Friday, April 09, 2010

R.D. LAING: EXTRAORDINARY MAN

My fondness for remarkable, non-conforming, strong men has served me well. Sometimes I’ve been in their slipstream, like a VW behind an 18-wheeler, and other times I’ve just been beside the road waving a hanky. Rarely have I opposed them since I usually believe in what they were doing. Some I only read about, for instance, R.D. Laing, whose biography by his son, Adrian, showed up in the remainder bin at Daedalus.

Laing was a Glasgow Scot, which his son finds highly significant, carrying that split between a super-respectable Victorian-style emphasis on “face” and near-riotous recklessness. Once he had achieved sufficient education and prestige to break barriers, achieve international acclaim, and big money, he slipped over into booze and carousing that eventually brought him to the ground. In short, the classic Icarus pattern, though towards the end he claimed he was shifting over to being Daedalus. This he tried to achieve in the way of many at the time: going to India and Tibet to seek for gurus.

I particularly value biographies and autobiographies of outstanding thinkers because the events often supply a vital key to their work. In Laing’s case it was his puckered-up parents. (He claimed they only had sex once, which produced him -- who was demonstrably his father’s child because of a distinctive birthmark carried by his grandfather, his father and himself.) His mother denied his gestation but could not hide his birth, which he claimed he remembered and “would not care to repeat.” No doubt she would agree. But once present, he was tightly controlled, sent to the best schools and kept on a rigid schedule. (Sounds modern.) He was a concert quality musician and a trained singer, which came in handy later on when he had broken free. The terrible offense that his mother finally could not forgive was the use of the f-word.

Understandably, it was “wee Ronnie,” grown up into R.D. Laing, who fought against over-control for the rest of his adult life and endorsed the idea (which was not his alone) that the psychosis called “schizophrenia” was caused by overcontrolling mothers whose message was a double-bind: “achieve but do not do anything risky and remain in my grasp.” This is about the same time as the popularity of Philip Wylie’s “Generation of Vipers,” maybe a general reaction against the mother-worship of WWII that kept them from interfering with sending their sons off to war.

In fact, Laing was surfing the sea change of culture that transformed the world in the Sixties and Seventies. Laing was an M.D. psychiatrist, qualified to prescribe drugs and quick to discover LSD as a way to swing open the gate to another world. It was a time when psychotic (often meaning “rebellious”) patients were kept in restraints, lobotomized, injected with drugs, locked into padded cells and so on. Laing recognized this as largely unnecessary, esp. after one day when he was exhausted from being on-call and took the occasion of visiting one of the padded cell occupants as a chance to cool out, sitting on the floor with some shared smokes and good conversation. He found the man pleasantly coherent when he didn’t have to be braced against invasion. From then on, his policy was to allow people to simply go through their episodes of violence, regardless of the consequences to the furniture. This was a relief to the nurses and orderlies who had acquired many a lump and bloody nose from trying to stop the “acting out.” The level of confrontation subsided.

Laing outdid Carl Rogers, an American member of this Third Wave of psychologists, who once persuaded a catatonic man to recover simply by sitting with him every day for a half hour or so until he felt “in tune,” and then offering the man a stick of gum, which the man accepted with spoken thanks. Laing’s version was being called to make recommendations on a young woman who was naked and sitting cross-legged in a padded room where she refused to speak or let down her guard. Laing stripped off all HIS clothes, piled them by the door, entered naked and sat down cross-legged alongside her. After a while, they began to visit and resolved a few issues.

Never the lone crusader, Laing was part of a friendship network of former classmates (mostly) who were also doctors or psychotherapists Over the years they organized communal households where patients could live in a more normal way even as their helpers lived with them. The most notorious case was Mary Barnes, who was allowed to go just as crazy as she wanted to -- most famously smearing excrement on the walls, then refusing to eat until her health was endangered. The problem was that she required 24-hour care, which fell mostly to a male nurse. Eventually, she normalized, wrote books and went on lecture tours.

Formed in opposition to both Dr. Freud’s Viennese proprieties and rigid assumptions and Skinner’s insistence on operant conditioning, freedom-loving romantic thinkers like Laing had a huge impact until the invention of effective drugs and today’s fMRI research into actual brain operation. Today’s thinking is that schizophrenia is not due to cold and controlling mothers but is a true malfunction of the brain, either lack of coordination between parts or some kind of chemical imbalance. I would not want to deny any of these approaches, valuing the contribution of each new angle and some probably yet to come, but surely the most exciting and happiest of all these so far has been this movement involving Laing. My own favorites have been somewhat more conventional: Winnicott, Bateson, Rogers, Maslow, Satir, et al. I was surprised to learn that Laing was a student of Foucault, the fountainhead of so many inscrutable and intractable ideas, since part of this liberation movement was an emphasis on experience instead of theory.

The media has never understood any of this. If the reporters became sympathetic, I suspect, editors protected the views of investors by keeping suspicion alive, except at Life magazine which seemed to share my attitude towards exceptional men. (Picasso, Pollock, Harry Jackson) What strikes me most is that we’ve returned to a near-Victorian valuing of conformity and money-making, but there is a lingering section of the world that refuses to give up the revolution that set so many people free. I’m hoping for a synergy.

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