If I don’t know I don’t know, I think I know. If I don’t know I know I know, I think I don’t know.
R. D. Laing, Knots, 1970
Clon wore – it was still somewhat notable in 1969 – a ring in one ear, and his hair was dirty blond, falling in careless curls around his face and neck like Shelley’s, though his overall look was more piratical than poetic. When asked what it was short for, he repeated that his name was Clon. ‘Just Clon,’ he insisted, in a way that suggested it wasn’t. He was bold and handsome in a roguish way, and his startling clear blue eyes looked directly at you, always amused, and with, it seemed, a rock-solid confidence in himself that didn’t require yours because he had enough of his own. Compared to the rest of us, he seemed to glow internally.
I was one of about thirty patients at the Paddington Day Clinic, an experiment in intensive group therapy, set up and funded by the local Health Authority, at Royal Oak in West London. A committee of elected patients interviewed prospective patients after one of the two psychiatrists in charge had done so and passed on to us those they thought could benefit from joining the emotional scrummage. New people were only admitted if they passed their second interview. Admission committees generally admit those most like themselves, so it was a fairly homogeneous group: young, very few people over twenty-five, disturbed, angry, dysfunctional, but often talented in a wasted, wayward sort of way, and highly articulate. Not much point in a full-time regime of group therapy from nine to five, five days a week, if people weren’t able to express themselves. We undertook not to take any drugs, including prescription tranquillisers and anti-depressants, and to participate in the various large and small groups that went on during the day. It was a place of high and constant drama. Everyone, some time or other, had their moment as the centre (or victim) of the group’s attention – anyone who didn’t volunteer to talk about themselves and their problem and have it considered by everyone else would, after a period of grace, be challenged and confronted on their silence. It could be very harsh. There were tears, arguments, walkouts, collapses and sometimes violence. Relations within the community, general and sexual, were examined with scalpels. The skin of everything was lifted back to look at the bloody mess that inevitably lay beneath. Every day brought smaller or larger crises and emotional turmoil. You really needed to be quite tough or hooked on emotional turmoil to survive it. Some of us were very troubled, others less obviously so, but if you got through the rather gruelling, unsympathetic patients’ committee interview, it was reckoned you could cope. Mostly, this was right, but during my four months there one or two people attempted suicide rather than talk (or as a result of it); others spoke out and, finding themselves overwhelmed by the effort or the response, left, sometimes for less experimental psychiatric inpatient care. There were those who watched, for as long as they could get away with it, and those who made themselves the centre of the group as much as they could get away with it. It was an education in group dynamics if you were a watcher, but there was always someone watching you and sooner rather than later you would be dragged into the collective eye of the group. If you denied the accusation of evasion or defended yourself, you were not facing up to your problems, or you were aggressive and not facing up to your problems; if you agreed with others’ assessments, you were too compliant and probably concealing the real issue. Breaking down, one way or another, was pretty much a requirement; a proof that you were ‘working’.
Clon lasted longer than any of the watchers – even me. He was never successfully enticed or goaded into the centre of a group session. He sat with his bold, knowing smile on his face and spoke neither on someone else’s problems or his own. If asked directly for a comment or how he felt, he’d shrug and open his blue eyes wide. ‘I’m cool, man.’ He had an exceptional capacity to resist being drawn in. Partly it was his compelling charm, and a mysterious ability to deflect attention as if he had a mirrored surface that enquiry slid off harmlessly and on to whomever else his eyes might turn towards. But it was also because of the confusion he created by the fiendishly cunning puzzle he set the community. I was on the committee that admitted him. His answer to the standard question ‘Why do you think you would benefit from joining this community?’ was instant and direct, spoken with a broad open-faced grin: ‘Because I’ll get a medical certificate and the sickness benefit, man.’
It was a novel response. All patients did get a medical certificate for as long as they were with the clinic to say that they were unfit for work by virtue of a psychological disorder and were entitled to about (I think) £7 a week state benefit. But everyone, including Clon, had been referred to the clinic by an outside psychiatrist as needing treatment and being potentially suitable for this particular experimental form. And nearly everyone given the opportunity at the admission interview to itemise their neuroses and psychoses had to be silenced eventually, or there would be nothing left to tell the group if we let them in. So we laughed at Clon’s casual joke. Yeah, funny, but, really, what was his problem?
