Laing’s Contribution
Laing offers us a series of guiding principles, elements of a methodology and a critical engagement with classical psychoanalysis. Theory is itself a discredited concept for Laing, tarnished by its logocentric philosophical heritage and used all too often as a defensive, or even aggressive, instrument with which to separate practitioner from patient.
He does not attempt to construct a coherent model of the mind, nor a theory of subjectivity or psychopathology. There is an underlying tension throughout Laing’s writing which simmers around the role of the unconscious. And although it could be argued that all psychoanalytic theorists—and indeed all psychoanalysts—will have a different understanding of the unconscious, there seems to me to be too much which divides Laing from his hero, Freud, for Laing’s approach to be meaningfully described as psychoanalytic. Laing offers instead a phenomenological approach.
Furthermore, this is an ‘obstinate attempt’. ‘Obstinate’ implies rebellion, psychotherapy as political resistance. Laing’s psychotherapy is a political endeavour which seeks to reintegrate the individual in defiance of social alienation: ‘the task of psychotherapy was to make (…) an appeal to the freedom of the patient.’ (Laing 1964: 61)
As a challenge to what he saw as Freud’s one-person metapsychology, Laing insists that any theory must be situated within the social sphere:
we need concepts which both indicate the interaction and interexperience of two persons, and help us to understand the relation between each person’s own experience and his own behaviour, within the context of the relationship between them.
And we must in turn be able to conceive of this relationship within the relevant contextual social systems (Laing 1990: 41).
As Laing and Esterson demonstrate, ‘’schizophrenia’ is a social event’ (Laing & Esterson 1970: 17). ‘Social’ here implies both the relational dimension of ‘self and other’, as well as the wider societal context. Laing says psychotherapy is an instrument of change for the better not only for the individual but for wider society:
I, personally, am interested in practicing psychotherapy only insofar as I hope that in so doing I am making a contribution to other people, as well as to myself, becoming more fully human, more actual as persons, more real, more true, more loving, less afraid of what it is not necessary to fear, happier, more joyous, more effective, more responsible, more capable of manifesting in everyday ordinary life the desiderata of human existence, courage, faith, hope, loving-kindness in action in the world, and so forth (‘The Use of Existential Phenomenology in Psychotherapy’).
But perhaps what is most important is the ethical insistence Laing returns to again and again, that we are engaged with the person, on a human level:
The science of persons is the study of human beings that begins from a relationship with the other as person and proceeds to an account of the other still as person (…) The experience of oneself and others as persons is primary and self-validating(Laing 1964: 21/23).
In other words, this experience is the locus of therapeutic efficacity for Laing. Furthermore, like Levinas, Laing’s insistence on the unknowability of the other’s experience is a way of respecting the radical alterity of the other; it is an insistence on the dignity of the other. Although this does not mean we have to give up on the possibility of understanding something of the other’s experience.
Finally, there is a call to arms in Laing for psychoanalysts and psychiatrists to challenge the establishment: ‘No one can deny us the right to disbelieve in the fact of schizophrenia.’ It is our right – our responsibility even – to question that powerful monolith, the psychiatric establishment, the medical model and all of the assumptions which go along with it.