"

vVHO ~ MAD?
WHO IS SN.B?
RD Laing: In search ofa newpsychiatry'
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byJames S. Gordon
I"To increasing numbers of readers-
psychiatrists as well as patients; political
lactivists and dropouts; the hardly literate,
isearching young; as well as middle-class
!artists and intellectuals-R. D. Laing is
lthe guide who most clearly elucidates
:the disordered surfaces and depths
lof their own lives." .
IIn a work;ng-dass area of Londoo's East End,
. near where the River Lem flows over marshes,
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past the gasworks, and into the Thames, stands
a three-story, sixty-year-old, dusty brick building
called Kingsley Hall. Nearby are dismal rows of .
:modern apartments. The rest of the neighborhood is
Icomposed of Victorian homes, converted to multiple
idwellings. A few blocks away are pubs, grocery
'stores, and other shops. Across the street from the
iHall, which stands alone, is a small open space.
I Sixty years ago, two wealthy spinster sisters with
:social-work inclinations established Kingsley Hall as
(a settlement house. In time, the sisters died and
!left the building to a foundation, the Kingsley Hall
IAssociation. Over the years the building served as
la center for social, religious, and pacifist activities
iin the East End.
In 1931, while he negotiated India's fate with
IBritain, Mahatma Gandhi slept on a straw mat in
jone of the tiny cells on the roof of the building. He
Ikept a goat in his room and milked it for food.
lCabinet ministers, p u z ~ l e ?y his choice of locati?n,
,came there to talk WIth hIm. On the wall outSIde
:Kingsley Hall, a blue and white plaque commemo-
!rates Gandhi's visit.
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In 1965 the building was leased to the Phila-
delphia Association (Philadelphia means, literaUy,
"brotherly love"), a group of Londoners, headed
by the Glasgow-born psychiatrist Ronald D. Laing,
who are dedicated to "relieving" and investig-ating
"mental illness of all descriptions." Though the
le2se ended last May, the consequences of the Phila-
delphia Association's five-year tenure could be as
important for the therapy of schizophrenia, indeed
for our conceptions of sanity and madness, as Gan-
dhi's visit was for the future of India.
In January, 1970, I went to London to visit
Kingsley Hall and to speak with R. D. Laing and
some of his co-workers. I had just been appointed
a chief resident (administrator, and instructor of
doctors and medical students taking psychiatric
training) on a psychiatric ward in New York, and
it seemed to be the time to take a trip that had
been brewing in me for four years, since I had read
Laing's first book, The Divided Self.
Four years ago, although he had already written
several books, Laing's name was known only to a
small number of people who were interested in exis-
tential psychiatry and the phenomenology of schizo-
phrenia. It was only with the publication of The
Politics of Experience in ,1967 that he began to be
regarded as a major cultural and social critic. Like
Norman O. Brown and Herbert Marcuse, he drew
on psychoanalytic insights to make a radical critique
of Western society. But where Marcuse and Brown'
are theoretical and speak in generalities, Laing is
immediate and personal. He speaks directly from
his own experience to that of his readers. He speaks
both as a therapist with "mad" patients and as a
man groping for sanity in a mad world.
In The Politics of Experience the reader is con-
stantly made aware of' Laing's own uncertainties.'
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Illuminations are shadowed by doubt. The book
be;:>irs by questioning its own existence: "Few books
tod<l.i'y are forgiveable. Black on canvas, silence on
the creen, an empty white sheet of paper, are per-
hap feasible." After seven chapters which attempt
to 1 y bare the truth of the madman's delusions and
the delusions at the heart of accepted truths, the
boo ends with a series of Blake-like images which
Lai g calls "The Bird of Paradise." The last in-
words of this section are as ironic as they
are fitting: "If I could turn you on, if I could drive
you lout of your wretched mind, if I could tell you
I wi uld let you know." Analytic conclusions are
emlfdded in the ambiguous, tortured process of
discpvery.
In The Divided Self Laing observed that "Freud
was a hero who descended to the 'Underworld' and
met there stark terrors." But, he continues, Freud
"ca -ried with him his theory as a Medusa's head
whi h turned these terrors to stone." Laing has set
him elf the task of "surviving without using a theory
tha is in some measure an instrument of defense."
To numbers of readers-psychiatrists as
weI as patients; political activists and dropouts; the
har -ly literate, searching young; as well as middle-
clas artists and intellectuals-Laing is the guide
whq most clearly elucidates the disordered surfaces
andl depths of their own lives.
rl>uring my own psychiatric training, I was deeply
disJatisfied with the theoretical models psychiatrists
ap lied to their patients and appalled by the sup-
pas dly therapeutic techniques that these models
dic ated or permitted. I was also disturbed by the
has ital psychiatrist's institutionalized position as
the guardian and enforcer of received social values.
In he Divided Self, I found a perspective which
hel ed me to understand and experience my patients
dir ctly, without the distorting prism of diagnostic
cla sification. In Laing's later works, I began to
per eive the outlines of a new, broader conception
.of anity and madness and of the role of the psychia-
trist. In these books he had begun to examine the
and societal conditions which produced
mehtal patients. He had come to see individual
as the distorted reflection of a pervasive
and political madness, of which psychiatry
was itself a part. He felt that only through a re-
of our socially and institutionally defined
iders about sanity andwadness could he arrive at
an conception of true sanity, any true therapy for
Only in a new setting, where all previous
_de nitions and roles could be called into question,
co ld this re-evaluation proceed. At Kingsley Hall,
for five years, he and his co-workers, together with a
nu ber of people who had been "mental patients,"
were embarked on this venture. I hoped that what
Jarhes S. Gordon, M.D., a 1967 graduate of the Harvard
Mddica-! School, is a chief resident in psychiatry at
th Albert Einstein College of Medicine.
they had learned there could guide me. in my own
undertaking.
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n order to understand the originality and sig-
nificance of what happened at Kingsley Hall,
it is necessary first to present some of the more
traditional ideas about madness and its treatment,
and the critique that Laing makes of them.
There have always, and in all cultures, been some
people whose behavior was regarded by others as
different and unusual. But these people, however
deviant or "mad," were not always thought to be
"sick." It is only during the last two centuries,
in Western Europe and America, that the madman-
no longer considered as possessed or saintly, annoy-
ing or amusing-has come to be seen primarily as
sick. )
The reasons why madness came to be regarded
as a disease are complicated.. Thomas Szasz, an
American psychiatrist, points/to the fact that in
the industrial era the traditional' Christian categories
of sin and salvation were displaced by the scientific-
medical ones of disease and health.
Advances in pathology in the nineteenth century
did indeed show a relationship between some mad
behavior and damage to the brain. Neurosyphilis,
chronic alcoholism, and arteriosclerosis all caused
people to speak and behave in a mad fashion, and
all produced identifiable pathologic lesions. But
the bmins of people with the most prevalent form
of modern madness, schizophrenia (by conservative
estimates one to two percent of all Americans will be
diagnosed as schizophrenic at some point during
their lifetime), show no pathologic lesions. Nor, at
this time,. has any genetic defect or biochemical ab-
normality been conclusively demonstrated in their
bodies. Nevertheless, psychiatrists treat people who
act and speak strangely as if they were diseased.
And they look for the signs and symptoms of schizo-
phrenia just as a specialist in internal medicine
searches for sugar in the urine of a suspected
diabetic.
Madness is a personal experience and social fact.
Schizophrenia is a medical artifact. But the assump-
tion that schizophrenia is a disease dictates that
physicians declare who has it, and care for those so
diagnosed. It provides the rationale for trying to
cure the schizophrenic by the medical means of tran-
quilizers and electroshock rtherapy and, with fortu-
nately diminishing frequency, surgical intervention in
the form of a lobotomy.
The creation of mental hospitals institutionalized
this convergence of social fact and medical artifact.
In Madness and Civilization, French historian of cul-
ture Michel Foucault points out that with the decline
of leprosy at t-he end of the Middle Ages, madmen
took the place of lepers as social scapegoats. Dur-
ing the Renaissance, madmen were expelled from
their native cities and confined to boats, the "ships
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o fools." These ships served to isolate and exclude
tme socially disruptive and sometimes frightening
from his fellow citizens. At present, within
al medical framework, mental hospitals serve the
function. One half of all the hospital beds in
are in mental hospitals', and more than one
beds are occupied by diagnosed schizo-
Medical students and young physicians who are
.b ginning training in psychiatry are taught to classify
t ir most bizarre patients according to categories
wpich owe their origin to ,a late-nineteenth-century
psychiatrist, Emil Kraepelin. Kraepelin
adopted his French contemporary Morel's term
" I cmence precoce" ("precocious or early insanity")
a d placed under this rubric, catatonic, hebephrenic,
a d paranoid psychoses. In his discussion he em-
p asized the onset of these conditions in young
pIe and their usual progression to a state of
m ntal deterioration.