‘I haven’t got one. Really. I heard about this place and it’s, like, perfect. I want to hang out here and get paid same as you guys. I’m cool, man. Happy childhood, life’s great. But it would be better if I didn’t have to get a job.’ He smiled amiably as he spoke, as if we were all in on the scam and knew exactly what he was talking about.
‘No,’ said the chair of our committee. ‘Seriously.’
‘Seriously,’ said Clon. ‘They’ve chucked me off the dole and I don’t want to work. I want to be like you cats.’
He had nothing to add. He gave a bland account of being brought up I can’t remember where, nothing interesting, no problems, just didn’t want a job and had heard about the clinic. He went to his doctor, saw a shrink, said what he had to say to be referred, and here he was. Smiling. Coming clean, wanting some of what we’d got.
‘Why should we admit you if you’ve really got nothing wrong with you?’
‘Why not? What’s it to you if I hang around here for a while?’
Bristling, the committee chairman said that everyone here was entitled to be here because they had serious and genuine problems and needed psychiatric help. He would be taking the place of someone who needed treatment. Clon kept his face locked into a smile, while he threw in his ace.
‘Yeah, well, how do you know I’m not faking it... the not being crazy?’
We sent him out of the room so we could discuss his application. It should have taken seconds to come to a decision, and for one or two people there was nothing to talk about. But there was another view. Clon’s brilliant skill at concealing his problems made him an ideal candidate for the clinic. Obviously, he had severe problems – he had been sent here by a doctor, passed on to us by our psychiatrists – and anyone who insisted that they had no mental problems, in general and in particular to the admission committee, was either really deluded or crying out for help to uncover their inner horror. He had virtually told us, with a sneer that by no means meant it wasn’t true, not to take him at his own word. Wouldn’t we be failing him if we rejected him? Colluding with his refusal to face the painful truth about himself? He was in.
For weeks great efforts went on within the large morning and evening group and the smaller groups that continued through the day to get Clon to confront his problems.
‘Clon, everyone has their difficulties. You’ve seen how people open up here. There’s no shame in admitting your fears. We’re here to help. You have to work on your stuff, like everyone else.’
‘Yeah, well, I would, but I don’t have any problems. I’m having a great time. If you’re bothered by me, that’s your problem. I’m getting what I want. This is fun and I’m being paid.’
It was true there was no evidence that Clon was other than quite content sitting in the groups, drinking tea, having lunch, hanging out until five o’clock. He wasn’t moody or given to sudden violence, weeping in corners, turning over tables, or screaming at someone he could no longer tolerate. He tolerated us perfectly, even seemed to enjoy himself, without ever actually participating with issues of his own or commenting on those of anyone else. Eventually, the admissions committee met to decide whether to expel Clon. He was summoned. All he had to do was say that he was fucked up like the rest of us.
‘Hey, I told you the truth and you admitted me. How can you expel me now? Nothing’s changed.’
He was right. The question was whether Clon was madder than all of us or a brilliant con artist. Yet he wasn’t exactly conning us. He certainly wasn’t pretending to be mad. But was he pretending not to be mad? Or – was he pretending to be mad by claiming not to be mad? He was a maestro of the double bind. Ronnie Laing would have loved him. But there were other ways, easier ways of getting social security, without having to sit through day after day of people having tantrums and obsessing about their inner demons. And even if he was just using the place, might it not teach him something in spite of himself? The big question kept returning: was he or wasn’t he authentic? I found myself wondering why it mattered so much to us. Having accepted him, shouldn’t we let him stay? And what the hell if he was playing the system? I had a kind of respect for his position, whatever it was, or really was. But then I’m the daughter of a conman. It was a long meeting. Finally, he was expelled. The danger that we were being taken for a ride (even though, or because, we couldn’t be sure what kind of ride we were being taken for) was too great for us to risk. As Clon had said over and over again in group: it was our problem. We called Clon in and told him he was out. I remember his shrug, and the who-cares, it-lasted-as-long-as-it-lasted beaming smile on his face.
