We do not need theories so much as the experience that is the source of the theory (Laing 1990: 15).
This was the starting point for the paper I wrote in 2009 as part of my training at The Site for Contemporary Psychoanalysis. I had recently encountered Laing for the first time and had been captivated by his writing, which resonated powerfully with what I was experiencing in clinical placements, both within NHS psychiatric services and at Islington Mind.
I set out to enquire whether, from his powerful and persuasive political commentary, a theoretical thread might be teased out. I was struck by the contradiction inherent in this opening quote from Laing: yes, of course, theory begins with experience – it was Freud's experience in the consulting room which drove his theoretical enquiries. But surely, to set about the task of writing about experience, of describing it, as Laing does so powerfully, is to set about the work of theory. Writing, it seems to me, is theorising. And this led me to challenge Laing's claim to be offering a phenomenological description of experience, which can somehow be free of theory.
During the course of this enquiry, I explored Laing's relationship with, and critique of, mainstream psychoanalytic theory and, in particular, his engagement with the concept of the unconscious and unconscious processes. In drawing my conclusions, I asserted that there is ‘too much which divides Laing from his hero, Freud, for Laing's approach to be meaningfully described as psychoanalytic. Laing offers instead a phenomenological approach.’ This statement became a focal point for the assessment of my paper by its Training Committee readers, and a point of divergence for them. They insisted that the statement required further investigation and, indeed, justification.
Now, 5 years on, as a graduate of The Site, and working in private practice, I find myself curious again about that point which so provoked
my readers. I am also interested in its wider implications. Was Laing a psychoanalyst? What does it mean to be a psychoanalyst? And what position does a psychoanalyst take up in relation to the unconscious? These questions lead inevitably to a deeper enquiry into what is meant by the unconscious and whether psychoanalysis is a religion, with a central belief system held to by its ‘true followers’. Why does this concept become such a point of division? And is there anything more fundamental than a simple political turf war behind the ongoing struggle over the right to the title of psychoanalyst.
These questions may provide fertile ground for a subsequent paper, but I have chosen to leave the paper in its original form with the hope that there might be a fruitful return to these questions in the future.
RD Laing is easily dismissed. ‘Oh, he was a terrible alcoholic’ people say, ‘that shrink who took LSD with his patients’; ‘a miserable old git,’ an NHS supervisor of mine commented, abruptly putting an end to any further discussion. Yet his legacy remains, The Divided Self has been continuously in print for 50 years and his name still has the ability to provoke, aggravate and inspire in equal measure.
But does he have anything to contribute to a clinical and theoretical approach for psychoanalysts and psychiatrists today?
In this paper, I wish not only to demonstrate how Laing's thinking offers a political and ethical foundation in which to ground psychoanalysis, but also to explore whether there is any ‘theory’ here which can guide the work itself. I will focus particularly on the areas of his writing which have struck me as most pertinent to individual psychotherapy. It is clear that Laing was keen to take on the psychoanalytic mainstream almost as much as he was taking on the psychiatric establishment. Theory is posited, challenged and unpacked. But the question I wish to discuss is what Laing is proposing in its place; whether he offers us an alternative theoretical approach, no theory or some kind of ‘anti-theory’, and whether indeed these are tenable positions to hold.
To be clear, ‘theory’ in the psychoanalytic context usually denotes metapsychology. This includes models of the mind as well as psychoanalytic psychopathology. However, I am also using ‘theory’ in the wider sense, to refer to the principles which guide a certain method or approach. These might be metapsychological ideas, but there are also other guiding principles such as a philosophical understanding, a political conviction, or an ethical motivation.
Perhaps the most obvious set of theories to be scrutinized in Laing's work are those which guide the psychiatric establishment and, in particular, psychopathology. Laing's objections to established psychiatric theory and practice are clearly outlined in the introduction to the seminal work he wrote with Aaron Esterson, Sanity, Madness and the Family: ‘In our view it is an assumption, a theory, a hypothesis, but not a fact, that anyone suffers from a condition called ‘schizophrenia” (Laing & Esterson 1970: 11).
Laing and Esterson emphasise the fact that even psychiatrists do not agree on who is schizophrenic, and they go on to insist:
No one can deny us the right to disbelieve in the fact of schizophrenia (…). We do not accept ‘schizophrenia’ as being a biochemical, neurophysiological, psychological fact, and we regard it as a palpable error, in the present state of the evidence, to take it to be a fact. Nor do we assume its existence. Nor do we adopt it as a hypothesis. We propose no model of it (Laing & Esterson 1970: 11 [my italics]).
Indeed, in none of his work does Laing propose a model of schizophrenia, nor does he propose a model of the mind, of the psyche or of any coherent metapsychological framework. In Sanity, Madness and the Family, what Laing and Esterson propose instead is that, when studied within the family context, in a certain (phenomenological) way, the behaviour and
experience of the so-called schizophrenic becomes far more ‘socially intelligible’ than previously supposed.
