Daddy issues, part II

R.D. Laing and psychoanalysis

This follows on from last week’s post discussing Guattari’s criticisms of Laing. I discussed Dagmar Herzog’s argument that Anti-Oedipus should be read as being influenced by and not only critical of psychoanalysis. And the same kind of argument could be made about Laing as well…

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In the opening pages of The Divided Self (1960) R.D. Laing proclaims:

The greatest psychopathologist has been Freud. Freud was a hero. He descended into the ‘Underworld’ and met there stark terrors. He carried with him his theory as a Medusa’s head which turned these terrors into stone. We who follow Freud have the benefit of the knowledge he brought back with him and conveyed to us. He survived. We must see if we can now survive without using a theory that is in some measure an instrument of defence. 

Laing accuses Freud of subduing the seething psychic forces he’d discovered. 

But it makes more sense to trace Laing’s psychoanalytic influences to the specificities of British psychoanalysis post-Word War Two, than it does to analyse his more generalising references to Freud. The psychoanalysts he cited and engaged with most substantively were people he knew or was in institutional proximity to in London, including Wilfred Bion (known for his work on group dynamics), Susan Isaacs (who underwent analysis with Otto Rank and Joan Riviere and was known for her experimental work in schools), Henry Ezriel (a Kleinian interested in group analysis) and John ‘Jock’ Sutherland (who published on object-relations theory). In the Preface to Self and Others (1961) he writes: ‘The book owes a great deal to many sources which are, for the most part, little discussed in the text itself—[including] psychoanalysis, particularly the work of [Ronald] Fairbairn, Melanie Klein, [Wilfred] Bion, [D.W.] Winnicott, [Charles] Rycroft, [Erik] Erikson, Marion Milner.’

Laing arrived in London from Glasgow in 1956 with the intention of training as a psychoanalyst. Laing and Aaron Esterson’s work with people diagnosed with schizophrenia that forms the basis of Sanity, Madness and the Family (1964) was undertaken while Laing was based at the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations. Laing had originally hoped to be analysed by DW Winnicott but instead began his analysis with Charles Rycroft. He was supervised by Winnicott and Marion Milner. 

In The Divided Self, Laing advanced an existential understanding of mental illness. ‘Madness’ was understood to result from discrepancies between a person’s individual existential reality and the social reality they inhabited. Schizophrenia was thus defined as an intelligible response to an individual’s particular social environment. Cheryl McGeachan argues that

Laing’s desire to understand “psychotic” individuals who he encountered within the context of their own immediate situations drove him away from the approach of Freudian psychoanalysis, with its desire to explain phenomena in terms of essences…

Laing complained that when he was working in psychoanalytic institutions that psychoanalysts saw no relevance in his philosophical interests. He remembered ‘Winnicott making several, unsuccessful attempts to pronounce the word ‘phenomenology’ in front of him.’ And was ‘was dismayed to learn’ that Melanie Klein ‘knew nothing about the work of almost any other European thinker apart from Freud.’ The characterisation of Laing’s existentialism as a critique of psychoanalysis was also voiced by some within the psychoanalytic community, but Laing’s interventions were framed by others as something closer to an immanent critique and his engagements with psychoanalytic texts show that he also came to his ideas by thinking both through and against psychoanalytic thought. 

Laing’s reservations about psychoanalysis were not only theoretical, but based on his clinical experiences and frustrations with approaches taken by the institutions he encountered in London. He recalled ‘being unpleasantly surprised to find that the Tavistock was an outpatient organization’ and was disheartened by the lack of rapport between patients and psychiatrists there. He remarked disapprovingly of the patients being treated at the Tavistock:

These were ordinary people who lived in Hampstead and all very white and very middle class, and none of them seemed to be any more disturbed than I was or anyone else. I had a lot of sympathy with the Maudsley argument that they dealt with the really ill, and serious cases, and that the Tavistock was a sort of dilettante outpost of an organization that dealt with normal people.

Allan Beveridge observes that after his move to London and embarking on his work at the Tavistock ‘Laing’s clinical notes reflect his clientele’s middle-class world of private schools, tennis, and theatre going.’ His famous publications of the period were based not on his clinical work there but on previous research conducted in Glasgow where he worked with psychotic patients. Though he had yet to embark on his own training analysis: ‘During this [earlier] period Laing drew on fairly orthodox Freudian concepts. He asked patients to tell him what came into their mind and to remember what they had been feeling and doing; and he examined their past memories and dreams. His clinical notes reveal that he made fairly ‘orthodox psychoanalytical comments, for example, he said of one female patient: ‘She has withdrawn libidinal cathexis from love-objects (husband, son) . . . this relationship to self (under her own lash) reflected in transference—“I feel as tho’ I’ve been whipped”’

Deleuze and Guattari may have criticised Laing for locating the aetiology of psychosis in the family, but Laing’s conceptualisation of the family did not rely on the Oedipal triangle. Instead he approached every person’s upbringing as irreducible to any other person’s. For Laing no family was alike and any family could include a ‘multiplicity of persons’. The term for him did not necessarily imply an individual’s biological parents and siblings, but instead indicated the context or environment in which they grew up. The influence of psychoanalytic thinkers on Laing’s work had little to do with family relationships, but was instead connected to his understanding of how individuals understood themselves in relation to their environments. His ‘existential’ approach was not straightforwardly opposed to a psychoanalytic one, but also drew from psychoanalysis.

