THE COST OF POSITIVE THINKING

This post has three parts. Click here for the first part, “No Other Way”. Click here for the second part, “Pros and Cons”.

15. R. D. Laing and Aaron Esterson, Sanity, Madness and the Family: Families of Schizophrenics (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1970), pp. 219–20.

16. Ibid., p. 220.

17. David Cooper, Psychiatry and Anti-Psychiatry (London: Paladin, 1970), pp. 74–5.

III
THE RIGHT WAY

It was a major achievement of the anti-psychiatry movement to show that disingenuous family groups could turn the idea of freedom into a con trick. Time and again in Sanity, Madness and the Family (1964) Laing and Aaron Esterson observed a young person caught in the snare of scapegoating doublespeak. One young woman tried to explore her predicament only to be drowned out by her mother’s perverse and muddled theorising:

MOTHER: Well I think Mary’s idea of being independent—it doesn’t mean being able to do what you want to do, it means being able to model a course for your life—finding ways and means of carrying it out. But to be independent doesn’t mean you walk out the door and don’t tell anybody where you are going, and you’re worried stiff about where she is—that’s not independence to me.

MARY: I didn’t walk out thinking I was going to be independent—for goodness’ sake—

MOTHER: Oh I don’t mean at the time you went away.

INTERVIEWER: But you wouldn’t see that as inconsistent with being independent would you?

MOTHER: Well it may be independence of a kind but it’s not the right kind of independence. She can be independent. She can make her arrangements and then say, “I’ll go away a week on Monday” or whatever it was—“I’ve got a nice job so-and-so”—and let’s know and go decently.

INTERVIEWER: But supposing she didn’t say that sort of thing to you?

MOTHER: Well if she didn’t want me to know she could say, “Well, look, Mummy, I’m going away, but I’d rather you didn’t know or bother about where I’m going.” I would say, “All right then.” That’s still the right way isn’t it?

MARY: But when do I go the wrong way then?

MOTHER: When you leave us wondering how you are getting on and what you are doing.

MARY: When did I do that?

MOTHER: You’ve never done it, it’s the way you’re talking about doing things—about independence.¹⁵
Laing and Esterson commented that Mary’s insensitive parent was “impervious to the point that Mary repeatedly makes, that she does not want to be ordered to be autonomous.”¹⁶ In Psychiatry and Anti-Psychiatry (1967), Cooper likewise described how the parents of one of his patients sent such mixed messages about their son’s adulthood that he never felt comfortable leaving home. He would rush back from university on a whim only to prepare immediately for the return journey in a state of panic. “The liberation he was offered was in fact a Trojan horse,” Cooper wrote. “To act freely entailed his submission to the injunction to be free: freedom and unfreedom were finally equated.”¹⁷ The multitude of positive-thinking therapies, of which est and to a lesser degree The ManKind Project are only two, also demand compliance as the price of choice—which is a swindle not a deal.