In The Divided Self, Laing emphasises that, not only is the psychopathological diagnosis of schizophrenia flawed, but that the premises of psychopathology are themselves fatally flawed: ‘no psychopathological theory is entirely able to surmount the distortion of the person imposed by its own premises even though it may seek to deny these very premises.’ (Laing 1964: 23-24)
These questionable ‘premises’ relate to an approach which engages with the patient on the level of organism, a set of processes, a mechanism which has gone wrong. As demonstrated poignantly by the analogy (Laing 1964: 20) of the image which can either be seen as a vase or as two faces, but cannot be viewed as both simultaneously, it is a ‘distortion of the person’ to view the patient as ‘a complex of things, of its’ (Laing 1964: 22): ‘One's theory of other as organism is remote from any theory of the other as person.’ (Laing 1964: 21).
Laing's objections to psychiatry penetrate further still. He objects on a socio-political level also to the treatment of ‘madness’ in society:
…psychiatry has been particularly concerned with individual experiences and behaviour regarded in our society as ‘abnormal’. (…) [the schizophrenic] is someone who has queer experiences and / or is acting in a queer way, from the point of view usually of his relatives and of ourselves (Laing & Esterson 1970: 16/18).
In other words, society decides what is normal and pathologises those who do not fit the mould. But in The Politics of Experience Laing describes the fundamental alienation, the ‘madness’ which underscores all of our experience:
The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one's mind, is the condition of the normal man. (…) What we call ‘normal’ is a product of repression, denial, splitting, projection, introjection (…) We are bemused and crazed
Page 69creatures, strangers to our true selves, to one another, and to the spiritual and material world – mad, even, from an ideal standpoint we can glimpse but not adopt (Laing 1990: 23-24/12).
In his own way, Laing is describing here the same ‘divided’ subject to be found in Freud and Lacan – indeed he does so using psychoanalytic terminology - but with an added socio-political, one might say Foucauldian dimension. This is the universal, eternal condition of man as cut off from his own mind, from his unconscious desires – in Freud's terms (Freud 2005 [1915]: 142) - and alienated by language – in Lacan's:
Man is, prior to his birth and beyond his death, caught up in the symbolic chain, a chain that founded his lineage before his history was embroidered upon it. (…) [man is] like a pawn, in the play of the signifier, and this is so even before its rules are transmitted to him (…) No prehistory allows us to efface the cut brought about by the heteronomy of the symbolic. On the contrary, everything it gives us merely deepens the cut (Lacan 2006 [1956]: 391-392).
Lacan is emphasising in stark terms, similar to those used by Laing, that man is subject to language, which he refers to as an ‘alienating intrusion’ whose significations ‘enslave the subject’. Man is castrated by the symbolic: ‘the cut’.
In Laing, the human subject becomes further desiccated by a violence perpetrated via messages passed on by one generation to the next:
the baby is subjected to these forces of violence, called love (…) These forces are mainly concerned with destroying most of its potentialities. (…) As [the child] is taught to move in specific ways, out of the whole range of possible movements, so he is taught to experience, out of the whole range of possible experiences (Laing 1990: 50-51).
In other words, we are alienated from our true potential. This idea is highly reminiscent of Freud's own description of the ‘moral education’ of children:
As a rule parents and authorities analogous to them follow the precepts of their own super-egos in educating children (…) Thus a child's super-ego is in fact constructed on the model not of its parents but of its parents' super-ego; the contents which fill it are the same and it becomes the vehicle of tradition and of all the time-resisting judgements of value which have propagated themselves in this manner from generation to generation (Freud 2005 [1933]: 493).
However, there arises a divergence from Freud's version of another aspect of emerging subjectivity. Laing says:
Our first way of experiencing the world is largely what psychoanalysts have called phantasy. This modality has its own validity, its own rationality. Infantile phantasy may become a closed enclave, a dissociated undeveloped ‘unconscious’, but this need not be so. This eventuality is another form of alienation (…) We do not then see phantasy in its true function but experienced merely as an intrusive, sabotaging infantile nuisance (Laing 1990: 26-27 my italics).
Laing seems to be suggesting that phantasy could be a consciously elected modality of experience, in which case repression is unnecessary: ‘this need not be so’. Phantasy could be accessed, not dissociated, and somehow used in relating to others. When describing an ‘ordinary’ interaction between two men (Laing 1990: 27) Laing uses the word ‘phantasy’ to describe, for example, one man's projections and assumptions about the other based on the other's behaviour. His implication is that these projections could be made conscious at the time of the conversation. Does this mean the unconscious could be exhausted or emptied somehow? That everything
could become conscious?
Freud's topographical model, in the simplest terms, demonstrates that the ego is concerned with maintaining equilibrium, with keeping the peace between its two masters, the super-ego and the id. The ego wishes to minimise the disturbance of unpleasure, brought about by a libidinal instinct which is, for whatever reason, forbidden:
The satisfaction of an instinct which is under repression would be quite possible, and further, that in every instance such a satisfaction would be pleasurable in itself; but it would be irreconcilable with other claims and intentions. It would, therefore, cause pleasure in one place and unpleasure in another…. the essence of repression lies simply in turning something away, and keeping it at a distance, from the conscious (Freud 2005 [1915]: 524 italics in the original).
