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This book presents an erratic scheme to revolutionize society. In his introduction, the author says his book 'is not dedicated to R. D. Laing, to whom I owe more than any other man on earth, or under it'; and then he reports that during the writing he went 'through a profound spiritual and bodily crisis that amounted to the death—and—rebirth experience of renewal that I speak of in these pages'.
Cooper's work has moved some reviewers to compare him to revolutionaries such as Bakunin and Nietzsche. It seems to me, however, that the book, in spite of its Dionysiac aspects and its dithyrambic style (often deteriorating into confusion), invites comparison instead with the work of C. G. Jung, not in scope, to be sure, but in direction. Jung advised his patients to enter into a dialogue with the persons of their dreams, to talk to them and to listen to their answers. Cooper reports in his introduction that he taught his four-year-old niece Heidi 'the language of water and how to shake hands with the branch of an oak tree and then listen to the astonishingly different answers trees give'. Both Cooper and Jung attempted to cure schizophrenic disturbances by applying a method of regressively living through the infantile conflict. Jung, in an obvious psychotic episode, for years stopped almost all work, played with building blocks, and drew mandalas. Cooper encourages undisguised and unrestricted acting out of archaic infantile fantasies and wishes.
According to Cooper, every bourgeois family is 'an ideological conditioning device in any exploitative society—slave, feudal, capitalist society'. To facilitate exploitation, the family destroys the autonomy toward which the infant is striving in his first year, with the result that all the members of bourgeois society who are thought to be normal are actually mad.
How does the family destroy the child's autonomy? Cooper writes: 'One of the first lessons one is taught in the course of one's family conditioning is that one i