Daddy issues

Guattari on Laing

Dagmar Herzog has some interesting things to say about Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, first published in French in 1972. On its publication, she writes, Anti-Oedipus ‘was repudiated almost immediately, and apoplectically, by prominent psychoanalysts, psychiatrists, and philosophers in France – repudiations to which both [authors] responded, singly and together, with amplifications and clarifications.’ Yet despite all the secondary literature on Anti-Oedipus that has since emerged emphasising, for example, Guattari’s activist engagements in various Trotskyist groupuscules or his experiences in French institutional psychotherapy, working alongside Jean Oury at the ‘innovative asylum’ La Borde, Herzog contends that ‘One crucial point has… strangely, been missed... Anti-Oedipus needs to be understood also as a psychoanalytic text, not just [as] an attack on psychoanalysis.’ 

Though Guattari was suspicious and critical of the socially disengaged tendencies of mainstream psychoanalysis at that moment and, as the book’s title indicates, he and Deleuze were intent on attacking certain key tenets of psychoanalysis (primarily the primacy of the holy Oedipal triangle: mommy-daddy-me), Anti-Oedipus nonetheless ‘redeployed’ various psychoanalytic concepts and bears the influence of specific psychoanalytic thinkers: not only Jacques Lacan, but also Wilhelm Reich and Melanie Klein. 

I’m interested in returning to Guattari’s engagements with British anti-psychiatry, both in Anti-Oedipus and elsewhere, which he accused of failing to shed its psychoanalytic baggage.  

Herzog argues that Deleuze and Guattari remained indebted to psychoanalysis despite their critiques of it but interestingly their main critique of British anti-psychiatry was precisely that: ‘we can see how the after-effects of 'psychoanalysm' dog the methods of Laing and his friends.’ In Anti-Oedipus Deleuze and Guattari praise Laing for daring to embark on an ‘interior voyage’ into psychic space and speak admiringly of his characterisations of psychosis and schizophrenia. British anti-psychiatry is, they say, ‘sensitive to the schizophrenic breakthrough’. They discern in Laing’s writings on his own regressive experiences and descriptions of formless, drifting, hallucinatory states an analogue to their ‘body without organs’: ‘R. D. Laing is entirely right in defining the schizophrenic process as a voyage of initiation, a transcendental experience of the loss of the Ego.’ But they nonetheless maintain that the Oedipus complex was not successfully dispensed with by the British anti-psychiatrists: ‘familialism… is ever present.’ Laing’s work though apparently ‘revolutionary’ is defined by contradiction; his radicality undermined by his persistent attachment to the family as a hermeneutic tool in a mode of treatment that remained troublingly rehabilitative or adaptive in its aims.

They claim that in Laing’s project though ego-loss is explored and even encouraged, ultimately the ego is reinstated:

At the very moment [Laing] breaks with psychiatric practice, undertakes assigning a veritable social genesis to psychosis, and calls for a continuation of the "voyage" as a process and for a dissolution of the "normal ego," he falls back into the worst familialist, personological, and egoic postulates, so that the remedies invoked are no more than a "sincere corroboration among parents," a "recognition of the real persons," a discovery of the true ego or self.

The accusation is that British anti-psychiatrists traced psychotic symptoms and utterances back to the family, rather than analysing them on their own terms. They quote David Cooper who interprets a patient who says he is ‘controlled by an electrical machine or by men from outer space’, as though these are embodiments of the family. (Though they fail to mention examples that don’t conform to this pattern like Laing’s famous description, in the 1964 Preface to The Divided Self, of a girl ‘terrified because the Atom bomb was inside her,’ which he uses to demonstrate that the violent world in which people diagnosed with schizophrenia live might be truly mad, rather than the people who live in that world who are labelled as such.)

In effect, Deleuze and Guattari contend that Laing and Cooper domesticate psychotic experience and constrain the deterritorialising flows and fluxes of desire. Although the British anti-psychiatrists claimed mental alienation was provoked by social alienation, they located social alienation in the family, and so society in the broader sense (or, more precisely for Deleuze and Guattari, capitalism) recedes from view. Though many people associated Laing with advancing a theory of mental illness grounded in society, Laing’s definition of the social realm was narrow, indicating not the world but the home (or sometimes a person’s immediate institutional environment), and it did not include a thorough-going analysis of the psychic impact of social relations under capitalism (although how one might go about actually doing that remains an open question).