If the satisfaction of an instinct is ‘irreconcilable with other claims and intentions’ – such as the reality principle, or an injunction by the superego – the instinct will be repressed. This means that it will not be known to the subject: ‘we call a psychical process unconscious whose existence we are obliged to assume (…) but of which we know nothing.’ (Freud 2005 [1933]: 496).
If an instinct, or indeed an idea or phantasy, is not known to us, it cannot be accessed by a pure act of will. On the other hand, Freud emphasised that not everything that is unconscious is under repression: ‘Everything that is repressed must remain unconscious; but let us state at the very outset that the repressed does not cover everything that is unconscious.’ (Freud 2005 [1915]: 142).
Perhaps, therefore, Laing is suggesting that what could be accessed in ‘phantasy’ is latent or pre-conscious material, rather than repressed material. He seems to advocate generally for a loosening of inhibitions (for example through the use of mind-altering drugs), in order for a wider range of experiences to be possible, a wider range of latent thoughts and ideas—phantasies—to become conscious.
However, this does not alter Laing's seemingly idealised view
which avoids acknowledging those drives which are subject to repression, such as aggression or incestuous desire; and which seeks to gloss over the unconscious which will always be unknown to us.
Freud asserts that the unconscious is by definition that which is ‘other’ to us: ‘ein anderer Schauplatz’, ‘another scene’. This is not to say that unconscious desires cannot be accessed or made conscious, this was, of course, the purpose of Freud's psychoanalytic technique; but there is always going to be that which eludes our knowledge, a gap, an excess or a lack. As Lacan describes it, ‘the unconscious is the Other's discourse.’ (Lacan 2006 [1955]: 459).
Laing goes on to argue that theory itself – both psychiatric and psychoanalytic – enhances alienation, it embodies the very divisions we are subject to by reifying them in the language it uses:
we cannot give an adequate account of the existential splits unless we can begin from the concept of the unitary whole, and no such concept exists, nor can any such concept be expressed within the current language system of psychiatry or psycho-analysis (Laing 1964: 19).
He argues that, by using words such as mind and body, psyche and soma, psychological and physical, we are referring to man in isolation from the other and the world, and we are trapped in a conceptual cul-de-sac, ‘condemned to start our study of schizoid and schizophrenic people with a verbal and conceptual splitting that matches the split up of the totality of the schizoid being-in-the-world.’ (Laing 1964: 20) In The Politics of Experience, Laing quotes Heidegger: ‘the Dreadful has already happened’; the division of inner from outer has radically cut us off from ourselves: ‘Man cut off from his own mind, cut off equally from his own body’ (Laing 1990: 47) He emphasises that psychotherapists – theorists - are also, of course, implicated: ‘The therapists, too, are in a world in which
the inner is already split from the outer.’ (Laing 1990: 46)
In other words, since Freud's endeavour was to transpose metaphysics into metapsychology, and since western metaphysics has, since Descartes, been entrenched in a logocentrism which conceptually divides everything into hierarchical dichotomies—mind//body, inner//outer, presence//absence—with no way of representing a totality; so psychoanalytic theory, as well as those who practise it, are bound to recreate the splits which have themselves caused the problem of being which Laing is describing. He attempts to disrupt these conceptual divisions:
This distinction between outer and inner usually refers to the distinction between behaviour and experience; but sometimes it refers to some experiences that are supposed to be ‘inner’ in contrast to others that are ‘outer’. More accurately this is a distinction between different modalities of experience, namely perception (as outer) in contrast to imagination etc. (as inner). But perception, imagination, phantasy, reverie, dreams, memory, are simply different modalities of experience, none more ‘inner’ or ‘outer’ than any others (Laing 1990: 18).
Only existential thought, Laing argues, has attempted to bring together as a totality, the ‘original experience of oneself in relationship to others in one's world’. This crucial concept is ‘existence’, ‘being-in-the-world’. Thus whilst Laing accepts that ‘alienation’ is our natural state, the therapeutic project he proposes has the potential to awaken and reintegrate the subject, to put the pieces back together again:
Ultimately it is possible to regain the ground that has been lost. These defence mechanisms are actions taken by the person on his own experience. On top of this he has dissociated himself from his own action. The end-product of this twofold violence is a person who no longer experiences himself fully as a person, but as a part of a person (…) The psychotherapeutic relationship is therefore
Page 74a re-search. A search, constantly reasserted and reconstituted for what we have all lost (Laing 1990: 30/47).
By a process of gradual ‘de-alienation’, a sort of enlightenment, of insight, facilitated by the therapist, the subject reclaims responsibility for ‘actions on himself’, becomes agent of his own destiny and can become ‘whole’ again.
These ideas are fundamentally opposed, firstly, to the Lacanian concept of lack which emphasises the fact that we have never been and can never be whole. The mirror phase acts as a moment of alienation, in which the subject ‘misrecognises’ his/her own wholeness. The infant ‘still trapped in his motor impotence and nursling dependence’ (Lacan 2006 [1949]: 76) is transfixed by his reflection in the mirror which suggests a greater level of integration than is actually the case. He is captured by the imaginary ‘ideal-I’ and this misrecognition fixes him for all time in an illusory or, as Lacan terms it, ‘fictional’ search for wholeness (Lacan 2006 [1949]: 76).