.--- In 1911, the Swiss psychiatrist Eugen :BIeuler,
the state. of mind rather t?an
thf outcome of hls.c!lsease, collled the term schlzo- .
("split-mind" or "split-soul"). Bleuler out-
lin;ed what he called the primary and secondary
. of schizophrenia. The primary symptoms
in lude the "4 A's" that still form the basis for first
on schizophrenia: distortions of Affect (for
ex mple, the patient is laughing when the situation
sh uld call for crying); loose Associations (use of
words and phrases which do not seem to connect
one another); Ambivalence (a constant uncer-
taifty or changing of mind);' and Autism (an ap-
pa ent preoccupation with internal concerns and a
lac of relatedness to the environment). Secondary
sy ptoms, often quite obvious and bizarre, but not
ess ntial to ,the diagnosis, include hallucinations,
ne ativism, delusions, and stupor.
he psychiatrist's initial task involves observing
or [lUCidating these symptoms in a patient and com-
ing to a diagnosis. And a considerable amount of
tiq and energy is devoted to perfecting one's ability
in his process. In The Divided Self, Laing points
out the wrongheadedness of this enterprise. He tries
to how how the medical model, with its assump-
of the doctor's scientific objectivity, prevents
than facilitates his underst,anding of the
pa
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aing Sees rigid diagnostic and psychodynamic
wa s of regarding people as a perpetuation, through
the Iverbal and conceptual means of psychiatry, of
the same dehumanizing attitudes which precipitated
their emotional dilemmas. He points out that the
of psychiatric description is a "vocabulary
of People who behave and speak in
the psychiatrist cannot understand are said to
be "maladaptive," "out of contact with reality,"
"la ing in insight." The psychiatrist sees the patient
thr ugh a filter of diagnostic criteria which do
viol nce to a two-sided interpersonal situation. The
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patient is reduced to an organism to be dissected,
the psychiatrist to a judgmental anatomist. Bleu1er,
Laing reminds his reader, stated that "when all is said
and done [his patients] were stranger to him than the
birds in his garden."
Laing demonstrates the classical clinical psychi-
a-tric attitude irt his discussions of an interview of
Kraepelin's with a boy who would be diagnosed as
schizophrenic:
The patient I will show today has almos-t to
be carried into the room ... [he] sits with his
eyes shut and pays no attention to his surround-
ings. He does not look up even when he is spoken
to, but answers beginning in a low tone, and gradu-
ally becoming louder and louder. When asked
where he is, he says, "You want to know that too?
I tell you who is being measured and is measured
and shall be measured. I know all that, and could
tell you, but I do not want to." When asked his
name, he screams, "What is your name? What
does he shut? He shuts his eyes. What does he
hear? He does not unders-tand; he understands not.
How? Who? Where? When? What does he mean?
When I tel! him to look he does not look properly.
You there, just look!"
Kraepelin notes the young man's "inaccessibility"
and asserts that his talk was "only a series of un-
connected sentences having no relation whatever
to the general situation." From Kraepelin's point of
view the young man exhibits the "signs of catatonic
excitement." (Post-Bleulerian psychiatrists might
note inappropriate affect, autism, loose associations,
negativism, and perhaps auditory hallucinations.)
But Laing suggests that from the young man's per-
spective, his words are perhaps a "dialogue between
his own parodied version of Kraepelin and his own
defiant rebelling self." Laing concludes: "What is
the boy's experience of Kraepelin? He seems to be .
tormented and desperate. What is he about in speak-
ing and acting this way? He is objecting to being
measured and tested, he wants to be heard," The
situation, it seems, has two sides. Kraepelin wants
information, the boy wants understanding. They
operate at cross-purposes, and potential communi-
cation is ruptured.
Freud, who created psychoanalysis, emphasized
the necessity for the psychiatrist to understand his
patient's experience of the world. Through the
medium of free associations the analyst could gain
access to the hidden, unconscious parts of his pa-
tients' minds. Once brought to light, unconscious
conflicts could come under the influence of con-
scious directive activity. But Freud felt his techniques
were not applicable to the treatment of psychotic
patients (schizophrenia is the major psychosis). He
thought these patients too absorbed in the inner
workings of their minds-too narcissistic-to estab-
. lish a working relationship with a therapist.
In -the 1920s, however, a group of American
psychiatrists, including William Alanson White and
Harry Stack Sullivan, undertook the psychoanalyti-
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cally riented treatment of schizophrenic patients.
Sulliv n saw his patients' apparently strange speech
and b'fhavior not as the signs and symptoms of a
diseas
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, but as evidence of "difficulties in living." He
felt that schizophrenic, in the context of a warm
relationship with a therapist, could
come to understand these difficulties. Both he and
his f llowers, including Frieda Fromm-Reichman
in Hannah Green's celebrated auto-
blOgr phlcal novel I Never Promised You a Rose
Gard n), Harold Searles, and Otto Will, have em-
phasi ed the two-sidedness of the therapeutic en-
count r. And they were willing to admit, as the
medic lly oriented psychiatric establishment often is
Laing's most recent book, Knots
$3.95, , has just been published in America. It presents .
in c ndensed, poetic fashion what Laing calls
"sam of the tortuosities of human interactions." In
his infOduction, Laing describes his new work this way:
"The patterns delineated here have not yet been clas-
sifiedby a Linnaeus of human bondage. They are all,
perha s, strangely, familiar. I have confined myself to
out only some of those I actually have seen.
Words that come to mind to name them are: knots
tanglJs, fankles, impasses, disjunctions, Whirligogs:
binds I could have remained closer to the 'raw' data
in WJiCh these patterns appear. I could have distilled
them further towards an abstract logico-mathematical
calcu us...."
One f' f Laing's "knots" appears below; others appear
on p ges 60 and 65. JSO
Jack knows he does not know.
Jill she knows what Jack does not know, but
she qoes not know he does not know it.
Jack I does not know
Jill does not know he does not know,
and thinks she knows what he knows he doesn't.
Jack believes Jill.
Jack now does not know he does not know.
One appy ending.
Jack thinks Jack sees what he does not, 0:-
and hat Jill sees what she does not see.
Jill elieves Jack.
She ow thinks she sees what Jack thinks Jack sees
that Jack sees it too.
They! may now both be completely wrong.
.. Th s .is ambiguous. Jack thinks he is seeing
an illUSion; ,is he right or wrong? Jack thinks
he is; not under an illusion. Is he right or
wrong? Try it anyway.
Who Is Mad? Who Is Sane?
not, that valid insight and experience are not merely
the property of the psychiatrist. Fromm-Reichman _
observed that "mentally disturbed persons who have
withdrawn from their environment are refreshingly
intolerant of all kinds of cultural compromises.
Hence they inevitably hold the mirror of the hypo-
critical aspects of the culture in front of society."
T
he mental hospitals I have worked in, as medi-
cal student, intern, and resident,
have had special teaching wards which are
among the most "advanced" in this country. Pa-
tients received intensive individual therapy, and a
great deal of lip service was paid to "understanding"
them. At the same time, therapists were told that
they really knew better than their patients what was
good for -the latter. We exercised a power over
their daily lives and rheir thoughts which seemed to
contradict our attempts to understand them and win
their confidence. We were told not to argue with a
patient's hallucinations or delusions. But at the same
time, our superiors and ward staff insisted that we
give patients tranquilizers to make these symptoms
go away. If a patient felt he wanted to leave the
hospital, it was up to us to decide whether Of not
he was ready. If he was speaking or acting bizarrely,
we had the power to keep him from leaving. We
could lock the ward door, put the patient in a se-
clusion room, or deprive him of his clothes-all this
in his own best interest.
If at any point I resisted using these sanctions,
I was told that I was depriving my patients of the
best possible care: "Patients need controls"; "Medi-
cation improves thought disorders"; "They'll never
get better if you don't set limits." I found myself
feeling guiJ,ty for going along with these measures.
And I felt guilty, or at least beleaguered by a
frightened and angry ward staff, when I refused.
Under less auspicious circumstances, those that
most people who are hospitalized are subjected to,
the experience is a disaster from beginning to end.
The institutional drama of degradation and mis-
understanding often starts in a city ,hospital emer-
gency room. For example: a man comes in, pur-
sued, as he believes, by demons. A psychiatric resi-
dent takes a history from whoever brought him in
the police or perhaps his family, listens politely
the man, and, unable to grasp much of what he is
.saying, begins to examine his "mental status." To'
?etermine whether or not he .is "schizophrenic," he
IS asked to interpret proverbs and to subtract seven
from one hundred, and seven from that, and so
on. If his thinking is "concrete"-as opposed to
abstract-if in the psychiatrist's opinion his affect
is "inappropriate" and his associations are loose, he
is schizophrenic. The man is terrified, and he is
with a numbing tranquilizer, deprived of
hIS clothes, and hustled off to a locked ward.
