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In her novel Briefing for a Descent into Hell Doris Lessing continues the exploration of madness begun in The Golden Notebook and elaborated upon in The Four-Gated City. Lessing's sympathy with the school of thought represented by the British psychiatrist R. D. Laing becomes more explicit in her third novel on the subject. Both Lessing and Laing are concerned with the nature of madness and the nature of reality: which of the multiple realities we experience—including those catalyzed by drugs or trauma, and those experiences which occur only in the mind—are “true” reality? Or does “true” reality, like sanity, defy conventional definitions?
In addition to sharing these basic concerns, Lessing pursues an idea in this novel which Laing has also articulated:
We are socially conditioned to regard total immersion in outer space and time as normal and healthy. Immersion in inner space and time tends to be regarded as anti-social withdrawal, a deviancy, invalid, pathological per se, in some sense discreditable…. We are far more out of touch with even the nearest approaches of the infinite reaches of inner space than we now are with the reaches of outer space.2a
On the page following the tide page of Briefing for a Descent into Hell, Lessing presents these prefatory remarks: “Category: Inner-space fiction—For there is never anywhere to go but in.”3a The plot follows this cue, tracing the inner space journey of one Charles Watkins, a Cambridge professor of classics who, for most of the novel, is suffering from amnesia. While absent from his former self, he discovers—and loses—the truth of his real self. Briefing is an intricately imagined