According to Lacan, not only are we destined to endlessly seek an illusory wholeness which will always elude us, we are also subject to the lack inherent in desire and to the ‘cut’ of the symbolic. Finally, with reference to Freud, we are always divided by the otherness of the unconscious, which definitively rules out the possibility of wholeness.
Indeed Laing's position here seems closer to Carl Rogers' person-centred approach than to a psychoanalytic view. Rogers, whose ideas are explained here by Brian Thorne, emphasises the ideal integration of man:
The person-centred therapist is constantly working with clients who have all but lost touch with the actualizing tendency within themselves and who have been surrounded by others who have no confidence in the innate capacity of human beings to move towards the fulfilment of their potential (Thorne 2002: 137).
Whilst this is not the vocabulary Laing uses, there are certainly familiar
concepts at work here, including fulfilment of potential and a self-actualizing tendency in man.
Freud, on the other hand, insists on conflict being at the centre of our experience, conflict that will, in fact, never be fully resolved. Laplanche's notion of therapy is that of a constant de-translation and re-translation of our own narratives, a process which never ceases and which cannot exhaust that which is enigmatic, that which eludes us, the confusion at the heart of experience; this translation always leaves a residue of unmetabolizable elements which form the unconscious.
To recap then, I believe three related aspects of Laingian theory have emerged. Firstly, there is the fundamental acknowledgement that man is radically alienated and divided in an alienating society. This is a grounding principle in which one might situate the aim of psychoanalysis. Unfortunately, Laing claims, traditional psychiatric and psychoanalytic approaches have exacerbated this alienation by pathologising the comprehensible state of madness; by embodying the alienating splits of inner//outer, mind//body and by treating the person as object. The solution Laing's approach proposes is a therapeutic relationship which is a true meeting between persons, with the aim of re-integration and de-alienation.
This certainly does seem to be a more optimistic proposal than Freud's aim of ‘turning neurosis into ordinary unhappiness’. Laing's vision of a fully integrated man – even as a possibility - is at odds with the insolubility of the Freudian intra-psychic conflicts, as it is with Laplanche's ceaseless de-translation and re-translation.
Indeed this is not the only way in which Laing's theory diverges from the Freudian model. Laing's central challenge to mainstream psychoanalysis is twofold. Firstly, he criticises Freud's one-person psychology as failing to adequately represent the relationship between self and other:
Instead of the original bond of I and You, we take a single man in
Page 76isolation and conceptualize his various aspects into ‘the ego’, ‘the superego’, and ‘the id’. How can we speak in any way adequately of the relationship between me and you in terms of the interaction of one mental apparatus and another? (Laing 1964: 19).
In the second chapter of The Politics of Experience, Laing unpacks these arguments further. He dedicates a whole chapter to a survey of ‘The Psychotherapeutic Experience’, spelling out in a footnote that this is ‘From the point of view of the psychotherapist’ (Laing 1990: 39). In other words, he is examining the differing theoretical approaches of psychotherapists. Laing begins by boiling down the essence of psychotherapy, common to all methods: ‘a therapist, a patient, and a regular and reliable time and place.’ (Laing 1990: 39) Given the simplicity of these elements, however, ‘it is not so easy for two people to meet’. (Laing 1990: 39) In a sense, this is where the Laingian project begins—a ‘true meeting’ with the other—because, as he argues in this chapter, all previous approaches have failed.
Laing begins by advocating a balance of concern between interpersonal interaction, behaviour and experience. He does not explain this methodology in detail, but does admit to the elusiveness of the therapeutic cure: ‘the really decisive moments in psychotherapy (…) are unpredictable, unique, unforgettable, always unrepeatable, and often indescribable.’ (Laing 1990: 47).
In other words, these ‘decisive moments’ are beyond language. This statement has important implications regarding the role of theory in a ‘talking cure’. Laing is suggesting that there is something mysterious and elusive which goes on between people which cannot be theorised. Perhaps this is what is implied in Laing's exhortation that we not use theory as ‘an instrument of defence’ (Laing 1964: 25): theory as an attempt to manage or even master the anxiety evoked by uncertainty or not knowing. He is also implying that, in contrast to the Lacanian approach, therapeutic efficacity is not only located in the medium of speech; psychotherapy also involves something which is beyond language, which is ‘indescribable’.
The second failing he highlights in this chapter is along the lines of the vase/faces phenomenon: the person is objectified and depersonalised
by the theory. This problem originated with Freud who, Laing suggests, was confined by the intellectual climate of his times which required that he present man as the ‘object of natural scientific investigation’. In other words, his approach was destined to become an objectifying, depersonalising endeavour.
