THE X PROCESS:
ANTI-PSYCHIATRY AND ITS HOPES
This essay has three parts. Click here for the first part, “JOURNEYS”. Click here for the third part, “No King Lear”.
19. David Cooper, Psychiatry and Anti-Psychiatry, p. 50.
20. David Cooper, The Death of the Family (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1972), p. 12.
21. David Cooper, The Grammar of Living: An Examination of Political Acts (London: Allen Lane, 1974), pp. 145, 96, 19, 107.
22. R. D. Laing, The Politics of Experience, p. 133.
23. R. D. Laing, The Facts of Life, p. 95.
24. Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity: The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, 1969– 1970 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972), p. 171.
25. R. D. Laing and A. Esterson, Sanity, Madness and the Family, p. 217.
26. R. D. Laing, The Divided Self, pp. 37, 85, 139.
27. Janet Frame, Faces in the Water (London: Virago Press, 2009), p. 150.
II
THE FACTS OF HALF-LIFE
THE FACTS OF HALF-LIFE
Cooper stopped working as a hospital psychiatrist in the mid-Sixties. He then also quit a lucrative Harley Street practice in order to commit “an act of rupture by which a person breaks and breaks out of an imprisoning system.”19 For him the purpose of anti-psychiatry wasn’t to offer treatment but to support anybody wishing to make the same kind of break, which Cooper called metanoia. “What we have to do is to totally re-evaluate certain experiential and behavioural states that are regarded as morbid,” he wrote in The Death of the Family (1971), and see them instead as “strategies to achieve autonomy and self-consistency.”20 He shifted the focus of his increasingly militant writing from asylum repression to the overarching authoritarianism of normality itself, which madness opposed and might one day even overthrow. He referred in The Grammar of Living (1974) to “the Golgotha of The Normal Life” and the “deadly, deadening trap of normality.” He advocated hallucinogenic drugs, communes, promiscuity, masturbation, meditation, and stranger things besides. LSD was one route into pre-birth and post-death experience, and Cooper also imagined mutations of being, as in a strange passage about the psyche’s inner ape. “The orang-utang is a reality hidden within us now,” he wrote. He wondered about the forceful but necessary procreation of new self forms. “By an existential harakiri we have to put our concealed insides out into the world—and stay alive.” For some people actual suicide was the only viable escape, and Cooper thought that jumpers off tall buildings had epiphanies as they fell to the ground. But he preferred shamanism of the nonlethal kind. He approvingly quoted Kierkegaard on the ubiquity of despair, but noted that along with this wound there was also “the cosmic womb where we can be alone enough at last.”21
Anti-psychiatry sought a radical redemptive cure for alienation. Laing saw himself as a “true physician-priest.”22 Rebirth became the name for the process, assisted by enlightened doctors, of somebody getting a second chance, free from psychiatry and family. In The Facts of Life (1976) Laing wrote jaggedly about a twenty-four-year-old patient who grew introspective in between the shock treatments inflicted on him:
as he gets deeper
he feels he gets closer
tremendous pressure begins to come upon him from all around
it is like being born, he says
every time it is stopped, compulsively, by electric shocks he has to start from the beginning again
There is not one psychiatric installation known to me in the UK, and perhaps two or three in the USA where he would be “allowed” or even “helped,” to go “through” what he feels impelled to go into.
There is no place known to me where a young or old psychiatrist may, as a matter of pure research interest, be allowed to observe the natural history of this process.
could he be trying to go through a birth experience?
Is it possible that in an appropriate environment, and with skilled therapists as accoucheurs, he might be “delivered.”23
Eventually Laing wanted to be the channel of a disembodied maternal force which could undo the pain of the past, wipe the slate clean. He rejected the professional ivory tower and became a celebrity renegade preaching reincarnation. He referred to it as humble midwifery, but anti-psychiatry became more like a voodoo attempting in vain to reanimate broken life. Lionel Trilling in Sincerity and Authenticity (1972) heaped scorn on anti-psychiatry, which he caricatured as “the thought that alienation is to be overcome only by the completeness of alienation, and that alienation completed is not a deprivation or deficiency but a potency”24—but in truth it was no easier for Laing and Cooper to stay with the sorrowful problem of solitary life-without-feeling-alive than it was for Trilling himself.
For an epigraph to The Facts of Life, Laing chose lines of Euripides: “Who knows / if life is not death, / and death life?” This relegated to the realm of vague poetic paradox the hollow everyday existence Laing described in his early writing. It was possible “to die existentially if not biologically,” to quote Sanity, Madness and the Family.25 This was the limbo state repeatedly referred to in The Divided Self. Alluding to Marianne Moore, Laing insisted that just as real toads got into imaginary gardens, so “ghosts walk in the real streets.” He said of one patient: “In order to survive he had, like the possum, to feign a measure of death.”26 In the Seventies, however, Laing shied away from these insights. He therefore didn’t dwell on patients who failed to get better or on the ordinary no-going-back experience of aging—of growing older and weaker, and slowly dying inside from the fallout of so many losses and failures. Most of the patients Laing discussed were under thirty, and by the time he was middle-aged he preferred to think about rebirth, not the trials of later life.
Anti-psychiatric writing often described the haunted half-life of the mental patient, but nothing in that literature captured it quite as piercingly as this passage in Janet Frame’s novel Faces in the Water (1961). The narrator glimpses the area where burnt-out male patients are kept like animals, away from the main hospital, and she understands that nothing will ever save them: “I once looked through at the men prowling unshaven in their tattered outlaw clothes, and I could not forget their hopelessness; it seemed deeper than that of the women, for all the masculine power and pride were lost and some of the men were weeping and in our civilisation it seems that only a final terrible grief can reduce a man to tears.”27 Though they were quick to point out the failures of traditional psychiatry, even the anti-psychiatrists recoiled from the thought of such an incurable fall. Anti-psychiatry’s passion for regeneration sidelined life in a state of helpess decline. Rebirth and revolution were easier to ponder than the real-world ghost life of frailty and regret, so Laing doubled down on the idea of a fresh-start cure.
GO TO PART 3