‘Well, fuck you, then,’ he said, not entirely amicably, and swaggered out of the room, out of the building, never to be seen again.
I’m still not sure whether I imagine in sentimental retrospect or actually saw a brief look of fear cross his face before he cleared it, or if his shrug wasn’t exactly the kind of shrug I used to make as an adolescent when I was given up on yet again, and all that mattered was to show that I didn’t care one bit.
I’d been sent to the day clinic after a consultation with Aaron Esterson, who had co-authored Sanity, Madness and the Family, Volume 1 of the proposed series Families of Schizophrenics, with R. D. Laing in 1964. In 1965, The Divided Self, written by Laing alone and originally published in 1960, was published in the Pelican series of books – that lifeline of paperback knowledge and information of every discipline which adorned the period and, along with the system of free public libraries, gave those of us who had rejected or been rejected by a university education, a way to learn. It was the beginning of the anti-psychiatry movement of the Sixties. Families of Schizophrenics proposed the theory that it was families who were mad rather than simply the individuals who were scapegoated by them as the ‘sick member’. The case histories taken by Laing and Esterson were chilling and strangely familiar whether you came from a recognisably mad family or one you had been brought up to think of as ‘normal’. The Divided Self extended this to suggesting that society itself estranged the mad, and caused them to create false selves in order to survive. From this position, it was a short hop, given the ethos of the Sixties, to doubting the normality of normality itself and then to questioning the madness of madness. The qualities of sanity or madness were defined as ‘degrees of conjunction and disjunction between two persons where the one is sane by common consent’.23 Laing was brilliant and was taken up by the intelligentsia, as well as, when they differed, the desperate. Admirers gathered at his feet at parties to listen to him talk about his theories. He drank heavily and took to using LSD frequently. His book The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise24 confirmed the holy-madness/consecrated-drugs connection. Enlightenment found another branch: drugs were already a fast route to opening ourselves up to the religious experience of Eastern philosophy, now they became a way for those not ‘blessed’ with madness to get an insight into this newly hallowed state. From being victims of their families, the mad* became the victims of society in general, and its medical institutions in particular (in timely line with the concurrently translated writings of Foucault). The mad – the word became a banner of resistance – were outcasts, prophets, speakers of unspeakable truths, and were pronounced heroes. Pushed by malign normality, the mad, on behalf of those of us who hadn’t the courage, took a journey to the furthest depths of the human psyche to look at what was really there, and who we really were. They trod the lonely hero’s journey (a classic quest scenario, also in vogue through the new popularity of Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces25) beyond the boundaries of society to places most of us dared not go, and they returned changed but with news of the truth they had found and brought back for us if we would just pay proper attention. When schizophrenics babbled or screamed or wept about their voices and told terrified tales of being spied on by MI6 or Smersh, of being the risen Christ recrucified, or Satan cast down again, they were, Laing said, to be listened to on their own terms, creatively understood, translated like radio messages from the Resistance, not medicated and institutionalised back to numbness – the numbness of the so-called-sane, now revealed to be a contemptible state of willed ignorance. The mad were the super-sane. We couldn’t hear them because we were not sensitive enough, or we couldn’t bear to face the truth they spoke about our own ‘normality’. Just as we were later to discover ourselves to be racist and sexist, so, in the mid-Sixties, we were to understand ourselves as madist. Not only should we stop persecuting the mad, we needed to become mad in order to achieve real sanity.