The object-relations theoretical developments, whilst attempting to achieve ‘a synthesis between the intra and inter personal’ (Laing 1990: 44) are also dismissed because ‘it is still objects not persons that are in question’ (Laing 1990: 44) and because ‘projection and introjection do not in themselves bridge the gap between persons.’ (Laing 1990: 42)
Laing makes quick work of ruling out all transactional, systemic and games-based theories, judging them to negate that which is specifically human: ‘A personal relationship is not only transactional, it is transexperiential and herein is its specific human quality.’ (Laing 1990: 44) Behaviour therapy is given the most damning treatment of all. It is described as ‘the most extreme example of such schizoid theory and practice that proposes to think and act purely in terms of the other, without reference to the self of the therapist or the patient, in terms of behaviour without experience, in terms of objects rather than persons. It is inevitably therefore a technique of non-meeting, of manipulation and control.’ (Laing 1990: 44-45)
However, although in this chapter Laing has outlined the ‘going-astray’ of Freud's enterprise and those that followed Freud, he is often keen to underscore the enormous admiration he has for the courage with which Freud laid the terrain. And it is equally clear that he sees himself as continuing along Freud's path:
Freud was a hero. He descended to the ‘Underworld’ and met there stark terrors. (…) we who follow Freud have the benefit of the knowledge he brought back with him and conveyed to us. He survived. We must see if we now can survive without using a theory that is in some measure an instrument of defence (Laing 1964: 25).
Laing's second major challenge to mainstream psychoanalytic thought relates to the concept of ‘unconscious experience’.
Throughout his work, Laing seems to be engaged in a struggle to resolve his own understanding of the unconscious. In the introduction to Sanity, Madness and the Family, Laing and Esterson warn the reader that they will not be analysing the unconscious motivations which are, they do not doubt, at play within the individual members of the families they are studying:
Our findings are presented with very few interpretations, whether existential or psychoanalytic. (…) The psychoanalyst frequently makes attributions about the analysand's motives, experiences, actions, intentions, that the analysand himself disavows or is unaware of. The reader will see that we have been very sparing about making attributions of this kind in respect to the members of these families (Laing & Esterson 1970: 25).
There seems to be a subtle disparagement of these psychoanalytic ‘attributions’ and yet, on numerous occasions, the authors seemingly cannot resist such an analysis. For example, in the footnote on page 42:
Clearly, here and in every other family, the material we present is full of evidence of the struggle of each of the family members against their own sexuality.
Again, on page 55, another footnote states:
We remind the reader once more that we are fully alive to the inferences to which these facts point, namely Mr. Blair's struggles with his unconscious incestuous feelings towards Lucie, her mother's jealousy of Lucie and her husband, and Lucie's own
Page 79sexual attachment to her father.
And yet again on page 80:
A psychoanalytic construction would be that Mrs Church saw Claire through a film of projective identifications.
These footnotes, almost like the unconscious itself, are a sort of ‘noises off’, a subtext which does not dare speak out loud. They denote a slippage: psychoanalysis, theory, cannot be entirely bracketed out, it leaks onto the page which was intended to be free of theory: ‘We are limiting ourselves very largely to the transactional phenomenology of these family situations.’ (Laing & Esterson 1970: 42) In this way, Laing and Esterson are setting up a contrast or contradiction between a psychoanalytic and a phenomenological approach, and this assertion seems to be crucial to the ‘Sanity, Madness’ project itself. The phenomenological approach is described as follows:
Each person not only is an object in the world of others but is a position in space and time from which he experiences, constitutes and acts in his world. He is his own centre with his own point of view, and it is precisely each person's perspective on the situation that he shares with others that we wish to discover (Laing & Esterson 1970: 19).
‘Each person’ it is claimed, ‘is his own centre with his own point of view.’ Yet surely it is the unconscious, speaking from the sidelines, disrupting this seemingly one-dimensional description of ‘each person's perspective’, which knocks the subject off his/her centre.
As Lacan commented: ‘Freud's discovery was to demonstrate that this verifying process authentically reaches the subject only by decentring him from self-consciousness’ (Lacan 2006 [1953]: 241).
Similarly, in ‘The Unfinished Copernican Revolution’ (Laplanche 1999), Laplanche argues that Freud oscillated between a Ptolemaic
position, in which the subject is at the centre, and the other-centred Copernican position: ‘The Copernican revolution (…) suggests that man, even as subject of knowledge, is not the central reference point of what he knows.’ (Laplanche 1999: 56).
Laplanche designates the unconscious as ‘an internal other but not at the centre’ (Laplanche 1999: 60) and he makes reference to Freud's adoption of the id ‘as an agency which lives us more than we live it.’ Lacan expounds on this idea also:
…this Elsewhere (…) present for all of us and closed to each of us, in which Freud discovered that, without thinking about it, and thus without anyone being able to think he thinks about it better than anyone else, it thinks. (…) It is in these very terms that Freud announces the unconscious to us (…) (the unconscious is the Other's discourse) (Lacan 2006 [1955] 458-9).
This psychoanalytic account is in direct contradiction to Laing/Esterson's in Sanity, Madness and the Family in which each person ‘is his own centre’. Furthermore, even if the footnotes described above do imply a decentring, it is a one-sided decentring. It is acknowledged, if only in passing, that unconscious motivations are shaping, colouring, even distorting the interactions between the family members, but what of the unconscious of the interviewer? And what of the interactions between the interviewer and the family members? The very designation ‘interviewer’ seems to be an insistence on the neutrality of this absent presence. There is no mention of transference on the part of the family members towards this person, nor of the interviewer's counter-transference as a possible distortion of the discussions which are, it is carefully underlined, recorded – as if to emphasise their objectivity. The interviewer is not implicated in the scene. Nor does Laing, in his individual case studies, tend to reflect on the impact his presence may have on the unfolding narrative of the patient.