The next morning, in a room with other people
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The setting of a psychiatric clinic and men-
ral hospi.tal promotes in staff and patients the set
best designed to turn .the metanoiac voyage from
a voyage of discovery into self of a potentially
revolutionary nature into a catastrophe; into a
pathological process from which the person re-
quires 10 be cured. We asked what could happen
if we began by changing our set and setting, to
regard what was happening as a potential healing
process through which the person may be guided
and during which he is guarded.
At Kingsley Hall he and his co-workers "changed
This kind of interaction, repeated innumerable
times and in a variety of situations, gives rise to a
more or less stable split between outer and inner,
false and true ,self. The child grows into an adult
who sees the outer world of his body and other
people as necessary but threatening. He relates to
it in ways that appear acceptable, but all the while
maintains himself aloof from his relatedness. In
later life his existential truth may be that he is not
having intercourse with another person, even while
, his body goes through the motions. He is not feeling
friendly even though he is smiling. '
Laing feels that "what is called psychosis (an acute
schizophrenic episode-'a nervous breakdown') is
sometimes simply the sudden removal of the vdl-
of the false self which had been serving tomaintain'
an outer behavioral normality that may long ago_
have failed to be any reflection of the state of affairs
in the secret self. Then the self [will] pour out
accusations of persecution [the observed, though
oLten disguised and distorted, paranoid ideas] at the
hands of the person with whom the false self has
been complying for years."
from this perspective, treatment by tran-
ward restrictions, and "controls" repre--
an Jl.ttempt to restore the split between true, ;
and false_selves, to produce outward compliance ;S.'-\
-and deny the validity and acceptability of the inner "< C" 'I
self's accusations and aspirations. In psychiatric jar- y'-': "'" '\ i.
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gon, one hopes for the ",
personality." .c.<
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--r:aII}g, 'on the other hand, feels the psychotic epi::'" \-" ,
may- presenL an_opportunity for a person to't
begin_to_heal the divisjon inlo true and false selves
,which has . deformed his life. Therapy involves en-
couraging and guiding the person in the exploration ; \ \ I
of the "inner time and space" into which psychosis: I: "1 I
has plunged him: "In this journey there are manyo
occasions to lose one's way, for confusion, I.,' "Ii;,
failure, even final shipwreck; many terrors, demons,'<, :-.:' -".:. \-
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to be encountered, that may not be overcome... '.', c'J\,:/
There are very few of us who know the territory in \' \
which he is lost, who know how to reach him, and ",J'"
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how to find the way back." i
In a paper entitled "Metanoia: Some Experiences. I
at Kingsley Hall" (metanoia is, literally, change of, (': ,\
lays the intellectual. grou?dwork forG(vlv I.)
hIS therapeutic venture:! ' ,00''- .-'.
Bresent, a ward doctor sees, the man for ten or
fl:fteen minutes. The doctor asks him a few ques-
dons-when were you last in the hospital? are you
spicidal? homicidal? do you hear voices? do you
people are after you? is there anyone at home
t<jl take care of you?-and dismisses him. The doctor
more medication. For the next few days
man, treated perfunotorily and often condescend-
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by the nurses and attendants, wanders around
a overcrowded ward in a daze. If at the end of this
ti e he is acting more "normal," he will probably
sent back to the family which a week before
him: If not, commitment proceedings
wpl be instituted, and he will be sent to a state
hlDspital. ,
ILaing's approach to people that psychiatrists de-
: slibe as sohizophrenic presents an important alter-
n tive. Drawing on an existential-phenomenological
. as well as a psychoanalytic framework,
oJ ,l] not as a but
- '0 \ of a precariously mamtamed splIt be-
\.5-,' ( t..,)een an outer false self and an
\:' '\: split and these terms reflect the patient's own
wly of eX'periencing himself, rather than the psychia-
trij;t's attempts at classification. '
In the "sane, schizoid state," writes Laing, a
fa se outer self has arisen "in compliance with the
intentions and expectations of the other or with
wHat one imagines to be other's intentions and
expectations." That state is grounded in the body
anti manifest in action and social intercourse. But
thJ inner, true self feels the perceptions and mani-
of this socially adjusted, olLtwardly visible,
falr.e self to be unreal, alien, and meaningless. The
self, fearful and detached, has retreated from
th9 consequences of being embodied and responsible.
It preoccupied with observation and fantasy, a
last refuge of hopes, love, anger, and despair. From
a "transcendent and unembodied" the true
,
self views the behavior of the false self. Terrified of
parlticipation in actions that seem like betrayals, the
, trub self gradually becomes more and more isolated
the outer world, which could, potentially, infuse
it \'{ith life.
<priginally, the split arose as a consequence of
intoLerably conflicted and confusing life situations.
It a means of preserving oneself from the rav-
ages of others, and from the unacceptable reactions
they provoked. For instance, a two-year-old who
his feces is given frequent and painful
enemas by a mother to whom he looks for love
and sustenance. The boy gradually detaches himself
from the bodily pain and emotional confusion which
these assaults provoke. He gives his body up to
the ,mother; he represses the anger which his mother
has punished or ignored. Now the mother is violat-
ing !only the child's body, removing only feces; the
child's feelings of anger and resentment, his disap-
pointment at the mother's hurtfulness, are no longer
mariifest.
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oing to London was a pilgrimage for me,
but one fraught with anxiety and uncer-
tainty. If Laing did not in some way live up
About 85 percent of the residents were between
.- }
-' twenty and forty years old, and about two thirds
I..{j were men. Sixty-five out of the 104 people were
classified as patients. More than half of them had
been previously hospitalized. Three quarters of all
the "patients" who lived there 'had been diagnosed
as schizophrenic. Only nine of the sixty-five have
,- been hospitalized since leaving Kingsley Hall.
-;::. . But the quality of the lived experience at Kings-
7.: ley Hall cannot be measured by statistics. Kingsley
::::( \Hall provided troubled people with an alternative
.J to hospitalization, an opportunity to live and grow
.;- -" ; through their madness. It was a place for "doctors"
and "patients" to shed their restrictive roles and
help and learn from one another immediately, with-
out the distorting medi'ation of a hierarchical medi-
'cal structure, without coercion. It was a place where
:; .people could simply be. It was s-imultaneously an
'- )':.,;, experiment in psychotherapy and an attempt at
communal living.
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the Iparadigm: someone is involved in a desperate
strategy of liberation within the micro-socia'! situa-
tion in which he finds himself. We try to follow the
of what is called 'an acute schizophrenic
epi$ode' instead of arresting it."
4- brochure put out by the Philadelphia Associa-
describes some of the features of Kingsley. Hall
and presents statistics. The reference point is the
traqitional mental hospi'tal. The statistics represent
an attempt to demonstrate the therapeutic success,
even in traditional terms, of Kingsley Hall:
IAt Kingsley H.all everyone's actions could be
challenged by anyone.
I With no staff and no patients-with the ultimate
breakdown of the binary role system of the insti-
tution-no resident has been given by any other
n;sident any tranquilizers. or sedatives. Experience
and behavior which could not be tolerated in most
or psychiatric institutions made heavy but
finally tolerable demands on ,the community,
Members of households [there were several other
small communities similar ,to Kingsley Hall which
. the Philadelphia Associa'tion established in Lon-
don] determined the structure of their days. The
context they thus es1ablish fits their experience
rather thanthM of a superimposed "ideal," and
results eventually in people going into society at
large. Members of households get up or stay in bed
as they wish, eat what they want when they want,
stay alone or be wi,th others and generally make
their own rules. DESPITE GLOOMY PREDICTIONS
there have been no suicides to date. [When Kingsley
Hall closed there still had been no suicides.] Kings-
ley Hall accommodates 14 people. From June 1965
to November 30, 1968 104 people have stayed
there.
Who Is Mad? Who Is Sane?
to the profoundly sympathetic voice of his books,
. if Kingsley Hall were not somehow successful, I
felt that the source of much of my own conviction
would disappear.
I had written to Laing several weeks before going
to England, had told him how important his books
were to me, and asked jf I could speak with him
and visit Kingsley Hall. But I left for London with-
out having received a reply.
It was more than a week before I actually got
to Kingsley Hall. To some degree this was because
many of the people who lived there had grown tired
of having visitors. It was their home, and they had
begun to resent the succession of reporters, psychia-
trists, and curiosity seekers who wanted to visit.
