The Causes of Sanity1

The original title for this paper, when it was being prepared for delivery at the 2018 Association for Psychosocial Studies conference, was ‘Changing modalities of containment’. According to some good advice I was given, that was too obscure and abstract a phrase, so it was changed to ‘The causes of sanity’, a phrase which hopefully sounds a bit more interesting, though it may be enigmatic.2 In the following pages I hope to convey some meaning for both phrases, by approaching the question of sanity and its foundations through psychosocial reflections on the legacy of the 1960s. The focus of the conference was on how the psychocultural and psychopolitical changes indexed by the iconography of ‘1967’ and ‘1968’ (respectively, the hippy ‘Summer of Love’ and the revolutionary moment of ‘May 68‘) had contributed to shaping our world as it stood a half century later.

In 1967 I read two books by Ronald Laing, one of which was The Divided Self. Laing was a major figure in the British version of the intellectual ferment of the post-WW2 period, which climaxed in the 1960s as part of the so-called ‘counter-culture’. He had written The Divided Self in the late 1950s, while working as a young psychiatrist in Glasgow, after which he joined the Tavistock Clinic in London, an institution which has had a significant influence on the development of psychosocial studies in Britain. Laing was by no means the only clinician after Freud to have offered psychosocial insight into the nature of mental illness and its relation to culture and society, but he was one of the most passionate in his writing and ambitious in his intellectual scope, in his project of linking the phenomena of psychotic illness to the nature of modern society.

Reading The Divided Self led me to study psychology, which meant re-starting my undergraduate career and giving up on what seemed to me to be the pointlessness of philosophy and the narrowness of politics, at least as those subjects were taught i