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Kingsley Hall was a therapeutic community started by Ronald Laing and the Philadelphia Association. It closed in 1970 after treating over 120 people in a therapeutic setting described in its brochure as a melting pot, a crucible in which many assumptions about normal-abnormal, conformist-deviant, sane-crazy experience and behaviour were dissolved. No person gave another tranquillisers or sedatives. Behaviour was feasible which would have been intolerable elsewhere. It was a place where people could be together and let each other be.
The interview with Victoria Hamilton gives an eye-witness view of this experiment by a frequent visitor to Kingsley Hall who was both an outsider and yet the analysand of the dominant presence in this community - the anti-psychiatry idol of the 1960s, R. D. Laing. Her comments bring into question the freedom that is experienced when full vent to madness and violence are encouraged as well as the effect on a community of a leader whose behaviour and opinions are viewed as sacrosanct.
LR: Did you see Kingsley Hall as a place where yourself might have occasion to go at any point, to live?
VH: I did think of going there twice, and I think it was important to me really, because I always felt there was somewhere to go if things got too difficult or too unmanageable living away. I was … and if things couldn't be contained in my analysis, I think I felt I could go there. But one time I did think of going there was when I did feel very bad, but I think the things
that deterred me were, well, just that there were so many people there, or I just felt I'd get all mixed up in other people's sort of … what they were sort of putting out and that I might get even more lost. Then I felt already, and it seemed to me if I could manage to stick it on my own, that was probably the best, quickest, and clearest way out of all of my sort of personal confusion.
But I always was very ambivalent about Kingsley Hall really being helpful to me because the sort of trip