When I first telephoned I was told that I couldn't
possibly understand what the place was about in two
weeks. My telling the man at the other end of, the
phone that I wanted to set up a similar community
in an American hospital didn't excite him. He
thought that my effort, like that of Laing's colleague
David Cooper, who had tried to restructure a men-
tal hospital ward in England, would be doomed.
He didn't tell me to come or stay away, just to
"keep trying." "Perhaps someone else will invite
you." Then I called Laing's office and discovered that
I already had an appointment to see him.
I had heard disturbing rumors. about Laing, that
he was periodically admitting himself to the mental
hospitals that he publicly attacked; that he was
likely to be abrupt and inconsiderate, perhaps sloppy
drunk. A woman who had met him described him
as frightening, "demonic." An American psycho-
analyst who knew him fairly well felt that he was a
charming man, perhaps the most original and crea-
tive psychiatric thinker since Freud. But another,
who had met him at the same time, called him "a
brilliant and seductive paranoid schizophrenic.'"
My first surprise was his office. It was in a town
house not far from Harley Street, where many of
London's rich and fashionable specialists have theirs.
It's hard to say what I expected, perhaps an ornate
but seedy mansion on a deserted street. Nothing
so ordinary and solid. His name, together with sev-
eral other physicians', was on the door, engraved
on a brass plate.
A secretary answered my ring, and showed me
into a waiting room on the ground floor. I sat in a
straight-backed Victorian chair facing an electric
heater that glowed in the fireplace. Across from
me an attractive blond girl was. reading a fashion
magazine.
After a few minutes, R. D. Laing appeared in the
doorway. He greeted me, shook hands, and led the
way, three steps at a time, up two long winding
flights.
Laing's consultation room has none of the studied
elegance with which most analysts surround them-
selves. It is simple, bare, functional. Two well-stuffed
armchairs with end tables face each other across
57
----
o
I
I
I
C' I
eople "on the run" from mental hospitals,
about to have a breakdown, or simply inter-
ested in taking part in a new experiment in
communal living came to Kingsley Hall. They had
read Laing's books, or knew someone who lived in
Kingsley Hall, or had just heard about the place. The
people who lived in the Hall decided, if there was
room, who could move in, with preference given to
work things out among ourselves. But even before we
took over the building, we began to promise people
who were in trouble that they could move in." When
the building opened in the summer of 1965, it was
already a new kind of community. People who earned
their living as therapists lived communally with those
who had been legally certified as patients.
When he moved into Kingsley Hall, Laing, like
most of the other members of the community, left
his family behind. He stayed in a ten-by-sixteen-foot
. room on the building's ground floor, which was
formerly a library and has since served as a medita-
tion room and darkroom. Except for about twenty-
five hours each week when he saw patients in his
office, he spent virtually all of his time at Kingsley
Hall.
Though he felt "at ease" in the place, the physical
and emotional pace was torrid. During a typical day
Laing wouId return from seeing private patients,
spend time with troubled members of the household,
discuss communal problems, and preside over an
hours710ng dinner discussion which often turned into
a seminar or spontaneous theater event. Going to bed
at two or three in the morning, he would awaken at
six or seven, write for several hours, and return to his
office. After more than a year, he felt physically
tired, emotionally "drained," and he moved out. He
needed more privacy, wanted to devote more time to
his theoretical writings. Still, he maintained close con-
tact with Kingsley Hall, was visiting several times a
month, publicizing and raising money for the com-
munity, and serving as a consultant and adviser in f- i
J
times stress. .. - I
Durmg the first four years of Its eXIstence, a num-::;:) -r (j'; !
ber of other therapists lived in Kingsley Hall. Laing ,I_
mentioned David Cooper, and Aaron Esterson, co- \.. .)
author with him of Sanity, Madness and the ".-
as well as Sid Briskin, a social worker. Four young '--:.:; ;
psychiatrists, Leon Redle:, Berke, Morton .:.' l _,
Schatzman, and Jerome LISS, emIgrated from Amer- .
ica to work with Laing. They lived at Kingsley Hall ........
and stayed on after he left. Psychiatrists, sociologisfs, '_.-'
poets, painters, writers, and musicians from England, -1. .......,:;; I
America, and the Continent were visitors for varying':-: J
periods of time. Seminars in political, social, and .::
therapeutic aspects of psychiatry were held regularly. C _
Dancing, painting, weaving, yoga, poetry reading, ,.u y -:>'-
lectures, and films were integral parts of life in <.l ..:
Kingsley Hall. There was an atmosphere of con- .\
tinual personal, creative, and intellectual quest. v \..
. '"" ---
several feet of space. On one long wall there is a
daybed with a drab spread. On the other, bookshelves
with a few dozen titles. I noticed Erik Erikson's book
on Gandhi and foreign-language translations of
Laing's own books. There is an uncluttered desk near
the windows, a hot plate in one corner.
Laing sat back in his chair, crossed his legs, and
waited. In his dress there was a kind of careless
sobriety: a dark jacket and pants which seemed just
to miss matching, a black turtleneck shirt, and scuffed
black loafers. In contrast, his face was pale, hand-
some, rugged, dominated by a high broad forehead;
brown hair, longish, graying, strayed in back over his
collar. His light, deep-set eyes seemed to gaze some-
where beyond my chair.
I nervously repeated what I had said in my letter
to him, then talked about my own discomfort at being
there. I lit a cigarette as I spoke, and he held up a
pack at Gauloises smiling, showing me we smoked
the same brand. His eyes went distant again, as I
began to ask questions about Kingsley Hall and his
relation to it. After a While I stopped, and he began
to talk, slowly at first, then with relish. A strong
Scots burr crept into his voice in reflective or ironic
moments:
"Seven of us, the original members of the Phila-
delphia Association, obtained the building five years
ago. There were psychiatrists and a social worker.
One woman had been a psychiatric nurse, and one of
the men was, by profession, a businessman. We
planned to live at Kingsley Hall communally and
R. D. Laing
58
those who seemed most in need of it. Laing empha-
sized that he never insisted that a given person be
allowed to come, that it was purely the community's
decision.
Once there, those who needed help came together
with those who felt they could be of help on a basis
of personal affinity, without constraint, without fees.
Those who felt like it or needed money worked out-
side during the day. Others lived on National Assist-
ance. All paid about three pounds a week (seven
dollars) into a common fund for room and board.
Each of the fourteen people who stayed there at any
one time had his oWh tiny room, which he could share
if he wanted.
Kingsley Hall, Laing explained, was always chang-
ing. He felt that what I would see would be quite
different from what it had been like several years ago.
That winter there was a general feeling of depression.
Friction with neighbors, many of whom regarded the
inhabitants of Kingsley Hall as dangerous and sub-
versive, had caused the Kingsley HaH Foundation to
refuse to renew the lease. There was little substance
to the neighbors' charges, but random incidents dis-
quieted them: a man who, at a neighboring green-
grocer's, had a habit of biting into an occasional
piece of fruit and replacing it on a pile; another who
wandered into peoples' houses and sat in their living
rooms. On one Friday night drunken workmen had
broken in, shouting obscenities at the "perverts,"
"loonies," and "lay-abouts." Boys from the neighbor-
.hood once smashed down the front door with an ax.
Now the building was in a state of disrepair. Windows
broken by children and replaced had been broken
again and left unmended. The large rooms were
rarely used. In four months the building itself would
be vacated.
Laing got up from his chair, put a kettle on the hot
plate, and heated water for tea; he opened a bag of
dried fruit and placed it on the table next to me. He
moved easily around the room, preparing tea, empty-
ing ashtrays, continuing to talk. His careful domes-
ticity puzzled me; I had hardly expected it from the
oracular author of The Politics of Experience.
I. asked Laing about his attitude toward peoples'
delusions; toward the ideas they have about them-
selves and the world, with which virtually everyone
else disagrees, and which are often the most obvious
and provocative aspect of schizophrenia. For ex-
ample, someone's belief that he is Christ, or that the
television is sending him messages, or that there is a
worldwide plot against him.
Laing replied, "I often differ with people, but
do not feel that it is incumbent on me to im-
pose a particular viewpoint on anyone." He spoke
about the personal and cultural origins of the "delu-
sions" of several people he knew. Then, after asking
if I had read the fifteenth-century Malleus Malefi-
carum, he began to tell what first appeared to be an
unrelated story about the Inquisition. "It seems that
the Inquisition dealt with a number of problems that
Who Is Mad? Who Is Sane?
are today regarded as the province of psychiatry.
