover, Laing’s work was important not just in terms of understanding mental illness, but also in understanding modern man’s relationship to himself and society.

It is important to place the work of Laing in context with the work of the French philosopher Michel Foucault. The publication of Madness and Civilisation in the early 1960s by Foucault was a landmark moment in the history of psychiatry. In Madness and Civilisation Foucault illustrates how European society managed insanity by locking it away. Foucault reveals that the ‘madman’ began his long period of incarceration at the start of the Enlightenment where he would be held captive until the latter half of the twentieth century. The political narrative of the 1960s Anti-Psychiatry Movement, informed by Foucault, challenged the political and philosophical discourses which had informed the European Enlightenment. Social events contributed to informing this new consciousness. The intellectuals of the anti-psychiatry movements had experienced the carnage of the Second World War, which had brought with it Hiroshima, and, of course, the Holocaust. The consequence of these events challenged the Enlightenment’s claim that Western society was civilised. Moreover, according to Foucault, the treatment of the mentally ill, and the very ways in which mental illness was defined, challenged the premise of Western man’s apparent rationality.

Michel Foucault

RD Laing did not need Foucault to reveal to him the oppressive nature of psychiatry for he had witnessed it first hand. Laing, as a newly qualified doctor did his psychiatric practice in the Royal Army Medical Corps between 1951 and 1953. The young RD Laing began his psychiatric career in the midst of what has become known as the ‘dark days’ of psychiatry. The main components of psychiatric practice in the 1950s still included insulin induced comas, electric shocks, straight jackets, tranquillisers and padded cells. Doctors were not permitted to speak to patients. Psychiatry as Foucault argues was surrounded by a wall of silence: ‘in the serene world of mental illness, modern man no longer communicates with the madman: on one hand, the man of reason delegates the physician to madness, thereby authorising a relation only through the abstract universality of disease’ (Foucault, 2003).

Foucault explains that the first houses of confinement appeared in England in the most industrialised parts of the country and opened during an economic recession. In the main it was the poor who were incarcerated, or those who could not adapt to the morality of the new bourgeois order. According to Foucault, the ‘madman’ crosses the frontier of bourgeois order of his own accord and alienates himself outside the sacred limits of its own ethic (Foucault, 2003). Confinement, as Foucault notes, was ‘an institutional creation peculiar to the seventeenth century…madness was perceived on the social horizon of poverty, of incapacity for work, of inability to integrate with the group: the moment when madness began to rank among the problems of the city. The new meanings consigned to poverty and all the ethical values that are linked to labour, ultimately determined the experience of madness and inflected its course’ (Foucault, 2003).

Foucault argued that madness was socially constructed. His arguments were seized upon by a generation of intellectuals, including RD Laing, who intrinsically grasped the concept that there was something insane about society. Moreover, the ‘social constructionists’ as they were referred to in academia, realised that inherent in the early social sciences was a biologically reductionist argument that was racist and patriarchal.

In addition to challenging this biological determinism, the premise of Foucault and Laing’s arguments challenged the notion that modern man was inherently rational, an insight which begins with Freud. It is Freud who provides modern society with the first concrete theory of human nature. According to Laing, Freud’s relevance to our time is largely his insight that the ordinary person is a shrivelled, desiccated fragment of what a person can be (Laing, 1967).

The deconstruction of the Enlightenment begins not in the 1960s with Foucault, however - it is equally evident in the works of Marx more than a century ago. In addition to Freud, the radical psychiatry of RD Laing is influenced by Marx’s concept of alienation. Marx argued that modern man is ‘alienated’ from his ‘species being’ or true human nature. Marx questioned the Enlightenment’s claim to have ushered in a society based on ‘freedom’ and ‘equality’. With his concept of alienation, he offers an early theory of mental illness that is related to the social and emotional process of performing labour. The individual who refused to develop a ‘work ethic’, or was psychologically unable to conform to the rigidity and conformity of bourgeois social relations, often went mad and was consequently incarcerated. Madness therefore had its origins in the social system.

What type of individual is it who learns to conform to a life of labour? Laing argues that in order to adapt to the modern social, political, economic and moral order, modern man displays the behaviour of a sociopath. It is those of us who refuse to take part that are in danger of becoming ‘mad’. The mad receive an insight into the suffering of humanity. ‘Our social realities are so ugly if seen in the light of exiled truth’, Laing explained in 1967.

