These footnotes, almost like the unconscious itself, are a sort of ‘noises off’, a subtext which does not dare speak out loud. They denote a slippage: psychoanalysis, theory, cannot be entirely bracketed out, it leaks onto the page which was intended to be free of theory: ‘We are limiting ourselves very largely to the transactional phenomenology of these family situations.’ (Laing & Esterson 1970: 42) In this way, Laing and Esterson are setting up a contrast or contradiction between a psychoanalytic and a phenomenological approach, and this assertion seems to be crucial to the ‘Sanity, Madness’ project itself. The phenomenological approach is described as follows:
Each person not only is an object in the world of others but is a position in space and time from which he experiences, constitutes and acts in his world. He is his own centre with his own point of view, and it is precisely each person’s perspective on the situation that he shares with others that we wish to discover (Laing & Esterson 1970: 19).
‘Each person’ it is claimed, ‘is his own centre with his own point of view.’ Yet surely it is the unconscious, speaking from the sidelines, disrupting this seemingly one-dimensional description of ‘each person’s perspective’, which knocks the subject off his/her centre.
As Lacan commented: ‘Freud’s discovery was to demonstrate that this verifying process authentically reaches the subject only by decentring him from self-consciousness’ (Lacan 2006 [1953]: 241).
Similarly, in ‘The Unfinished Copernican Revolution’ (Laplanche 1999), Laplanche argues that Freud oscillated between a Ptolemaic position, in which the subject is at the centre, and the other-centred Copernican position: ‘The Copernican revolution (…) suggests that man, even as subject of knowledge, is not the central reference point of what he knows.’ (Laplanche 1999: 56).
Laplanche designates the unconscious as ‘an internal other but not at the centre’ (Laplanche 1999: 60) and he makes reference to Freud’s adoption of the id ‘as an agency which lives us more than we live it.’ Lacan expounds on this idea also:
…this Elsewhere (…) present for all of us and closed to each of us, in which Freud discovered that, without thinking about it, and thus without anyone being able to think he thinks about it better than anyone else, it thinks. (…) It is in these very terms that Freud announces the unconscious to us (…) (the unconscious is the Other’s discourse) (Lacan 2006 [1955] 458-9).
This psychoanalytic account is in direct contradiction to Laing/Esterson’s in Sanity, Madness and the Family in which each person ‘is his own centre’. Furthermore, even if the footnotes described above do imply a decentring, it is a one-sided decentring. It is acknowledged, if only in passing, that unconscious motivations are shaping, colouring, even distorting the interactions between the family members, but what of the unconscious of the interviewer? And what of the interactions between the interviewer and the family members? The very designation ‘interviewer’ seems to be an insistence on the neutrality of this absent presence. There is no mention of transference on the part of the family members towards this person, nor of the interviewer’s counter-transference as a possible distortion of the discussions which are, it is carefully underlined, recorded – as if to emphasise their objectivity. The interviewer is not implicated in the scene. Nor does Laing, in his individual case studies, tend to reflect on the impact his presence may have on the unfolding narrative of the patient.
What is being evoked here is a tension between Laing’s notion of a phenomenological approach and that of psychoanalysis, between a supposedly phenomenological description of an individual’s experience and the ‘inferences’ involved in a psychoanalytic interpretation of unconscious phantasy. I think this tension goes to the core of Laing’s struggle with psychoanalysis.