They found that the causes of these problems lay
in the fact that black magic had been practiced on
the sufferer. If a man complained of impotence with
his wife, the Inquisition would find the man's former
mistress and torture her until she admitted she had
practiced black magic. If, however, someone came
along and proposed a naturalistic or psychological
explanation for the man's impotence, he was re-
garded as a heretic. Now, however, someone who
claims that black magic is being practiced on him is
regarded as deluded. His belief is a symptom for
which psychiatrists seek a naturalistic explanation,
and often prescribe a pharmacological cure."
I listened to his narrative in rapt silence, won-
dering if he was putting me on. Certainly he was
pointing out that ideas which once made up a domi-
nant "therapeutic" ideology, the Inquisition's de-
monology, would now be regarded as "psychotic de-
lusions." But did he also mean that psychiatric
thought was, itself, a delusional system, no different
in essence from the Inquisition's demonology? Per-
haps he did. I'm still not sure. At any rate, he went
on to say that "delusions .are as culturally relative
life-style and family structure," and that there f' 0
was no absolute way of determining their validity. I
Some were culturally sanctioned and validated, others
not. He had, in his story, provided a larger frame-
work for the consideration of the whole problem
of delusions, psychiatrists' as well as patients'. The
anecdote was a kind of mental judo, turning my
question back on itself.
I asked Laing other questions about his own writ-
ings. Was the "Bird of Paradise" the record of an
LSD trip? I knew that Laing had used LSD and
that he found it helpful in psychotherapy and as
a means of self-exploration. "No," he replied. "It
was merely a description of some of the things that
make up my own inner life." He reminded me that
Freud in The Interpretation of Dreams and The
Psychopathology of Everyday Life had written about
himself, and Laing contrasted his accessibility with
the self-imposed anonymity of modern "Freudian"
analysts. Freud, Laing added, was still "the best of
psychiatric writers."
Before I left the office Laing gave me the names
of several people who had spent time at Kingsley
Hall, and during the next few days I contacted them.
S
omehow, I felt unsatisfied with my first dis-
cussion with Laing. I wanted something more
from him than a glimpse of how his mind
worked and a description of Kingsley Hall. I wasn't
exactly sure what it was. Thinking I might get closer
to him if I gathered material for a biographical
sketch, I asked if I could record our next session.
He reluctantly agreed; then, later, changed his mind.
Perhaps Laing sensed my craving for more inti-
mate knowledge, because when I next came to him
59
i
.'
he asked if I wanted to sit in on an interview that
"
(\ he was conducting with a .
" .>--.. ,:, >. '. The parents .elderly lower-mIddle-class peo-
, ,', I.. pIe, from a provIncIal town, whose son had been
, ,,. diagnosed as schizophrenic and hospitalized. Through
I.. , ,
i' 'i' Laing's widely publicized BBC broadcasts on schizo-
,A phrenia; they had heard of his work and had come,
_ t to him after a series of resigned" dismal prognoses
j "from local psychiatrists. Their son was currently on
\:.0. <: large doses of tranquilizers, and saw a doctor once
...:... (monthly to get them.
..:::: ) "- The parents, growing old, were worried about
\.... "-
what would happen to him after their death. Terribly
anxious, heavily, medicated, he seemed incapable of
caring for himselL The parents sat on the daybed,
the son in the chair opposite Laing. The interview
was marked by a courteous ease on Laing's part
and a remarkable openness in all members of the
family. Laing is sometimes regarded as being very
hostile to parents and as glorifying the madness of
their children. Yet, though his writings depict the
absurd and sometimes Christ-like suffering of the
children of confused and confusing homes, he does
not vilify the parents. His descriptions, as in Sanity,
Madness and the Family, are quite dispassionate.
But the maneuvers by which children are driven
mad, the connections between the shape of the re-
sultant madness and the structure of the family in-
teraction, are inescapable. In extreme and untenable
situations, extreme measures of evasion and com-
pliance-the signs and symptoms of "mental illness"
-are necessary to survive.
Laing enabled each member of the family to tell
his side of the story. He asked few questions, yet
received much information. He was able, by a shift-
ing glance or direct question, to interrupt what ap-
peared to be deeply ingrained family patterns easily,
without challenge or rancor, and without alienating
any of the family members. The son had clearly
found someone who could understand his predica-
ment, and this understanding helped him build a
bridge of communication to his parents. Laing helped
him divest his fears and felt inadequacies 'of their
frightening and bizarre quality. They were revealed
as responses to family stress which the family could
now begin to understand. Laing patiently discussed
the details of the son's starting therapy with one
of his colleagues. He talked with the parents about
train schedules, fees, living accommodations in Lon-
don, and the possibility of their son's moving into
Kingsley Hall.
Afterward, Laing and I talked for a while about
the interview. This discussion felt very different from
the first one. Laing had let me see how he worked.
A degree of intimacy had been broached, one which
I hesitantly advanced when I asked him why he
hadn't wanted me to use a tape recorder. "I don't
want to make a public statement," he said, "to speak
to all people at all times. The message, I have to
convey is from one person to another. I would rather
60
speak to ,you, so that when you write something it
will be about your experience of me and of London."
I wondered whether what he had said was merely
a rationalization for not permitting a tape recorder.
But it felt as if he were helping to transform our
meeting from an "interview" into a personal en-
counter. He didn't seem to have much to hide.
I
asked his opinion of the body therapy of Wil-
. ' helm Reich and his followers. Laing felt that
. "one could work with emotional problems
by dealing with their physical manifestations."
He mentioned his occasional use of the techniques
of sensory awareness and of yoga. He told me about
a psychoanalyst in London who believed that an
entire analysis could be conducted by dealing with
how someone stood up from a chair. While I s.at,
smilingly surprised, Laing stood up from his own
chair, mechanically, emphasizing each movement;
then he did so more smoothly. He added that his
own interests were, in general, verbal and,
intellectual." As a young man he had wanted to
write stories. At present he is fascinated by attempts
to delineate the structures of cultures, by the work
of the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, and by
Michel Foucault's attempt to write a comprehensive
intellectual history of the last 300 years in Europe.
At my insistence he spoke of his own career. Laing
was born to a poor family in Glasgow in 1927 and
grew up there, attending state-supported grammar
and secondary schools. He was graduated from Glas-
gow University with a Doctor of Medicine degree
in 1951, and then served in the British Army for two
years. After his discharge, he worked as a psychia-
trist in a mental hospital. He set about to see whether
by changing the way some of his patients were treated
he could change the nature of the "mental illness"
they were diagnosed as having. At that time, the
early 1950s, he still believed schizophrenia was pos-
It is our duty to bring up our children to love,
honour and obey us.
If they don't, they must be punished,
otherwise we would not be doing our duty.
If they grow up to love, honour and obey us
we have been blessed for bringing them up properly.
If they grow up not to love, honour and obey us
either we have brought them up ,properly
or we have not:
if we have
there must be something the matter with them;
if we have not
there is something the matter with us.
-From Knots
)
,i
sibly a genetic or biochemical disorder or that it was
secondary to an innate lowered threshold to certain
kinds of stress.
He described, with amused tolerance for his own
"scientific procedure," the sociometric process by
which he had selected the twelve most "out-of-con-
tact" chronic schizophrenic patients on his ward. He
had two nurses each day take the twelve who were
chosen to a pleasant room in another part of the
hospital. There, with decent occupational and recrea-
tional facilities, treated simply as human beings, they
could do whatever they pleased. On the first day,
the patients, many of' whom had hardly moved or
spoken in years, had to be wheeled or pushed off the
ward. "On the second day," he recalled, "an hour
before the ward door opened, they had gathered
around it talking, laughing, jumping up and down:
it was enormously moving."
Within eighteen months all twelve, many of whom
had been ,hospitalized for ten or fifteen years, were
out of the hospital and back to their families. Within
another year they were all back in the hospital.
To Laing this suggested, first, that "a change in
the way schizophrenics were treated could radically
alter the nature of their schizophrenia," and, second,
that the family creates the "disease" in the indi-
vidual. Interest in individual schizophrenics gave
way to studies of the families of schizophrenics. He
conducted these in association with the psycho-
analytically oriented Tavistock Clinic. He went on
to an elaboration of a theory of interpersonal rela-
tions based on models derived from psychoanalysis,
phenomenology, and communications theory.
And this work in turn led to his critiques of a.
society which, he says, produces, and is maintained
by, destructive families and warped interpersonal re-
, lations. And ultimately to the creation of Kingsley
Hall.
There, in the context of a new family and society,
the diagnosed schizophrenic could rediscover and
begin to redefine himself. "My interests," he said,
"fell into line like a row of skittles." For the present,
his interests have taken him somewhat away from-
Kingsley Hall. He is devoting much of his time to
theoretical writings-right now, "an attempt to revise
Freud's theory of defenses."