What is being evoked here is a tension between Laing's notion of a phenomenological approach and that of psychoanalysis, between a
supposedly phenomenological description of an individual's experience and the ‘inferences’ involved in a psychoanalytic interpretation of unconscious phantasy. I think this tension goes to the core of Laing's struggle with psychoanalysis.
In Self and Others, Laing engages with this question directly by unpacking the concept, as presented by Susan Isaacs, of unconscious phantasy. His initial challenge is on the basis that Isaacs is confusing the category definition of ‘phantasy’. He asks ‘what is the experiential status of ‘unconscious phantasy’ as Isaacs uses the term?’ (Laing 1971: 21) The answer which comes back seems to be a contradictory one: ‘Phantasy appears now to be the cause of itself, as an effect, and the effect of itself, as a cause.’ (Laing 1971: 23) Laing concludes that this conceptual confusion is a result of a critical entanglement which is at the heart of Isaacs' psychoanalytic theory:
One source of the confusion is the particular dichotomous schema in which the whole theory is cast. This particular schema entails the distinction between ‘the inner world of the mind’, on the one hand, and ‘the external world of the subject's bodily development and behaviour …’ on the other (Laing 1971: 23).
In other words, we are back in Heidegger's territory of ‘the Dreadful has already happened’. Inner is split from outer, mind from body. This theoretical schism leads inevitably to further complications in trying to explain psychoanalytic mechanisms:
Terms like conversion, a shift from mind to body; projection, a shift from inner to outer; introjection, a shift from outer to inner, are caught and entangled by this theoretical split (Laing 1971: 24).
Psychoanalysis runs aground, Laing argues, on its failure to explain unconscious communication, to properly represent the relationship between ‘self’ and ‘other’:
The idea that ‘the mind’, ‘the unconscious’, or ‘phantasy’ is located inside a person and, in that sense, is inaccessible to the other, has far-reaching effects on the whole of psychoanalytic theory and method (Laing 1971: 24).
The implication is that only a phenomenological, ontological enquiry into our ‘being in the world’ can address this problem of human subjectivity and inter-subjectivity. Freud did not begin with such an enquiry.
I agree that the reification of notions of inner and outer worlds, with its accompanying assumption of a single and objective ‘external reality’, constricts much of traditional psychoanalytic theory, resulting in an inability to adequately conceptualise the interactions between people. The imagery in object-relations theory of two containers and an exchange of psychic phenomena between the two is both impoverished and alienating. The phenomenological insistence on our experience as embodied beings, living through our bodies, is useful in beginning to conceptualise an ‘in betweenness’, especially in the consulting room, as is Laing's description of a ‘field of inter-experience’ (Laing 1990: 15).
However, I am less convinced that Laing adequately locates the concept of ‘phantasy’ as he continues to use it. As we have already seen, there is a lack of clarity regarding whether phantasy is considered to be unconscious, conscious or pre-conscious.
The second, interrelated, aspect of Laing's challenge to Isaacs hangs on the notion that experience can be unconscious: ‘A person's experience comprises anything that ‘he’ or ‘any part of him’ is aware of, whether ‘he’ or every part of him is aware of every level of his awareness or not.’ On this basis, experience cannot, by definition, be unconscious. Laing objects to the suggestion that, whereas an aspect of my experience may be unknown to me, the psychoanalyst can infer from my behaviour something of this unconscious experience: ‘Things are going to be difficult if you tell me
that I am experiencing something which I am not experiencing. If that is what I think you mean by unconscious experience.’
This statement is, in fact, reminiscent of Lacan's own insistence, quoted earlier, on the unknowability of the unconscious: 'this Elsewhere (…) in which Freud discovered that, without thinking about it, and thus without anyone being able to think he thinks about it better than anyone else, it thinks. (Lacan 2006 [1955]: 458-9, my italics).
And these ‘inferences’, he points out, act as an ‘imaginary’ foundation, upon which the ‘imaginary’ psychoanalytic mechanisms such as life and death instincts, internal objects and so on are piled on top: ‘the whole of psychoanalytic theory rests upon the validity of such inferences; if they are wrong, everything built upon them loses its raison d'être.’ (Laing 1971: 30).
However, Laing is reluctant to rule out the relevance of an unconscious dimension to our experience. He proposes a model of experience (Laing 1971: 30) in which three modalities are in play at the same time: imagining, perceiving and remembering, with the diagram (Laing 1971: 31) demonstrating how ‘Peter's’ experience is divided:
I would be prepared to say, speaking in a rough and ready way, that Peter is split. He is unconscious of his imagination at that moment. The part of Peter in communication with Paul is unconscious of what is going on in his imagination (Laing 1971: 31).
And he suggests that the other may have an insight into this: ‘The ‘unconscious’ is what we do not communicate, to ourselves or to one another. We may convey something to another, without communicating it to ourselves. Something about Peter is evident to Paul that is not evident to Peter. This is one sense of the phrase, ‘Peter is unconscious of…” (Laing 1971: 32).
