As a Lacanian coming to Laing late, the title of his most renowned book had always held such allure: was the contemporaneous Divided Self working along similar lines to Lacan's concept of, and theory surrounding, the divided subject? Yes and no, of course; but also, so much more. With Lacan, despite his psychiatric beginnings; the devotion of a year's Seminar and a very important écrit to the subject; and his many returns to it, psychosis has always seemed like that into which one might, even should, take a leap, but also like the point at which any psychoanalytic handholding must come to an end to an extent (perhaps this is informed by Freud's therapeutic reticence with regard to psychosis). By the time you're immersed in the frenetic world of Deleuze and Guattari's schizoanalysis, it is as if the meeting ground to the twain of wholly dissimilar, though uncannily related practices, has all but receded from view. Laing's The Divided Self in many ways provides that bridge, and more besides.
Existentialism and phenomenology being key reference points for Laing gives an indication as to why this might be so; Deleuze notoriously shunned Hegel, whereas the Phenomenology of Mind is evidently integral to Laing's study (as was its author to all the work of Lacan, honed in its understandings by the often underrated extraordinary elucidations of Hegel undertaken by Alexandre Kojève especially, and Alexandre Koyré as well, formative of the French psychoanalyst's theoretical structuration). Laing's erudition – his familiarity with Hegel, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and a host of literary figures and works – seeps through in his presentation of clinical material analysed phenomenologically and existentially; it is this analytic combinatory that delivers what I think is the essence of Laing's clinical positioning: the combination of the phenomenological and existential to create the experiential, as understood in a very precise sense: phenomena as it is experienced to oneself. For precisely this type of experience – and against amassed aeons of first
expulsive and exorcistic penalisation and then diagnostic and quarantine-centred psychiatric institutionalisation – Laing had the keenest of ears.
The discursive definition he arrives at for sanity – as a condition situated in the order of things as they are perceived in the mental health sector at the time of Laing's writing – clearly demonstrates the author's acuity to this: ‘sanity is tested by the degree of conjunction or disjunction between two persons where the one is sane by common consent’ (p.36). The constitution of the ‘common’ in this formula is tinged with an establishment authoritarianism in which the readily associated, but less favoured term ‘anti-psychiatry’ garners some credibility; indeed, it is the concentration of power – in which can always reside a latent form of authoritarianism – within the psychiatric conjunction, and its medical gaze, as ‘common consent’, that privileges the ‘one’ – inevitably, the psychiatrically informed one – as sane. Laing's alternative approach is to hear the other side, the other one; very precisely, the other themselves.
His methodology for doing so is set out in relation to the figure of the Rubin's vase (in which a vase or two symmetrical silhouetted faces staring at one another can be determined): ‘to look and to listen to a patient and to see ‘signs’ of schizophrenia (as a ‘disease’) and to look and to listen to him simply as a human being are to see and to hear in as radically different ways as when one sees, first the vase, then the faces in the ambiguous picture’ (p.33). Through this latter approach to looking and listening, Laing was not only able to come to a better understanding of his schizophrenic patients, to assist and make some healing ‘progress’ with them, but also to return to discover more about what it is to be schizophrenic, and to contribute new insights surrounding aetiological factors. One such is revelatorily touched upon in his consideration of childhood reliance on certain forms of magical thinking:
It is indeed an important achievement for the child to gain the assurance that the adults have no means of knowing what he does, if they do not see him; that they cannot do more than guess at what he thinks to himself if he does not tell them; that actions that no one has seen and thoughts that he has kept to himself are
Page 68in no way accessible to others unless he himself ‘gives the show away’. The child who cannot keep a secret or who cannot tell a lie because of the persistence of such primitive magical fears has not established his full measure of autonomy and identity (p.107).
It is from such states of unestablished autonomy and identity that Laing's concepts of the ‘false-self systems’ that comprise schizophrenic being-in-the-world arise, that a subject's own thinking may seem to them monstrously and uncontrollably telekinetic, and that the flipside of this influencing finds itself in the Tauskian ‘influencing machines’ that may haunt and persecute such subjects. What Laing insists on in all of this, though, is hearing the truth of these very divided subjects, these divided selves:
Undoubtedly, most people take to be ‘really’ true what has to do with grammar and the natural world. A man says he is dead but he is alive. But his ‘truth’ is that he is dead. He expresses it perhaps in the only way common (i.e. the communal) sense allows him. He means that he is ‘really’ and quite ‘literally’ dead, not merely symbolically or ‘in a sense’ or ‘as it were’, and is seriously bent on communicating his truth. The price, however, to be paid for transvaluating the communal truth in this manner is to ‘be’ mad, for the only real death we recognize is biological death (pp.37-38).
Laing was attuned and attentive to the futural and deeply present implications of discourses that dared to transvaluate communal, or the commonly consented-to, truth; he risked riveting himself to the rivening Spaltung of the subject, to the divisions of the selves he encountered, to gain the perspicuity in relation to its subject matter – and its subjects mattering – that The Divided Self is laden with.