I wanted to get some idea of Laing's politics. How
did he reconcile his position as a psychiatrist with
his own sweeping criticisms of the society which
produces and maintains psychiatrists? Didn't he feel
that he-and by implication I and other psychiatrists
-should be more directly active in helping to shock
what he describes in The Politics of Experience
as the "often fibrillating heartland of a senescent
capitalism"?
Laing spoke only for himself: he said that he
was "not an activist in the ordinary sense of the
word." "Living in England," he observed, "made
radical activism less pressing than in America." Be-
sides, he felt that he was "temperamentally not very
Who Is Mad? Who Is Sane?
well suited for it." His own energies are devoted to
what he calls "microrevolutions," profound changes
in individuals, families, hospitals, and other small
institutions. These changes may, in turn, bring about
others, not through dramatic confrontation but by
personal contact. Kingsley Hall, it is clear, is one
such microrevolution.
Our time was up, and Laing led me down the
stairs to the door. We stood outside for a moment.
"You can tell your friends in America," he said,
grinning, "that I'm not in a mental hospital." We
both laughed. "Good luck in your scene back there."
When I left Laing's office, I felt satisfied. Even if he
didn't have "the answers," he was unafraid of pur-
suing his questions and living with the contradictions"
they brought. He is a dedicated professionaL with
revolutionary ideas, a staunch opponent of our civili- .; ,f
zation's "abdication of ecstasy," who produces care- " l
ful books; a distant and .ironic person who .. l::
can make mtense felt contact wlth others; a man (-;- .. ,./-'" .
accustomed to the depths of despair and the many ,
faces of alienation, who prepares tea and treats visi-
tors with politeness. I had no nagging doubts about'
his "sanity," and the rumors regarding his hospital-
izations seemed trivial.
In the days that followed, in speaking to people
who were close to Laing, I found no hint of confirma-
tion for these rumors. I can only attribute their per- -
sistence, and the fascination they hold for many of
Laing's readers, to the degree of discomfort that his
ideas have engendered. The parallel that comes to
mind is the response of the medical establishment to
Freud's early work. Freud pointed out that the in-
tensity with which his contemporaries vilified him and
his theories of infantile sexuality was evidence of the .J
strength of their defenses against their own child- <j" - .
hood sexual experiences. Laing, who has sought to .
point out the madness in much of our "normal" life, l::-"
including accepted psychiatric practice, is suspected .':::"'1
by tentative admirers, and accused by his psychiatric y
colleagues, of being himself mad.
T
hat afternoon I took the long tube ride out to
, Kingsley Hall. During the preceding week I
had telephoned twice more, but couldn't get
a definite invitation from the people who answered
the phone. Finally, through Laing's colleague Joe
Berke, I had contacted Mary Barnes, who cheer-
fully agreed to talk with me.
By this time I was well prepared for disappoint-
ment. Everyone I had spoken to told me that the
people at Kingsley Hall were depressed and angry
at having to leave the building. One psychiatrist I
met thought the building symbolized Laing's body,
its present state of neglect the community's fury
about what was happening, directed at Laing. On top
of that, an article that appeared in the Evening Stan-
dard had provoked them. When I read it, it seemed
simpleminded but generally favorable. But it called
61
"
Kingsley Hall a "mental hospital," and some
of the people who lived there were outraged.
I paused for a moment outside the building, looked
at the plaque commemorating Gandhi's visit and at
the array of broken windows. I was reminded of an
abandoned parochial school. I sat on a bench across
the street and tried to imagine what it would be like
inside. A girl came out of the front door and walked
in my direction. "You must be here to see Mary,"
she said. I said I was. "She's leftthe door open. The
bell doesn't work. The children have broken it." She
walked away, and I got up, crossed the street, and
pushed open the' scarred double doors.
I entered a large dark room which was about as
cold as the January day outside. It looked as if it
had once been a chapel or auditorium, but was now
without pews or chairs. On one side, dozens of can-
vases leaned against the wall; to the right were stone
stairs. At the head of the stairs, next to a pay tele-
phone, was a door with a tree painted on it. The
branches looked like arms. This was where Mary
. Barnes had lived for over three years.
While I was wondering whether I had arrived too
early, Mary came up behind me. She led the way
back downstairs, through the auditorium and into
"the library," the room where Laing had lived. "I'll
like living in Ronnie's old room," Mary told me.
"Besides, it's larger than mine was." She apologized
for the condition of the room as we pushed aside
piles of clothes, paint tubes, scrapbooks, and glass
jars. We sat on the floor, Mary in a pink quilted
housecoat and slippers, her thick dark hair, framing a
broad, deeply lined face, flowing over her shoulders,
her knees drawn up against her chest; me shifting
occasionally from one position to another when, dur-
ing the next three or four hours, my body let me know
I was uncomfortable.
There are, in the literature of psychotherapy, some
remarkable first-person accounts of human growth
achieved through madness. Hannah Green's I Never
Promised You a Rose Garden and Marguerite
Sechehcye's and her patient Renee's Autobiography
of a Schizophrenic are two. To me, the story of Mary.
Barnes, a forty-seven-year-old Roman Catholic and
former nurse, who is now a painter and author of
children's stories, is even more striking.
Unlike almost all psychiatric patients, Mary has
been allowed and encouraged to experience. "the
natural healing process" of madness, the "initiation
ceremonial through which the person will be guided
with full social sanction into inner space and time"
of which Laing speaks in The Politics of Experience.
Mary's experience is crucial to Laing's model of
therapy in the same way t-hat Freud's early hysterical
patients were to psychoanalysis. It is quite unlikely
that it could have taken place anywhere but Kingsley
Hall, and even there a great strain was felt by the
other inhabitants.
As she talked of the two periods of months during
which she was quite mad, of the slow evolution of her
62
trust in Joe Berke, who became her therapist, and
of the discovery of herself as a painter, the light
gradually faded from the room until we were sitting
in darkness. After a while, Mary lit a candle. In the
light of the candle I could see changes flicker across
her face as she spoke of her life: the shy child who
had been told she was awkward and untalented, the
embarrassed adolescent, the constricted nursing in-
structor barely holding on to ,her sanity, the frenzied
adult smearing feces on the walls, and the gentle wise
woman who was able, in the calm born of great
suffering, to tell me straightforwardly what she had
gone through.
Mary's speech is quiet, direct, melodious, and
modest. She uses some expressions often: "going
down" for plunges into madness; "it went in on me"
for anger that she turned against herself; "baby" as
an adjective; "out" for people who are sociable-
"he was very out"-and "in" for those who are
feeling introspective.
Since I took no notes and want to convey as di-
rectly as possible the quality of Mary's experience
and her language, some of what follows is quoted
from a paper of Laing's, some from Morton Schatz-
man's chapter "Madness and Morals," included in
Joe Berke's book of essays on counterculture, and
some directly from Mary's own writing.
T
hrough Dr. James Robertson of the Tavistock
Clinic, Mary had gone to Laing in 1963 to
ask for help. She had been in a mental hospi-
tal in 1953 for a year with a diagnosis of schizophre-
nia, and had maintained herself since then as a nurs",:
ing tutor in a general hospital. But she saw her daily
life as a rigid, anxiety-laden, and constricted facade.
She began to sense "that I had lost myself sometime
in my life a long time ago." She felt she was on the
verge of another psychotic episode, but this time, in-
stead of the padded cells and shock therapy of the
mental hospital, she wanted "to go back to before I
was born and come up again." Laing told her that he
was trying to establish a place where she could live
through this experience, and Mary agreed to try to .
"hold on" until he could do so. During this time Mary
continued to work at her job. Severe anxiety attacks
were frequent. At night, with great effort, she pulled
herself together for the next day's work. Periodically
she visited Laing.
Nineteen months later Kingsley Hall opened, and
Mary Barnes moved in: "At first so great was my fear
I forgot what I had come for. Quite suddenly, I
remembered, 'I've come here to have a breakdown,
to go back to before I was born, and come up
again.''' She continued to work for two weeks, but
each night when she came to Kingsley Hall she "re-
gressed." "Life became quite fantastic. Every night
at Kingsley Hall I tore off my clothes, feeling I had
to be naked. Lay on the floor with my shits and
water, smeared the walls with feces. Was wild and
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noisy about the house or sitting in a heap on the
kitchen floor. Half aware that I was going mad,
there was the terror that I might not know what I
was doing, away, outside of Kingsley Hall." She
wrote to the hospital resigning her position and then
took'to bed, "went down" into her madness and back
in time to infancy.
"The tempo was increasing. Down, down, oh, God,
would I never break?"
