THE X PROCESS:
ANTI-PSYCHIATRY AND ITS HOPES
This essay has three parts. Click here for the first part, “JOURNEYS”. Click here for the second part, “The Facts of Half-life”.
28. D. L. Rosenhan, “On Being Sane in Insane Places,” Science, new series, vol. 179, no. 4070 (January 19, 1973), 250–58: 253, 256.
29. David Cooper, Psychiatry and Anti-Psychiatry, p. 114.
30. Mary Barnes and Joseph Berke, Mary Barnes: Two Accounts of a Journey Through Madness (New York: Other Press, 2002), pp. 13, 157n.
31. Joanne Greenberg, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden (London: Pan Books, 1978), p. 238.
32. The Archway Community is discussed in Joseph Berke, I Haven’t Had to Go Mad Here: The Psychotic’s Journey From Dependence to Autonomy (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1979), ch. 7. See also Paul Gordon, An Uneasy Dwelling: The Story of the Philadelphia Association Community Houses (Ross-on-Wye, Herefordshire: PCCS Books, 2010).
33. Janet Frame, Faces in the Water, p. 98.
III
NO KING LEAR
NO KING LEAR
The high-profile work of Erving Goffman and the anti-psychiatrists forced mental hospitals to change, but only superficially. In a famous article, “On Being Sane in Insane Places” (1973), a Stanford psychologist exposed ongoing problems. D. L. Rosenhan assembled a team that entered both public and private asylums under false pretenses. Three psychologists, two physicians, a painter, a housewife, and the professor himself went to different mental hospitals, each of them complaining of inner voices muttering something about emptiness. These pseudo-patients, as Rosenhan called them, used fake names but told no other lies and mimicked no other symptoms. Every one of them was diagnosed as insane, and committed for between seven and fifty-two days (see also “Asylum Politics”).
Inside, the undercover researchers studied the way psychiatric wards were run. They noticed that staff zeroed in on any sign of individual pathology but discounted context. There was a rule of thumb: “behaviors that are stimulated by the environment are commonly misattributed to the patient’s disorder.” Staff also shunned patients by avoiding eye contact, ignoring questions, punishing excessively, readily handing out pills, and failing to respect the few vestiges of personal space patients were allowed. The researchers were accustomed to being treated as competent citizens, and when that prestige was removed by the institution it made them frantic. Level-headedness became impossible. Seeking to recover his status, one researcher tried to seduce a nurse and compulsively offered other inmates psychotherapy, gambits which staff presumably took as the usual crazy grandiosity. Rosenhan and his team said that the no-win situation of their diagnosis made them feel helpless, invisible, and unworthy. “Neither anecdotal nor ‘hard’ data can convey the overwhelming sense of powerlessness which invades the individual as he is continually exposed to the depersonalization of the psychiatric hospital,” Rosenhan wrote, and he must have known that the team went through only a fraction of what it was possible to suffer there, if for no other reason than that his report was taken so seriously afterwards.28 The mental hospital continued to sustain its own vampiric institutional vitality by discrediting the protests of patients. These places were still abusive, despite reforms.
Cooper had attempted to put into practice his ideas about anti-psychiatry in an experimental unit known as Villa 21 at Shenley Hospital, Hertfordshire, but like Laing he decided that a “place to which people choose to come in order to escape” had to be outside hospital walls.29 In 1965 the two nonconformists were among the founders of the Philadelphia Association, an independent psychotherapy group that set up community alternatives to mental hospitals. The first of these establishments, Kingsley Hall, became a famous hub of London radicalism. Its best-known resident was the former nurse Mary Barnes. With therapist Joseph Berke’s help, she spent her years there inventing the treatment that she hadn’t been able to get in any mental hospital. In Mary Barnes (1971), the book Berke and Barnes wrote together about this experiment, she explained what motivated her. “I was trying,” she wrote, “to get back inside my Mother, to be reborn, to come up again, straight and clear of all the mess.” For a while she was fed with a bottle and in her baby-like way smeared herself with excrement, which she also used to make murals. Barnes was a scathing critic of mental hospitals, calling them spider’s webs and grinding machines, and in one way this imitation of infancy was an utter break with traditional psychiatric methods. In her eyes, however, not only she herself but also an institution was being incubated and reborn in Kingsley Hall, which was a “real, true hospital.”30 After Kingsley Hall closed down in 1970, Barnes never needed psychiatric attention again. Living the anti-psychiatric dream, she managed to start over and establish herself as a painter. Aside from the counterculture setting, her deliverance wasn’t dissimilar to the emancipation described in Joanne Greenberg’s asylum-friendly novel I Never Promised You a Rose Garden (1964), which ends with the “rich and fertile lands” of a fulfilled life on the narrator’s horizon.31
If Kingsley Hall was some kind of authentic hospital under its Swinging Sixties surface, the London households that the Philadelphia Association set up afterwards were more rough and ready, judging by a documentary film made by Peter Robinson about one such household, the Archway Community.32 In this film, Asylum (1972), another former hospital patient and Kingsley Hall resident, David Bell, is the playful and irreverent central presence. On screen he engages in a great deal of cryptic banter, wears drag, chats idly with local boys in the street, riles his housemates, and crawls out of a downstairs window as though to test his freedom to come and go as he pleases. When an earnest visitor raises the politics of the nuclear family, Bell takes up the topic with deadpan neutrality. “It gets you past the fifth year of your natural life—one should get past one’s fifth year—then one is in the hands of the education authority after the fifth year, and one’s career is perhaps chosen about one’s fifteenth year,” he says. “Then about one’s twenty-eighth year one can decide whether one’s anywhere near it or not. And if not, one can find out who to blame. That’s a comfort, having somebody to blame.” Asylum ends with a return to the topic of careers, as Bell tells the filmmaker about his background. He worked on “control instrumentality for power stations” for an automation firm. He did mathematics as well as electronic engineering but left the job because it had connections to the military. Then he was a computer programmer at London University before joining a commune—presumably Kingsley Hall—which was “rather a disaster and I finished up in the hospital.” There is none of Bell’s oddball skittishness during this part of the conversation. It is mournful. There is neither any blame nor any expectation of being cured. In Frame’s Faces in the Water the narrator keeps thinking of Shakespeare—“over and over in my mind I saw King Lear wandering on the moor”33—yet, past his prime and out of a job though he was, Bell was no King Lear, just a wisecracking Prufrock growing eccentrically older in shared accommodation in Islington. When he talks about the work he used to do, his words of failure have no tragic majesty. What comes through in the modesty of his quiet plain speaking is the kind of indelible sadness that Laing illuminated in The Divided Self, and which anti-psychiatry was determined to overcome, but overzealously and with too much hope.