In 1960, the year Laing published The Divided Self, D.W. Winnicott published an essay entitled ‘Ego Distortion in Terms of True and False Self: The Maturation Processes and Facilitating Environment’. The mutual influences are difficult to trace retroactively and Winnicott’s patients were ‘neurotic’ while Laing’s were ‘psychotic’, but both works discuss the concept of the ‘false self’. Years later Laing declared that his understanding of the ‘false self’ owed nothing to Winnicott, despite the fact that he’d sent a manuscript to Winnicott in 1958 claiming he’d drawn inspiration from him. Winnicott for his part inserted Laing in his bibliography in later editions of his essay, but expressed frustration that he had not been given credit for his role in introducing the concept of the ‘false self’. 

Both Laing and Winnicott describe experiences in which people’s understanding of themselves do not accord with the world’s perceptions of them, in which they do not fully experience themselves as ‘real’ or in which their understanding of what constitutes reality does not coincide with other people’s. They both describe patients who do not feel as though they really exist, but feel as though they simply play a role. In Winnicott’s account the True Self is the product of a good enough mother, which allows the infant to feel congruent with its environment: ‘The True Self has a spontaneity, and this has been joined up with the world’s events.’ Laing describes the false self as a kind of mask that ‘arises in compliance with the intentions or expectations of the other’. The performance of a false self can, he says, seem ‘perfectly normal. We see a model child, an ideal husband, an industrious clerk.’ But eventually the discrepancy between selves can produce strange behaviour, the compliant performance can tip into caricature and the ‘true self’ might finally erupt – ‘what is called psychosis is sometimes simply the sudden removal of the veil of the false self.’

Laing’s discussion of the ‘false self’ chimes with his accounts of group therapy sessions he led at the Tavistock in the late 1950s. His approach to group therapy seems at this point to have been similar to sessions run by others at the institution; generally groups of around seven people would sit in a circle with the main psychiatrist for seventy minute sessions. In the 1958 article ‘The Collusive Function of Pairing in Analytic Groups’, Laing and Esterson approvingly cite Wilfred Bion’s observation of a tendency for pairs to form within analytic groups. They identify the phenomenon of the ‘concealed pair’, a relationship between two patients which is paradoxically made obvious to others by their ostentatious avoidance of one another in the analytic group situation. The key to understanding these dynamics, they argued, was the question of exhibitionism and imagined onlookers. They argue that unlike in one-on-one analysis, group therapy gives the opportunity of revealing discrepancies between fantasy and reality, because the patient is not only relying on the analyst’s account of reality but can seek confirmation in the other members of the group. Through the patients encountering each other’s mutually incompatible versions of reality they can come to acknowledge the falsity of their own.

These themes also recur in Laing’s book Self and Others (1961) in which he approvingly cites Bion, Sandor Ferenczi and Winnicott (while being scathing about Anna Freud). The book opens with a long critical engagement with a 1952 essay by the Kleinian analyst Susan Isaacs on ‘The Nature and Function of Phantasy’. Laing says her essay exemplifies an understanding of ‘unconscious phantasy’ then dominant among psychoanalysts in Britain. He seems to be reckoning with the inability of existing psychoanalytic methods and concepts to adequately make sense of things he encountered in his clinical practice. 

The book discusses people whose understandings of the world and of themselves radically differ from those of other people. According to Isaacs, Laing says, it is only possible to infer things about another person’s experiences so an analyst can only infer things about the experiences of an analysand. He identifies ‘intractable difficulties’ with Isaacs’ paper and specifically with her understanding of fantasy. He attacks the ‘dichotomous schema’ on which he says her argument relies, which carves out a neat distinction between ‘the inner world of the mind’ and ‘the external world of the subject’s bodily development and behaviour, and hence of other people’s minds and bodies.’ He claims the following binaries structure many psychoanalytic works: inner/outer, mental/physical, mental/external and bodily realities, figment/sensuous experience, psychical reality/physical reality, mind/body. But these starkly differentiated pairs, he argues, cannot account for the way fantasy functions. A neat theory blots out the messiness of experience. He gives an example of a patient who believed she was as ‘cold as death’ and who began to experience physical symptoms: her tongue felt twisted, her chest felt empty, her hands seemed blue-black. To deny the reality of this experience or to claim it could only be understood as a being confined to the inner realm of the mind cannot account for the way that fantasy manifests in the body.

His main contention is that psychoanalytic concepts smother rather than illuminate psychic phenomena and that psychoanalysts begin from concepts rather symptoms: ‘Theory can only legitimately be made on behalf of experience, not in order to deny experience which the theory ignores out of embarrassment.’ He moves on to consider the slipperiness of the term ‘reality’ within psychoanalysis. For Laing it is important to acknowledge a patient’s experiential reality, not to insist on some really real reality that they are failing to apprehend. 

But his frustrations were shared by some psychoanalysts themselves. Marion Milner wrote in favour of Laing being admitted to the Institute of Psychoanalysis, despite objections from some other analysts, saying: ‘I found him a pleasure to work with because I never feel he is distorting the material to make it fit into a preconceived theory or formula, he never gives ready-made or cliché interpretations.’