She stopped eating solids, was fed milk from a
bottle by Joe, by Laing, and by others. She rarely
spoke and lay immobile for hours at a time. "In bed
I kept my eyes shut'so I didn't see people but I heard
~ h e m Touch was all important. Sometimes my body
seemed apart, a leg or an arm across the room. The
wall became hollow, and I seemed to go into it as
into a big hole. Vividly aware of people, I was physi-
cally isolated in my room."
During this time there were several crises. Joe
recalled that at one point Mary stopped sucking,
urinating, and defecating; she was returning to a
completely womblike state. She lost weight, grew
weaker. The community met and decided that they
couldn't let her continue this way, and that at
Kingsley Hall they felt uneasy about putting in the
feeding tube and catheter ~ h t would be necessary.
They told Mary their decision, and gradually she
began to suck again. Somewhat later the smell of the
feces she smeared on the walls became annoying:
Mary\ room was next to the kitchen. Again the com-
munity debated. Eventually it was decided to let
Mary continue. Each time a crisis came up the mem-
bers of the community came together to decide what
to do. Each step on Mary's journey was also a step
in the community's development.
As Mary "came up" out of the madness she put on
trousers, played ball, and danced, as she had never
been allowed to as a child. Joe gave her some grease
,crayons, and in November, 1965, after five months
at Kingsley Hall, she began to "scribble black breasts
all over the walls of the hall. Suddenly a picture
emerged, a woman kneeling with a baby at her
breast. "
"About the house, left over from decorating, were
'old tins of paints and brushes. On the walls of my
room I painted moving figures, on my door twining
stems and leaves, and on the table an orange bird
appeared. Finding odd lengths of wallpaper I made
picture stories. Then on strips of wallpaper backing,
and on the walls of the house, I painted big, very big,
at high speed. Through the spring of 1966 work
poured out, all my insides were loose, the painting,
like lightning, was streaking from the storm of me.
Joe suggested 'paint the Crucifixion'; I did, again and
again; hungry for life I wanted the cross."
Joe was with Mary every day, talking, playing with
her, taking her shopping. For a long time she felt
"Joe ar:.d I are not separate." But there were frequent
crises of trust. Mary told me that once when they
were eating together, Joe put salt on his food. She
Who Is Mad? Who Is Sane?
was desolate: "Joe," she said, "what have I done
that you had to punish yourself?"
In June, 1966, "feeling it go in on me," Mary took
to her bed again, but with the support of the com-
munity she was up in a few months. "In the autumn,
with oil pastels and a sketchbook, I made more
stories with pictures, including 'The Hollow Tree' for
'Ronnie's birt'hday and 'The King and the Donkey.'''
Since then, Mary has been painting and writing
steadily. She has had four shows of her work and
w'as preparing for another when I saw her. The paint-
ings-dozens of which she showed me after we had
talked, on canvas, boards, sheets of wrapping paper,
and the walls-reminded me of a hybrid of Munch
and Rouault. I bought two from her, vivid, powerful
renderings of Saul struck down by God on the way to
Damascus, emblems to me of the blinding force of
Mary's own transformation.
Laing's introduction to the catalogue of her Cam-
den Art Center exhibits seems apt: "In her painting
Mary puts outside herself with a minimum of medita-
tion what is inside her. Paintings are executed with
her finger not because she cannot use a brush, but
because she prefers (often) not to. She is not pro-
fessionally proficient in the art of composition, not
because of the failure to master the means for this
end, but because hers is not the end that this is a
means towards. We must take her on her terms...."
Two paintings by Mary Barnes: Saul Struck Down by God
63
Mary still feels that in many ways she is "not very
grown up." She continues to see Joe in therapy, con-
tinues to learn more about herself. Though she could
have lived elsewhere, she preferred, until its closing,
to stay at Kingsley Hall, which she regarded as home.
There, according to other members of the community,
she was a highly valued therapist. Having gone so
deeply down and come out, she is unafraid of others'
madness. A terrified girl would speak with no one
else but came to Mary, slept in her room for days,
and drank the mixture of warm milk and honey that
Mary prepared for her. When Mary was "down" Joe
had given it to her.
Pi
fter I looked at some of her paintings, Mary
showed me around Kingsley Hall: the large
rooms, now not regularly used, where com-
munal meals were eaten, seminars and entertainment
held; the roof garden; and some of the individual
rooms where people I had met had lived. After a
while we came to "the flat," a living room on the
third story of the house. Several people sat around
an electric heater sipping tea, chatting, and reading.
Just off this room, in a small kitchen, someone was
cooking. Mary introduced me to a couple of people
and left to continue her packing.
I sat down close to the heater, beside a young
man who held his head in his hands. The wall above
him was covered with graffiti. One read "Harold
Pinter was here with his friend Franz Kafka." Fur-
ther up were black three-quarter circles, solid sweeps
of pigment, the breasts that Mary had first painted.
After a while, the girl I had seen on the street came
out of the kitchen and offered me tea. We sat in
silence for a while. I grew uncomfortable and asked
a polite, inane question. Abruptly, she got up. I felt
alone, an awkward snooper.
A meticulously dressed man of about thirty-five
came over and introduced himself as David. I told
him I recognized his voice from the telephone, and
he smiled with satisfaction: "So you've finally got
here." He began to talk animatedly about the Eve-
ning Standard article: "Kingsley Hall is not a hos-
pital, and we are not Laing's patients unless we
choose to be." He said he was thinking of suing the
Standard, and was sending copies of the article to the
members of the Philadelphia Association.
David went on to describe the vitriolic public at-
tacks that members of the organic and behaviorist
Establishment had recently launched against Laing
and Kingsley Hall. He said that William Sargant, the
chief psychiatrist at London's St. Thomas's Hospital,
and one of those quoted in the Standard, had com-
plained of having to "take care of Laing's failures."
He also suggested I read "an absurd article" in which
the psychologist H. J. Eysenck, long a critic of psy-
choanalysis, accuses Laing (and David Cooper) of
"using these poor suffering victims as a platform for
pseudophilosophical arguments."
A tall young man, long-haired, bearded, wide-
64
eyed-a figure out of Saxon legends-wandered by,
grimacing, folding and unfolding his arms. He said
something about "Green helmets" and "Princeton,
New Jersey." I sat very seriously, uncomprehending,
in my best listener's posture.
Everyone else continued about his business. In
the kitchen there was a discussion about the proper
way to cook a Christmas pudding. The voices grew
louder, more argumentative. An older man left the
kitchen, silent, obviously angry. His advice, at first
solicited, had been rejected.
David was carefully mounting copies of the Stand-
ard article on heavy paper. The girl returned to the
room, sat down again with a magazine. The man next
to me was looking into the electric flame of the
heater, warming his hands. /\
Suddenly the bearded man burst out laughing. I
started to laugh too, aware of my own self-conscious
seriousness. He told me that he was "in the iono-
sphere," and that the "air [was] thin." I asked if it
was "lonely," and he said, serious now, that it was
and that 'he "could corne down but am not sure .if I,
want to." Feeling closer to him, I let go of my
psychiatric demeanor, and for a while, through puns,
mimicry, and self-caricature, we carried on a con-
versation. He poured some more tea for me.
During the two day-long visits I made to Kingsley
Hall, I spent about half my time with Mary, talking,
helping her move five years' of possessions from her
old to her new room, and looking at her paintings.
The rest of the time I sat around the flat. The people
who passed in and out became accustomed to my
presence as I relaxed in theirs. I was questioned
about psychoanalysis and lectured on electrical
energy.
Feeling more comfortable, I asked some people
about their attitude toward Laing's theories. A few,
like Mary, were unabashedly enthusiastic. But many,
to my surprise, were somewhat skeptical. One man
wryly observed that "previous encounters with psy-
chiatrists and mental hospitals have numbed me to
theoretical arguments."
Kingsley Hall, almost everyone seemed to agree,
was a good place-Peter, Mary Barnes's brother, and
a newcomer, strenuously objected to the lack of pri-
vate cooking facilities-a home, or a haven in stormy
times. Laing's writings interested people less than
Laing himself, toward whom there seemed to be a
deep but grudging warmth. Even though he no longer
stayed there, and couldn't stop the lease from run-
ning out, he, and the rest of the Philadelphia Associa-
tion, still cared and still fought for Kingsley Hall:
against family-sponsored health officers, bent on
dragging erring relatives back to mental hospitals;
against public attacks from other psychiatrists; and
against an often hostile neighborhood.
Mary told me that with the building soon to be
vacated, no psychiatrist in residence, and the future
uncertain, people were reluctant to "go down." She
saw the community .as wary, its members self-pro-
tective, inclined to keep their defenses up. She said
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that several people were in therapy with Laing and
the others with psychiatrists who had lived in Kings-
ley Hall, and that any community member could
get help free or at low cost. But it seemed unlikely
that anyone would now risk the profound journey
into himself that Mary and others took in the earlier'
years.
