A Phenomenological Approach
In the chapter on ‘Phantasy and Communication’ (Laing 1971: 33), Laing attempts to capture what it is to be an ‘origin of experience’, a ‘self-being’, what it is to experience as a human subject. In particular, how self experiences other. There are clear implications here for the practice of psychiatry and psychotherapy:
It is difficult to understand the self-being of the other…. By what token do changes in the way man experiences his self-being, his being-for-himself, determine his own definition of himself as ‘ill’, ‘physically’ or ‘psychologically’, and what leads one person to decide that the self-being, the being-for-himself of the other, is sick? (Laing 1971: 35-6).
He is destabilising or bracketing off established and accepted concepts of health and illness. He goes on to say: ‘in so far as we experience the world differently, in a sense we live in different worlds.’ Thus we begin to build a picture of the phenomenology Laing is proposing instead of what he views as the schizoid psychoanalytic theory which is based on a shaky method of inference explained by imaginary processes. But what exactly does Laing mean by ‘phenomenology’?
In a paper entitled ‘The Use of Existential Phenomenology in Psychotherapy’, written in 1986, Laing begins with a simple definition: ‘by phenomenology I mean the science of description.’ He underlines the anti-theoretical nature of phenomenology, as a mode of deconstructing: ‘I am not trying to induce you to adopt a ‘theoretical model’. Rather, I am trying to depict a way of seeing, a way of contemplating what is going on, whether praxis or process, a destructing of destructive constructions.’ He goes on to give examples of how defining ‘what is going on’ for a patient in terms of process has entirely different consequences to defining what is going on in terms of praxis. Thus ‘existential phenomenology’ is an application of this method to an understanding of existence, of being-in-the-world: ‘existential phenomenology attempts to characterize the nature of a person’s experience with his world and himself.’ (Laing 1964: 17).
In Laing’s phenomenology there is a ‘bracketing off’ of the inessential; of theory, of metapsychology, of any pre-conceived models of the mind. It is a suspension of assumptions about, for example, what it is to be mad or to be ill. Assumptions built upon theory are exchanged for experiential enquiry.
This technique is exemplified by Laing in his attempt to understand psychosis in The Divided Self. Laing’s central argument is as follows: ‘There is a comprehensible transition from a sane schizoid way of being-in-the-world to a psychotic way of being-in-the-world.’ (Laing 1964: 17) Laing guides the reader through the description of the experience of such states as ‘ontological insecurity’ and ‘self-consciousness’, going on to describe the ‘false self system’ which is created and the ‘double-bind’ scenarios people are subject to. This is not a ‘model of schizophrenia’, but a phenomenological account of the schizophrenic experience. But is it a theory? Is it possible to assert that this ‘description’ is entirely free of inference and supposition? In fact, Laing does not deny that there is ‘interpretation’ or ‘deciphering’ at work: ‘The existential-phenomenological construction is an inference about the way the other is feeling and acting.’ (Laing 1964: 31) Here is an appropriation of that very concept, denigrated elsewhere by Laing, of ‘inference’,
However, what is suggested is that the intentions, the ethics of the Laingian therapist are different to the psychoanalyst who, based on inferences from behaviour, attributes to the other aspects of his/her experience of which he/she is unaware – taking up the position of ‘the one who knows’. He says: ‘our view of the other depends on our willingness to enlist all the powers of every aspect of ourselves in the act of comprehension’ (Laing 1964: 32) This ‘enlisting’ implies a willingness in the therapist to draw on his/her depths of experience, to go to his/her darkest corners, to be alongside, to truly meet the other: ‘Psychotherapy must remain an obstinate attempt of two people to recover the wholeness of being human through the relationship between them.’ (Laing 1990: 45 [italics in the original]).
And as suggested in the statement ‘we must see if we now can survive without using a theory that is in some measure an instrument of defence’ (Laing 1964: 25), this must entail a willingness to meet the other naked, without pre-suppositions, without theory as a cloak or shield, and with an attitude of not knowing. Psychotherapy is for Laing, quite simply, a being with the other: ‘this re-search is validated by the shared experience of experience regained in and through the therapeutic relationship in the here and now.’ (Laing 1990: 47).