It was incredibly seductive. The mad hero became a teacher, whose pronouncements were only for those who could or would understand. The crazy were shamans, gurus, speakers in tongues, cut loose from ordinary language and behaviour, and were at risk, as are all holy men and women, of persecution from being locked up and drugged into silence. They were the heirs to the witch hunts conducted by the Inquisition. Society found the mad intolerable and psychically killed them if they refused to conform. They spoke the peculiar language of truth, a kind of poetry, and acted out reality, inscrutable to those who refused to hear and see. Laing and fellow psychotherapists David Cooper and Joseph Burke opened a house in East London, called Kingsley Hall, where the shrinks and the mad lived communally and defied uninitiated visitors to tell which was which. It wasn’t that easy to tell even for those who lived there. Mary Barnes was a famous resident: a former nurse who had had a catastrophic breakdown in her mid-forties. In the basement of Kingsley Hall, she painted frantic pictures in swirling psychedelic colours, howled, ranted, was reborn, nursed dolls at her breast, shat like a baby and rubbed it into the walls. Everything was permitted. Everything expressed the message about reality she was trying to get across. It was a private healing process from which the ‘normal’ could benefit just by watching and reading about it.26 The Good Doctors were there not to control but to enable whatever needed to happen so that the mad could express themselves. If a ‘patient’ took off her clothes during a session, Laing took off his too in order to show that he was on her wavelength. Wavelength was everything, though I’m inclined to doubt now that the mad really wanted their doctors to be as mad as they were. Laing and the other anti-psychiatrists provided hash, mescaline and LSD to open the channels to the truth, in much the same spirit that a handful of other people, responding to similar spiritual and psychological teaching at the time, were trepanning themselves – boring holes in their foreheads in order to let the light into their third eye.
And let me say, for all its excesses and cock-ups and carelessnesses, even the stupidities, the anti-psychiatry movement had a point. Life for the institutionalised mad was grim. In the huge hospitals for the mad, left over from the Victorians, they were drugged into silence and calamitous palsies, received electroshock therapy and lobotomies, well into the Sixties and beyond. In spite of the worthy Quakers of the nineteenth century, care for the mad in large asylums was often brutal and punitive, suffering from a lack of good training and money. What mental institutions did for many people was institutionalise them. Going into the madhouse often trained the mad to want to remain incarcerated. It is not accidental that in Ken Kesey’s book One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,27 the great revelatory moment is when the Clon-like hero, McMurphy, discovers that all his fellow victims are voluntary patients, and not, like him, on a section. They could all leave if they wanted to.
I was certainly ready for anti-psychiatry. I had been in two psychiatric hospitals when I read The Divided Self, and was shortly to be in a third. I never suffered from brutality, but I saw its effects on staff and other patients. Geriatric patients and those we would now call sufferers of Alzheimer’s disease were lumped in with psychiatric patients: they were particularly hard to cope with and got roughly handled. When I objected at one woman, in her late forties with an early form of dementia, who incessantly roamed round and round the day room, whimpering, being pushed into her chair, I was told to mind my own business: ‘You’re just a patient.’ Mostly, I was on anti-depressants and saw a psychiatrist twice a week for fifteen minutes (having seen the terrors of those who had ECT when I was fifteen, I always refused to have it), but in one hospital I was put into ‘sleep therapy’ after it was decided I was particularly depressed, and when a nurse noticed several days later that I was suffering from barbiturate poisoning as a result, and I became ‘difficult’ to deal with, wanting more of the lovely oblivion I had been given, I was detained under a section of the Mental Health Act that deprived me of any right to agree or disagree with my own treatment and the right to leave. I was detained, literally, being held down by several nurses and injected with Largactyl, which put me into another narcosis, but this time with hideous nightmares I couldn’t wake up from. Later, in the Maudsley, it was the ‘abreaction’ therapy and intravenous injections of methylamphetamine. A woman in the bed next to me, incredibly in 1968, was put on the completely discredited insulin shock therapy, another given LSD ‘treatment’. Two or three of the patients had received lobotomies, and sat passively waiting to be discharged. The strangest things were going on. And all the time, in all the hospitals, I watched people come back from their twentieth, thirtieth, God knows how many, electro-convulsive therapy session, pale, horrified and remembering nothing about themselves or where they were, but weeping with fear as the next ECT became due. Psychiatrists I’ve talked to since, some of them working later at the Maudsley, are amazed to hear about the treatment I saw and received, but the hospital was a teaching hospital and regarded itself as being on the experimental edge.
