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THE PURPOSE of this paper is to demonstrate a method by which the comprehensibility of "schizophrenia, " the secret order within "thought disorder, " and the personal value of "madness" to the madman, may be uncovered. This approach, which is phenomenological, is illustrated in terms of the social-structural map formed by collective arrangements for social control—for example, family, church, work, (including the person's fantasy as well as his real perceptions of them).
Because of lack of data from other members of the family, I will focus on one person's statement of his experience (rather than on the family network itself); and on the implicit point and intelligibility of this experience. The search for intelligibility is in line with work in communication theory on the double bind, and the search for point as well as intelligibility with that of Laing and Esterson. 3 I am not concerned, in this paper, with the kind of therapy practised in Villa 21, the ward of the mental hospital in which the subject, Francis Kennedy, 2 lived: This is one of the themes of a book by Cooper. 1 It is questionable whether "therapy" came into the picture at all, this ward being the locus for an attempt to de-structure the usual dichotomy between patients and staff, to abolish what was thought to be a pseudo-medical ideology (of doctor-or-nurse-knows-best type, and the like) and to allow the "patients" to do as much what they liked—without drugs to stop them—as was possible within the overall context of the hospital.