Still, the dozen people at Kingsley Hall, many of
whom had been diagnosed schizophrenic, some.
among them having been for long periods on mental
hospital back wards, were finding a way to live with
one another: free from restraints .and coercion, not
needing tranquilizers and shock therapy, independent
of "ward administrators," and without benefit of.
rules and regulations.
An American medical student who had been at
Kingsley Hall the year before told me that even if
she couldn't understand what people were saying
to each other they obviously understood one another.
In two days I couldn't really understand what the
community was saying to itself. But I knew that it
spoke in accents of mutual acceptance and open
disagreement, in deeds of kindness and "appropri-
ate" impoliteness-in anguish and humor and
guarded hope.
Just before I went to say good-bye to Mary, the
young man who sat by the -heater told me that he
was afraid to loosen his tortured and precarious hold
on his "normality" to seek a new, more stable kind
of sanity. He said he felt "like a ship on the edge
of darkness." The image seemed appropriate for
Kingsley Hall as well. Soon the building would be
returned to the pacifists who had lent it, five years
ago, to Laing and his friends.
But Mary Barnes was pretty sure that new Kings-
ley. Halls would be created, new places,' which, as
she put it, would be "good enough to take all the
shit of all the people." Places where people could
There must be something the matter with him
because he would not be acting as he does
unless there was
therefore he is acting as he is
because there is something the matter with him
He does not think there is anything the matter
with him because
one of the things that is
the matter with him
is that he does not think that there is anything
the matter with him
therefore
we have to help him realize that,
the fact that he does not think there is anything
the matter with him
is one of the things that is
the matter with him
-From Knots
Who Is Mad? Who Is Sane?
go back to where they had "gone wrong" and make
a new start. I left her, late at night, looking through
a pile of sketches. She told me to "come back' any-
time."
he Kingsley Hall experience is the central
node, Laing the master switch in a "Net-
work" of men and women who are dedicated
to practicing and living a new kind of psychiatry.
Energy seems to flow from him and his writings,
touching in others sources of creativity which spark
their own projects. Excitement, discoveries, informa-
tion are passed in all directions.
The young psychiatrists who lived there over the
past five years found at Kingsley Hall the same kinds
of possibilities for growth and change as did the
former "mental patients" who came there. The psy-
chiatrists' paths of discovery were less agonizing than
their patients', but they were more fraught with toe-
stubbing ironies. The first problem, very difficult for
even the most relaxed acolyte, was to unlearn the
role of doctor, to drop the self-protective, self-de-
feating guise of the sane man in the midst of lunatics.
Joe Berke, the huge black-bearded bear of a man
who worked so tirelessly with Mary Barnes, de-
scribed how this process began for him: when he
arrived at Kingsley Hall, recently graduated from
medical school, he met a young man named "An-
drew" who had spent nine of -his twenty-one years
in a mental hospital. "Andrew" had been diagnosed
as a catatonic schizophrenic and presumed beyond
help. He shuffled around Kingsley Hall speaking to
himself under his breath. When he wanted to talk
to someone, he put his face right up against theirs
and spoke, often incomprehensibly. This unnerved
Joe, who, for weeks, in spite of his good intentions,
had continued to regard "Andrew" as "that nuL" One
morning Joe rose early and went down to the dining
room. "Andrew" came in at about the same time.
Standing there, in the early morning light, half asleep,
off-guard, they smiled at each other. After that,
"Andrew" was just Andrew, and he and Joe began
to get to know one another.
The others described similar experiences, meet-
ings, and friendships with people .who had been pre-
viously given up by psychiatrists as "hopelessly di-
lapidated, burnt-out schizophrenics." Sometimes
their relationships turned into somewhat more for-
mal psychotherapeutic ones, often not.
When I visited last January, none of the psychia-
trists lived at Kingsley Hall anymore. Cramped,
cold quarters and the arrival of wives who felt the
need for more privacy precipitated their leaving.
But all were still actively involved in Kingsley Hall.
To Leon, whose wife had just had a child, Kings-
ley Hall was itself a "baby," with whose growth and
development he was intimately concerned. Like
Laing, and Mary Barnes, he viewed its closing in
Mayas merely the end of its first phase.
65
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When Kingsley Hall did close, Mary Barnes took
an apartment of her own, the first she has ever had,
and there she paints and writes. Most of the others
whom I met in January moved into two condemned
buildings which Leon managed to rent from the local
council. Joe .and Marty are in the process of organ-
izing another house-hold, and Laing himself described
plans for eventually opening up a larger, more com-
fortable therapeutic center to which psychiatrists
and others could come for training.
But the Network has spread well beyond this
central core. It comprises eighty to a hundred other
people, predominately in England, but .also on the
Continent and in America. Leon, who edits the
Network Newsletter, described it in the first issue
as a "London-based group of people concerned with
liberation particularly in the contexf of human ex-
perience and behavior; of making sense of one's
experience of oneself, the other, the world; of libera-
tion from institutional psychiatric thought and pr.ac-
tice; of healing and making whole, mind-body-soul;
of being."
Already two new households on the Kingsley Hall
model are in the process of opening in America,
one in New Haven, the other in San Jose, California.
. Members of the Network have begun to publish
books on their experience. Leon is editing a book
of writings by people who stayed at Kingsley Hall.
Joe and Mary are finishing a book entitled Mary
Barnes: Two Accounts ot a Journey Through Mad-
ness, which will be published here this year. Others
who spent time at Kingsley Hall are writing about
it and trying to set up similar communities.
As I spent time with members of the Network,
I began for the first time to feel p.art of a larger
personal and professional context which made sense
to me. In spite of geographical and professional iso-
lation, I had really been part of it for several years.
Joe said, half-jokingly, that "if the Network is in
you, you .are in it." I was reminded, first, of the
League in Hesse's Journey to the East and then,
more concretely, of t,he missionary excitement that
pervaded Freud's early circle.
A
new way of looking at madness has given
birth to a new kind of therapy. Patients'
and therapists' strategies of liberation have
begun to coincide. New places for them to "work
things out," to "discover the wholeness of being hu-
man between them," are being created. The insights
won from understanding madness are being used to
transform the social worlds of the "mad" patient and
the "sane" doctor. Kingsley Hall, the Network, and
the new communities in America are among the first
of these transformations. These new developments
in psychiatric theory and practice, sometimes re-
ferred to as Anti-Psychiatry, parallel and catalyze
developments in the larger society.
At Kingsley Hall the barrier between the "sane"
doctor and the "mad" patient was removed. In his
writings, Laing, starting with an attempt to describe
madness, ultimately questions the sanity of the so-
ciety which erected this barrier: "A little girl of
seventeen told me she was terrified because the Atom
Bomb was inside her. That is .a delusion. The states-
men of the world who boast and threaten that they
have Doomsday weapons are far more dangerous
and far more estranged from 'reality' than .any of
the people to whom the label 'psychotic' is affixed."
Laing holds up to his readers a vision of a world
in which all of us are "bemused and crazed crea-
tures, strangers to our true selves, to one another,
and to the spiritual and material world." He insists
that the way out of this pervasive madness is
through profound personal and social transformation.
The metanoiac voyage that took place at Kingsley
Hall must become possible for all who need and wish
to embark on it. Perhaps "mental hospitals," re-
versing history, can become ships of sanity. 0
.j
THE HOLLOW TREE
by Mary Barnes (for Ronnie's Birthday)
There was once a tree in the forest who felt very to the sky. The other trees looked down and gasped
sad and lonely for her trunk was hollow and her and didn't know whether to turn their branches po-
head was lost in mist. Sometimes, the mist seemed litely away or whether to try and cover her empti-
so thick that her head felt divided from her trunk. ness and blackness with their green and brown. The
To the other trees, she .appeared quite strong but tree moaned for her own life and feared to be suf-
rather aloof, for no wind ever bent her branches focated by theirs. She felt she wanted to lay bare,
to them. She felt if she bent she would break yet and open, to the wind and the rain and the sun,
she grew so tired of standing straight. So it was and that in time she would grow up again, full and
with relief that in a mighty storm, she was thrown brown from t,he ground. So it was, th.at with the
to the ground. The tree was split, her branches scat- wetness of the rain, she put down new roots and by
tered, her roots torn up and her bark was charred the warmth of the sun she stretched forth new wood.
and blackened. In the wind her branches bent to other trees and
She felt stunned and though her head was clear as their leaves rustled and whispered, in the dark
of the mist she felt her sap dryas she felt her dead- and in the light, the tree felt loved and laughed with
ness revealed when the hollow of her trunk was open life.
66