There seems to be a confusion here between ‘conveying’ and ‘communicating’ as well as regarding whether something unconscious is conveyed/communicated to the other or not. However, Laing does acknowledge a domain which is unavailable to, or disguised from the
subject—although he does not specify whether or not this material is under repression—but which may be revealed to the other, let slip in the Freudian sense, through the subject's behaviour.
Furthermore, for Laing, phantasy is one of a number of possible modalities of experience, it is ‘a particular way of relating to the world’. In Self and Others he goes on to describe the way that all ‘sane’ people live in a perpetual state of phantasy: ‘We are aware of the content of experience, but are unaware that it is illusion.’ In order to function in a family ‘nexus’, for example, one must remain suspended in its shared phantasy. In this sense, we are all living in an unconscious way:
The usual state of affairs is to be in a tenable position in phantasy systems of a nexus… We never realize we are in it. We never even dream of extricating ourselves. We tolerate, punish, or treat as harmless, bad, or mad those who try to extricate themselves, and tell us that we should also (Laing 1971: 41).
One way of understanding psychosis is as an emergence from this state of illusion: ‘A person in an alienated false position within a social phantasy system, who begins partially to apperceive his position, may give ‘psychotic’ expression to his partial apperception of the actual phantasy state of affairs' (Laing 1971: 39). Thus having gone some way towards the unconscious in the previous chapter, Laing seems to again retrench in a notion of phantasy as an ‘elected’ modality of experience, which cancels out the unconscious as an uncontrollable, dynamic force.
In my view, Laing is attempting to fudge the question which disturbs him of ‘unconscious experience’. However, this does not resolve his fundamental difficulty with the unconscious as Other, nor does it address the status of repression which rules out the fully conscious subject which Laing seems to be evoking.
In the chapter on ‘Phantasy and Communication’ (Laing 1971: 33),
Laing attempts to capture what it is to be an ‘origin of experience’, a ‘self-being’, what it is to experience as a human subject. In particular, how self experiences other. There are clear implications here for the practice of psychiatry and psychotherapy:
It is difficult to understand the self-being of the other. … By what token do changes in the way man experiences his self-being, his being-for-himself, determine his own definition of himself as ‘ill’, ‘physically’ or ‘psychologically’, and what leads one person to decide that the self-being, the being-for-himself of the other, is sick? (Laing 1971: 35-6).
He is destabilising or bracketing off established and accepted concepts of health and illness. He goes on to say: ‘in so far as we experience the world differently, in a sense we live in different worlds.’ Thus we begin to build a picture of the phenomenology Laing is proposing instead of what he views as the schizoid psychoanalytic theory which is based on a shaky method of inference explained by imaginary processes. But what exactly does Laing mean by ‘phenomenology’?
In a paper entitled ‘The Use of Existential Phenomenology in Psychotherapy’, written in 1986, Laing begins with a simple definition: ‘by phenomenology I mean the science of description.’ He underlines the anti-theoretical nature of phenomenology, as a mode of deconstructing: ‘I am not trying to induce you to adopt a ‘theoretical model’. Rather, I am trying to depict a way of seeing, a way of contemplating what is going on, whether praxis or process, a destructing of destructive constructions.’ He goes on to give examples of how defining ‘what is going on’ for a patient in terms of process has entirely different consequences to defining what is going on in terms of praxis. Thus ‘existential phenomenology’ is an application of this method to an understanding of existence, of being-in-the-world: ‘existential phenomenology attempts to characterize the nature of a person's experience with his world and himself.’ (Laing 1964: 17).
In Laing's phenomenology there is a ‘bracketing off’ of the
inessential; of theory, of metapsychology, of any pre-conceived models of the mind. It is a suspension of assumptions about, for example, what it is to be mad or to be ill. Assumptions built upon theory are exchanged for experiential enquiry.
This technique is exemplified by Laing in his attempt to understand psychosis in The Divided Self. Laing's central argument is as follows: ‘There is a comprehensible transition from a sane schizoid way of being-in-the-world to a psychotic way of being-in-the-world.’ (Laing 1964: 17) Laing guides the reader through the description of the experience of such states as ‘ontological insecurity’ and ‘self-consciousness’, going on to describe the ‘false self system’ which is created and the ‘double-bind’ scenarios people are subject to. This is not a ‘model of schizophrenia’, but a phenomenological account of the schizophrenic experience. But is it a theory? Is it possible to assert that this ‘description’ is entirely free of inference and supposition? In fact, Laing does not deny that there is ‘interpretation’ or ‘deciphering’ at work: ‘The existential-phenomenological construction is an inference about the way the other is feeling and acting.’ (Laing 1964: 31) Here is an appropriation of that very concept, denigrated elsewhere by Laing, of ‘inference’,
However, what is suggested is that the intentions, the ethics of the Laingian therapist are different to the psychoanalyst who, based on inferences from behaviour, attributes to the other aspects of his/her experience of which he/she is unaware – taking up the position of ‘the one who knows’. He says: ‘our view of the other depends on our willingness to enlist all the powers of every aspect of ourselves in the act of comprehension’ (Laing 1964: 32) This ‘enlisting’ implies a willingness in the therapist to draw on his/her depths of experience, to go to his/her darkest corners, to be alongside, to truly meet the other: ‘Psychotherapy must remain an obstinate attempt of two people to recover the wholeness of being human through the relationship between them.’ (Laing 1990: 45 [italics in the original]).