The occasion for Guattari and Laing’s first meeting was an event organised by the French psychoanalyst Maud Mannoni in 1967, two study days devoted to ‘child psychosis’. And also, incidentally, the occasion for a rare encounter between DW Winnicott and Jacques Lacan. It was on this occasion that Guattari first developed his criticisms of Laing’s approach. The result was an essay called ‘Mary Barnes, or Oedipus in Anti-Psychiatry ', which discusses the infamous anti-psychiatric therapeutic community at Kingsley Hall. R.D. Laing had set up the experimental community at Kingsley Hall in East London in 1965, its doors were not locked and drugs were not administered. It was as renowned for its celebrity visitors (including Sean Connery), LSD-fuelled parties and counter-cultural events, as it was for its controversial advocation of psychic regression among the residents. Mary Barnes had been diagnosed with schizophrenia and admitted herself to Kingsley Hall after reading Laing’s Divided Self where she regressed to infancy, even exploring intrauterine experience. Only at the most extreme points in this process, like when she began smearing her shit on the walls, did the other members of the community intervene. She began painting during her time at Kingsley Hall, having been encouraged to use paint as a substitute for shit. She later exhibited her work and wrote an account of her experiences with Joseph Berke, who had worked closely with her at Kingsley Hall.

Guattari argued that the radical promise of Kingsley Hall was always at risk, ‘besieged on all sides’ with ‘the old world oozing in at every crack.’ ‘But the worst threat to Kingsley Hall’, he continued, ‘actually came from within; though free from identifiable constraints, people still went on silently interiorizing social repressions; and, furthermore, no one could escape the simplistic reduction of all things to the same old triangle (father, mother and child) that confines all situations that exceed what are considered the bounds of normality within the mould of Oedipal psychoanalysis.’

Guattari’s assessment of Laing is scathing:

Laing is, certainly one of the people most deeply committed to the enterprise of demolishing psychiatry. He has·broken down the walls of the hospital, but one gets the impression that he remains the prisoner of other walls still standing within himself; he has not yet managed to free himself of the worst constraint, the most dangerous of all double binds, that of what Robert Castel has called 'psychoanalysm' - with its obsession with significant interpretation, its 'false-bottomed' representations and shallow depths.

Here, the accusation is not simply that Laing reduces everything to a specific form of interpretation tied to family relationships; it is a critique of interpretation as such. He goes on to refer to interpretation as a ‘reductionist drug.’ Though he maintains that in Laing’s thought ‘everything starts from the family’, he goes on to attack Laing’s hippie-ish interest in meditation and internal voyaging:

He would like us to become one with the cosmos, break out of the humdrum of everyday life. But his method of reasoning cannot detach the subject from the familial grasp: though he sees it only as the starting point, it catches up with him again at every turn. He tries to resolve the difficulty by taking refuge in an eastern style meditation, but that cannot long withstand the intrusion of capitalist subjectivity whose methods are nothing if not subtle. He does not take Oedipus seriously enough: without a frontal attack on this vital tool of capitalist repression, one can make no decisive change in the economy of desire, or, therefore, the status of madness.

He and Deleuze would later argue in Anti-Oedipus that this focus on the family betrays a ‘petty bourgeois’ approach, blocking out any analysis of the broader social context within which people’s subjectivities are formed. Yet here he suggests Laing needed to take the Oedipus complex more seriously in order to demolish it, suggesting Laing was deluded about the success his own approach had in breaking down mental walls. Guattari also mocks Laing for banishing any mention of capitalist social relations under which his radical institution is operating, for failing to discuss the financial arrangements through which patients and doctors live and work there: ‘Familialism means magically denying the social reality, avoiding all connection with real fluxes.’

According to Herzog, Guattari’s frustrations with psychoanalysis were specific to a particular moment in its history:

Psychoanalysis succeeded so brilliantly in the first half of the Cold War, especially in the US but by extension also internationally, precisely by shedding whatever socially subversive potential it had once had. Concomitantly, psychoanalysis, as a movement, had largely lost interest in seriously theorizing the complex interconnections between the self and the wider society.

Guattari’s clinical work and political activism led him to reject this loss as untenable: ‘in Anti-Oedipus itself, and in the many further texts generated by him in its long unwinding aftermath, there was a continual searching for a language that could communicate effectively his conviction of the unremitting mutual imbrication of selves and society.’ It would be possible to give a similar account of Laing’s trajectory: he started his own psychoanalytic training analysis with Charles Rycroft (supervised by DW Winnicott and Marion Milner), and was influenced by psychoanalytic concepts and practices, but his clinical work led him to identify some of their limits and he broke off his analysis. Maybe I’ll attempt to give an account of some of his engagements with psychoanalysis in a separate post.

By his 1967 book The Politics of Experience and the Bird of Paradise Laing would declare that psychoanalysis, ‘has no concepts of social collectivities of experience shared or unshared between persons… It has no way of expressing the meeting of an ‘I’ with ‘an other’, and of the impact of one person on another. It has no concept of ‘me’ except as objectified as ‘the ego’.’