Despite his pessimism Laing, like Marx, wanted to create a new set of social conditions in which humanity could overcome its own alienation. From this perspective a humanist strand is evident in Laing. He noted that we all live in the hope that an authentic meeting between human beings can occur (Laing, 1967). For Laing, the radical psychotherapist was one such person engaged in this task: ‘psychotherapists are specialists in human relations. But the dreadful has already happened. It has happened to us all. The therapists too are in a world in which the inner is already split from the outer’ (Laing, 1967). The split between outer and inner relates to mans alienation from his ‘species being’. Alienated man has become a master of deluding himself and others. In a famous passage Laing notes:

R D Laing

From the moment of birth, when the Stone Age baby confronts the twentieth century mother, the baby is subjected to these forces of violence, called love, as its mother and father have been, and their parents before them, these forces are mainly concerned with destroying most of its potentialities. This enterprise is on the whole successful. By the time the new human being is fifteen or so, we are left with a being like ourselves. A half crazed creature, more or less adjusted to a mad world. This is normality in our present age (Laing, 1967).

Laing argued that insanity was a sane response to an insane society. For Laing, it was the intuitions of bourgeois society, for example the family, that were truly sick and in need of treatment. The intellectuals of the 1960s counter-culture agreed. Laing’s work struck a chord with a generation of feminists who had identified the bourgeois family as the main site in which social oppression is constructed and reproduced. Moreover, it is within this family that the tensions inherent in modern man’s relationship to society are revealed causing conflict between family members.

Laing argued that the function of such a family was to ensure that the individual adapted to the demands of the social order and became prepared for a life of labour and conformity. Resistance to this process by children is the root cause of parent/child conflicts. The ‘storm and stress’ model of adolescence, constructed by nineteenth century Romantics like Rousseau, was in reality a social conflict in which the parents manoeuvred to adapt the child to the requirements of society. But adapt children to what asked Ronnie Laing in 1967? Adaptation to a world gone mad, he concluded.

This, he argued was the primary function of the family in our contemporary age: the family’s function is to repress Eros: to induce a false consciousness of security: to deny death by avoiding life, to cut off transcendence, to believe in God, not to experience the void, to create in short, one-dimensional man, to promote respect, obedience, to con children out of play, to induce a fear of failure, to promote a respect for work, to promote a respect for respectability’ (Laing, 1967).

This understanding of the family is equally evident in the works of Marx. In the Communist Manifesto, Marx stated that one of the aims of the Communists was the abolition of the bourgeois family: ‘do you charge us with wanting to stop the exploitation of children by their parents?’ Marx thundered in 1848. ‘To this crime we plead guilty’, he stated. When Marx was writing in the mid-nineteenth century psychology was in its infancy. Marx could not have known (and perhaps he would not have been all that interested) about the family’s impact on the mental health of its members. It would take Freud, writing another half a century later to begin to unravel the impact of the family on the individual. Influenced by both Marx and Freud, Laing’s conclusion was that mental illness, including schizophrenia, could be located within the stultifying world of the bourgeois family, a claim that remains controversial to this day.

We have seen that there is convergence between the social constructionist theories of Laing and the philosophical aspects of Marxism. However, Laing introduces a healthy dose of scepticism into the Marxist claim that the individual or the working classes will overcome their alienation by engaging in the political act of revolution.

Bereft of a theory of human nature Marxists have struggled to develop a coherent theory as to why the proletariat, which they believed is the harbinger of a new society, would acquiesce with the present social order. In fact, more than just acquiesce with the social order the toiling masses in actual fact have been prepared to kill in order to defend it. From one point of view the real story of the twentieth century is not the story of the oppressed masses rising up to overthrow their oppressors as hoped for by Marx and Lenin. Instead it is the story of the oppressed masses systematically murdering and butchering one another to defend a social order which, according to Marxists, was the origin of their own alienation.

