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I once lived next door to a Philadelphia Association House in Holland Park, not metaphorically, literally. My windows faced theirs, and from my kitchen I could hear the late-night weeping, the manic declarations, the shouts of someone announcing he was “The Messiah!” and in the quieter hours, laughter, deep silences, the shared labour of meaning-making through madness or just sheer exhaustion. It was the 1970s, and the house still carried the revolutionary spirit of Laing, Berke, and Kingsley Hall. The psychiatrist who oversaw this unique establishment was Hugh Crawford.
One night, a woman climbed from her window, dangerously traversed the roof, and entered our bedroom by opening a sash window. My girlfriend and I woke to find her standing there, mid-mania, apologising profusely in an American accent before vanishing down the stairs and out into the night. It was both comic and surreal, oddly emblematic of what I discovered the Philadelphia Association stood for: the radical erasure of barriers between inside and out, patient and person, madness and meaning.
For Laing and others of his school of thought, such as David Cooper, the great question was: what if madness were not a symptom of illness, but a form of communication? His idea was not merely therapeutic, it was existential: madness, for Laing, was meaning in extremis. In The Divided Self and The Politics of Experience, he laid bare the cruelty of the medical model, which treated human suffering as a defect rather than an enacted pre-symbolic drama seeking understanding.
The Philadelphia Association, founded in 1965, became a living experiment in these ideas. No hierarchy, no coercion, no white coats; madness was not to be eliminated but lived with. Yet alongside this vision came a risk. Without boundary, without frame, without the analytic third, the project often faltered, and these safe houses inevitably sometimes replicated the very confusio