And as suggested in the statement ‘we must see if we now can survive without using a theory that is in some measure an instrument of defence’ (Laing 1964: 25), this must entail a willingness to meet the
other naked, without pre-suppositions, without theory as a cloak or shield, and with an attitude of not knowing. Psychotherapy is for Laing, quite simply, a being with the other: ‘this re-search is validated by the shared experience of experience regained in and through the therapeutic relationship in the here and now.’ (Laing 1990: 47).
Laing offers us a series of guiding principles, elements of a methodology and a critical engagement with classical psychoanalysis. Theory is itself a discredited concept for Laing, tarnished by its logocentric philosophical heritage and used all too often as a defensive, or even aggressive, instrument with which to separate practitioner from patient.
He does not attempt to construct a coherent model of the mind, nor a theory of subjectivity or psychopathology. There is an underlying tension throughout Laing's writing which simmers around the role of the unconscious. And although it could be argued that all psychoanalytic theorists—and indeed all psychoanalysts—will have a different understanding of the unconscious, there seems to me to be too much which divides Laing from his hero, Freud, for Laing's approach to be meaningfully described as psychoanalytic. Laing offers instead a phenomenological approach.
Furthermore, this is an ‘obstinate attempt’. ‘Obstinate’ implies rebellion, psychotherapy as political resistance. Laing's psychotherapy is a political endeavour which seeks to reintegrate the individual in defiance of social alienation: ‘the task of psychotherapy was to make (…) an appeal to the freedom of the patient.’ (Laing 1964: 61)
As a challenge to what he saw as Freud's one-person metapsychology, Laing insists that any theory must be situated within the social sphere:
we need concepts which both indicate the interaction and interexperience of two persons, and help us to understand the relation between each person's own experience and his own behaviour, within the context of the relationship between them.
Page 88And we must in turn be able to conceive of this relationship within the relevant contextual social systems (Laing 1990: 41).
As Laing and Esterson demonstrate, “schizophrenia' is a social event' (Laing & Esterson 1970: 17). ‘Social’ here implies both the relational dimension of ‘self and other’, as well as the wider societal context. Laing says psychotherapy is an instrument of change for the better not only for the individual but for wider society:
I, personally, am interested in practicing psychotherapy only insofar as I hope that in so doing I am making a contribution to other people, as well as to myself, becoming more fully human, more actual as persons, more real, more true, more loving, less afraid of what it is not necessary to fear, happier, more joyous, more effective, more responsible, more capable of manifesting in everyday ordinary life the desiderata of human existence, courage, faith, hope, loving-kindness in action in the world, and so forth (‘The Use of Existential Phenomenology in Psychotherapy’).
But perhaps what is most important is the ethical insistence Laing returns to again and again, that we are engaged with the person, on a human level:
The science of persons is the study of human beings that begins from a relationship with the other as person and proceeds to an account of the other still as person (…) The experience of oneself and others as persons is primary and self-validating(Laing 1964: 21/23).
In other words, this experience is the locus of therapeutic efficacity for Laing. Furthermore, like Levinas, Laing's insistence on the unknowability of the other's experience is a way of respecting the radical alterity of the other; it is an insistence on the dignity of the other. Although this does not mean we have to give up on the possibility of understanding something
of the other's experience.
Finally, there is a call to arms in Laing for psychoanalysts and psychiatrists to challenge the establishment: ‘No one can deny us the right to disbelieve in the fact of schizophrenia.’ It is our right – our responsibility even - to question that powerful monolith, the psychiatric establishment, the medical model and all of the assumptions which go along with it.
Laing's ideology, it seems to me, could not be more relevant today given that many psychiatrists are quicker to prescribe aggressive anti-psychotics than to listen to their patients and in a climate where Cognitive Behavioural Therapy is prevalent.
From my own experience, working within an NHS psychotherapy clinic and, in particular, during a placement in a psychiatric in-patient unit, I have found Laing's ideas invaluable in articulating a generalised sense of unease. Primarily, this relates to the lack of time and attention being given to the experience of patients as persons, rather than as faulty organisms to be treated with medication. This is epitomised by the fact that CBT can be delivered via computer – here we are firmly in the terrain of The Politics of Experience where transactional therapies negate that which is specifically human, and behaviour therapy is ‘a technique of non-meeting, of manipulation and control.’ There seems to have been little progress since Sanity, Madness and the Family was published in acknowledging the social intelligibility of madness and little credence is given to the idea that meaning could be found in floridly psychotic speech. When a patient of mine challenged her diagnosis of Borderline Personality Disorder, the psychiatrist told her that the very fact she was challenging it proved its validity.
Twenty-five years on from the death of RD Laing, is this not a maddening state of affairs?