Thus the First World War exposed the socialist appeal to international solidarity as nothing but hollow rhetoric. The reality was not a brotherhood of man, but a war of savagery and butchery waged by man against man, oppressed versus oppressed. It was in aftermath of another World War, which had produced Hiroshima and the Holocaust that intellectuals like Laing and Foucault became far more cautious and in Foucault’s case downright sceptical about the emancipatory agency of the working class. Laing argued:

In the last fifty years, we human beings have slaughtered by our own hands coming on for one hundred million of our own species. We all live under the threat of our total annihilation. We seem to seek death and destruction as much as life and happiness…only by the most outrageous violation of ourselves have we achieved our capacity to live in relative adjustment to a civilisation apparently driven to its own destruction (Laing, 1967).

In another passage Laing argues that human beings are animals which have a tendency in nature to be socially conservative, ‘the history of heresies of all kinds testifies to more than the tendency to break off communication (excommunication) with those who hold different dogmas or opinions…we seem to share a communal meaning to human existence, to give with others a common sense to the world, to maintain a consensus (Laing, 1967).

This sentiment expressed by Laing is cynical; in fact many of his observations would make redundant the Leninist argument that a nationalised mass will participate in a revolution.

Despite these pessimisms Laing’s arguments can speak to a generation of socialists who have been angered at the incapacity of the working classes to react to the inhumanity of their oppressors and who feel frustrated by the limitations of social change in their own lifetimes. This does not mean that socialism is impossible, but it should imply that socialist ideas need to be updated and socialist strategies rethought.

In conclusion, let us return to the politics of the Anti-Psychiatry movements. In the 1960s Laing believed that a revolution was taking place both inside and outside psychiatry. He argued that the clinical point of view was giving way before a point of view that was both existential and social (Laing, 1967). The arguments of Laing and Foucault undoubtedly played a part in humanising psychiatry.

However social constructionist insights into mental illness have all too easily given way to an argument which is simplistic cultural determinism. It has become a common tend on the left to deny the role of biology in influencing the behaviour of individuals. From this perspective cultural determinism is as misguided as its intellectual polar opposite, biological determinism.

Cultural determinists, according to Rose, et al, ‘identify narrow (and exclusive) causal chains in society which are also reductionist…Humanity cannot be cut adrift from its own biology, but neither is it enchained by it’ (Rose, et al, 1984). In attempting to develop a social explanation for mental illness, Laing went too far in the opposite direction almost to the point of denying the existence of a disorder diagnosable as schizophrenia (Rose, et al, 1984).

In recent years psychiatry has undergone a qualitative transformation. In many ways psychiatry has become ‘humanised’ something which owes much to the Anti-Psychiatry movements of the 1960s. However the process of ‘humanising’ psychiatry has been a double edged sword. Psychiatry once specialised in the treatment of a minority of any given society who were medically defined as ‘mentally ill’. Today, psychiatric practice and ideas informed by psychiatry are spreading into all spheres of society. Contemporary psychiatric discourses acknowledge Laing’s argument that there is something inherently malfunctioning within the psyche of the modern individual. However, this has not resulted in a revolt against social institutions and practices as Laing (and Marx) would have hoped for. Instead modern man has found himself laid bare on the operating table whilst he is probed by a whole series of professionals and, in some cases, quacks. In today’s hyper driven world of social narcissism ordinary life is being turned into medical illnesses in order to expand markets for medication. The whole population is mentally ill.

One of the most commonly known statistics of the last twenty years is that one third of the population will experience a psychiatric disorder at some point in their lives. Mental illness has become big business. In the year 2005 US companies that sold drugs for anti-depression made more than twenty billion dollars (Moynihan and Cassels, 2005). This phenomenal market growth has in part been influenced by biologically reductionist arguments articulated by doctors and psychiatrists that the main cause of depression is a chemical imbalance in the brain best treated with drugs like Prozac. Everyday life is becoming medicalised. Biologically reductionist arguments are creating a ‘pill for every ill’ culture which negates the agency of individuals to actively change their lives. On the other hand, counselling has become the new confession. The complex interplay between social phenomena and human nature is being ignored. In this brave new world of biological reductionism, children who misbehave are told that they have chemical disorders which need to be treated with Ritalin: alcoholics have bad genes: heroin addicts are informed that they have addictive personalities. The individual is in danger of being cast adrift from society.

It is in this context that RD Laing serves as both a warning and an opportunity - a warning in the sense that existential arguments have proved fertile ground for a view of society that is pathological; an opportunity in the sense that there is the space to draw upon Laing’s ideas and to question contemporary discourses.