Laing’s ideas came when the time was absolutely right for them. Politics was experience, experience was political. I saw people not being healed, but kept quiet, being made more convenient, sometimes with the best will in the world, but always, it seemed to me, with ears and eyes closed to what the distressed and the mad were actually experiencing. I read Laing’s books as if they were a road map of my life. I wanted to be part of it (even though I was just a humble depressive and he was only really interested in exciting schizophrenics). But when, as an outpatient at the Tavistock Clinic in the mid-Sixties, I said that I wanted to go and work as a volunteer at Kingsley Hall, my psychiatrist responded (quite correctly, of course, it wouldn’t have been very good for my own mental health), ‘If you try, I’ll have you sectioned.’ The threat to lock up and give enforced treatment to wilful patients was always readily available in the psychiatrist’s medical bag and a gift to any anti-authoritarian patient or theoretician.
Laing fused the notion of liberation of the insane with the buzz that was already beginning to be heard about the liberation of the mind in a broader sense, and it was thrillingly cogent. At least in theory. Laing was a brilliant theoretician; but as a practitioner, Dr Ronnie’s patients were often dumped back into institutions or left to cope for themselves when they became too hard even for him to handle. He called in the men in white coats and walked away more than once to my knowledge. Drugs, drink, general craziness and a phenomenal amount of ego mixed with the theory and made some dangerous black holes in the practice.
Even aside from Laing’s own limitations, there was the matter of pain. While we romanticised madness, he and those of us who supported him failed to take seriously the excruciating pain of the mad. Pain was existential truth, so the anti-psychiatrists permitted them to go through it; indeed, insisted that they did. In fact, as anyone stuck in the middle of a severe depression or a terrifying psychotic episode would have told their champions if they’d really been listening, people suffering from severe mental illness would do anything to make the anguish stop. Most of those having ECT, lobotomies, and mind-numbing drugs were voluntary patients, as McMurphy found out, prepared to have whatever treatment it would take to stop the nightmare. The anti-psychiatrists took other people’s pain too philosophically. Nevertheless, for all that, read those early books by Laing and Esterson, even parts of Laing’s later increasingly gnomic, not to say crazy, or faux-crazy writings, and see if they aren’t still powerful, intelligent and compelling.
In just the same way as it happened with politics and education, liberation got confused with libertarianism. And in the area of psychiatry, too, Thatcher and Reagan in the Eighties took up our slack thinking, to transform the rhetoric and turn it into their own special form of radicalism, all the while blaming the chaos caused by the permissiveness of the Sixties for their harsh ‘necessities’. We were guilty of woolly-mindedness: and as in politics and education, the upshot of libertarianism was there to be seen at the time. We didn’t see it, or if we did, we didn’t think about it enough. Thomas Szasz’s book The Myth of Mental Illness,28 was read as another book, along with those of Laing and friends, that promoted anti-psychiatry and the freeing of the mad from the shackles of the medicating doctors. It was, in its way. At least in theory. Mental illness was a category of control by institutions of the individual. Shut down the mental hospitals, free the madmen, they were no more mad than you and me, said Szasz. It looked on a not-careful-enough reading just like the liberating theses of the Good Doctors. How carefully did we read the passages where he said that if the so-called mad behaviour of those pushed out on to the streets was causing civil difficulties, it was simple misbehaviour, and should be treated as such: delinquents should be locked up in prisons, dealt with by courts? And perhaps it wasn’t actually so far from Laing’s position, certainly not so far from his practice. But it’s easy to see now that this view (and perhaps, indeed, the Good Doctors’ views) could sit happily to the far right of the political spectrum. Szasz wanted to get rid of the ‘namby-pamby caring’ that was precisely what us namby-pamby carers in the Sixties were wanting to achieve more of. We were (those of us not aligned to strict Marxist or Trotskyist groups who took more care in analysing what they were reading) profoundly naïve, the wishy-washy liberals, the wets, so sneered at by the Thatcher government. Thomas Szasz wanted no kind of doctoring at all of the mind. Let people be free to roam the streets and cause trouble, and let those who didn’t like it deal with them as individual nuisances. There was no such distinction as bad or mad. The State had no business interfering with matters of the mind, or even supposing that Mind existed. Along with the behaviourist psychologists, like B. F. Skinner and John B. Watson, Szasz’s point was to reject the notion that mind had any meaning at all. He didn’t want to help the mad or listen to them, or offer them asylum; he wanted to abolish the idea of them. He refuted the concept of madness in order to refute any claim for civic responsibility towards others. Close the hospitals, let the mad walk free. Everyone made their own individual choices: the rich, the poor, the mad, the sane. That was their problem. Charles Shaar Murray assessed it correctly when in 1988, after the libertarian Right had done its worst, he noted:
