“We are too happy to accept the mad artist, and to repeat the usual litany of Nietzsche, Van Gogh, and Artaud. Such instances are dramatic, romantic, and creative. We are much less happy to believe those who are diagnosed with schizophrenia might have something to say, and much less happy to engage with the lived experience of suffering and ‘madness’ as it confronts us.

The Journey

In The Politics of Experience Laing offers a metaphor of planes flying in formation to explain his attitude to schizophrenia. The schizophrenic is flying ‘out of formation’, but not ‘off course’, as the whole formation may be ‘off course’. Laing suggests that we should neither idealise those ‘out of formation’, nor simply force them back ‘into formation’. Rather, Laing argues that we should treat schizophrenia as a journey, as an experience, and should create a place and guidance for those undertaking such a journey. He wryly notes that ‘Psychiatrically, this would appear as ex-patients helping future patients go mad.’ In another formulation, he states: ‘Madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be break-through. It is potentially liberation and renewal as well as enslavement and existential death.’

The flippant or quick reading, which Laing himself can proffer, suggests a simple alternative: liberation or enslavement. Liberation is a result of the mad aiding themselves, while enslavement is the fault of ‘society’. In fact, we could argue that Laing’s sympathy to the position of the schizophrenic, who inhabits a kind of absolute alienation from society, is replicated in his own analysis. The result is a tendency to reproduce a sharp distinction of the individual and their possible authenticity from the automatically alienating effects of ‘society’, and this threatens to block real consideration of how mental ‘illness’ is socially embedded and how it might function as a point of critique to alter social relations. Franco Basaglia was critical of Laing’s belief that he could work outside the system, when the struggle was within and against the system. Laing fell into an ironic error, as he had used Hegel’s point about fear of action and fear of entering into social relations to characterise the pathological dimensions of the schizoid state. Laing himself could not integrate his analysis of ‘existential death’ with the historical forms and patterns of domination in such a way as to alter them. It may be Laing’s own later prophetic and mystical mode came out of a deepening of this detachment from society, as the shift from concrete analysis led to the abstract alternative: inside and oppressed, or outside and liberated.

Despite, or because of, these tensions, which speak to all such experiments, Laing’s work still offers lessons to our unpropitious times. In particular, this lies in Laing’s recognition of class and gender pathologies, which mean that ‘mental illness’ is not exterior to society, but a symptom and sign of these social pathologies. Laing’s own identification with the absolute alienation of the schizophrenic, his own exclusions and failures, threaten to leave these insights detached and isolated. This is, of course, reinforced by over thirty years of defeat for radical experiments. Yet, if we return to Laing, we might see that the ‘voyage’ to liberation can be helped and aided, but that there is no guarantee of break-through. It is the very possibility of such a journey that we have, however, learned to deny.”

rest @ http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/2276-legacies-of-anti-psychiatry-and-r-d-laing