The line from hippy to yuppie is not nearly as convoluted as people like to believe and a lot of the old hippie rhetoric could well be co-opted now by the pseudo-libertarian Right – which has in fact happened. Get the government off our backs, let individuals do what they want – that translates very smoothly into laissez-faire yuppyism, and that’s the legacy of the era.29
The argument limps on, between generations now, about the legacy of the permissive Sixties. There are two accusations: that we caused the greed and self-interest of the Eighties by invoking the self, the individual, as the unit of society and setting up individualism for the Right to pick up and run with; or that we caused it by being so permissive, so soppy about matters that needed hard, firm handling, that a reaction was inevitable if the West wasn’t to sink into a morass of self-indulgent chaos. But, we cry, that wasn’t what we meant. And it wasn’t. We had hardly invented the idea of Self, nor the idea that the individual had a right to respect and equality. Nor is it, anathema though it might be to the communitarian Left, such a terrible notion so long as the bad guys don’t get hold of it. We were, and some of us still are, namby-pamby. We certainly believed very definitely that there was such a thing as society, and that attending to its most vulnerable members was one of its main tasks. But we were guilty, I think, of not imagining the Eighties, of not being able to visualise what David Widgery calls Thatcher’s ‘appalling candour’30 in denouncing society as a myth, and the greed and self-interest (not the same thing as an interest in the self) that could be and was unleashed in the name of sacred individualism. We didn’t really believe in the existence of the bad guys. We were guilty, too, of failing to understand the power of capitalism, the pull of material well-being, because many of us had had it much of our lives and could therefore easily enough imagine something different. We thought we would be happy to share our goods and our relationships. Mostly, we weren’t, but even if we had been, the promise of wealth for all, of owning property rather than having housing provided by councils at fair rents, was too desirable for those that had been left out of ownership. And most people didn’t have either the time or the inclination to devote themselves to listening for the underlying sense the mad might be making. They didn’t want lives that included allowing individuals all the time in the world they needed to regress, to paint and to smear the walls with shit. They weren’t interested in the mental travellers coming back with remarkable tales to tell; they wanted, as people seem always to want, to get on, and getting on meant focusing narrowly on the vital business of getting things (money, success, objects) and not worrying too much about those who didn’t, unless they needed sequestering. Truth (whatever it may be), art (whatever that may be), consideration at a cost to yourself, none of those were priorities compared to a decent standard of living and the promise of ever better, ever more to come.
Whether it was our fault, or the fault of those other radicals of the Eighties and Nineties, the current situation seems to be that those who are looking to be in charge of the world next are actually facing the prospect of not much world at all. There are small signs that a new radicalism is developing, or at least desperate attempts, here and there, to resist the dying of the planet. Gathering force, I hope. The Sixties generation are getting to an age where the world is beginning to look quite baffling and alien. It happens to everyone as they grow older. People don’t notice you in the street, they aren’t very interested in what you have to say. We complain about how things used to be and how they are now – better then, terrible now. And it feels as if this is true. But perhaps it always feels true as the centre drifts away from you. Anyway, no one takes much notice – they make TV programmes called Grumpy Old Men, as we used to sit around laughing at Alf Garnett and his ever-baffled missus.*
What alarms me is how little has actually changed. There are new laws governing what can be said and ensuring that minorities are treated better in the workplace, but even in the developed nations women are still paid considerably less than men for the same work, millions of people are starving around the world and most of them are black, the wife of the first minister of Northern Ireland felt able to call homosexuality ‘an abomination’ in 2008, the Market, whether it is up or down, controls the lives of individuals, and vast corporations have consolidated their power over elected (and unelected) governments. In addition the planet is frying. Some fine souls are still battling; most of us who had the good fortune to be part of the Sixties are plain discouraged.
* Schizophrenics, specifically; those of us who were depressives were merely dull.
* In a British sitcom called Till Death Us Do Part, which portrayed a viciously racist, sexist working-class anti-hero as a lovable idiot, patronised by all around him.