Challenge to Psychoanalysis
Indeed this is not the only way in which Laing’s theory diverges from the Freudian model. Laing’s central challenge to mainstream psychoanalysis is twofold. Firstly, he criticises Freud’s one-person psychology as failing to adequately represent the relationship between self and other:
Instead of the original bond of I and You, we take a single man in isolation and conceptualize his various aspects into ‘the ego’, ‘the superego’, and ‘the id’. How can we speak in any way adequately of the relationship between me and you in terms of the interaction of one mental apparatus and another? (Laing 1964: 19).
In the second chapter of The Politics of Experience, Laing unpacks these arguments further. He dedicates a whole chapter to a survey of ‘The Psychotherapeutic Experience’, spelling out in a footnote that this is ‘From the point of view of the psychotherapist’ (Laing 1990: 39). In other words, he is examining the differing theoretical approaches of psychotherapists. Laing begins by boiling down the essence of psychotherapy, common to all methods: ‘a therapist, a patient, and a regular and reliable time and place.’ (Laing 1990: 39) Given the simplicity of these elements, however, ‘it is not so easy for two people to meet’. (Laing 1990: 39) In a sense, this is where the Laingian project begins—a ‘true meeting’ with the other—because, as he argues in this chapter, all previous approaches have failed.
Laing begins by advocating a balance of concern between interpersonal interaction, behaviour and experience. He does not explain this methodology in detail, but does admit to the elusiveness of the therapeutic cure: ‘the really decisive moments in psychotherapy (…) are unpredictable, unique, unforgettable, always unrepeatable, and often indescribable.’ (Laing 1990: 47).
In other words, these ‘decisive moments’ are beyond language. This statement has important implications regarding the role of theory in a ‘talking cure’. Laing is suggesting that there is something mysterious and elusive which goes on between people which cannot be theorised. Perhaps this is what is implied in Laing’s exhortation that we not use theory as ‘an instrument of defence’ (Laing 1964: 25): theory as an attempt to manage or even master the anxiety evoked by uncertainty or not knowing. He is also implying that, in contrast to the Lacanian approach, therapeutic efficacity is not only located in the medium of speech; psychotherapy also involves something which is beyond language, which is ‘indescribable’.
The second failing he highlights in this chapter is along the lines of the vase/faces phenomenon: the person is objectified and depersonalised by the theory. This problem originated with Freud who, Laing suggests, was confined by the intellectual climate of his times which required that he present man as the ‘object of natural scientific investigation’. In other words, his approach was destined to become an objectifying, depersonalising endeavour.
The object-relations theoretical developments, whilst attempting to achieve ‘a synthesis between the intra and inter personal’ (Laing 1990: 44) are also dismissed because ‘it is still objects not persons that are in question’ (Laing 1990: 44) and because ‘projection and introjection do not in themselves bridge the gap between persons.’ (Laing 1990: 42)
Laing makes quick work of ruling out all transactional, systemic and games-based theories, judging them to negate that which is specifically human: ‘A personal relationship is not only transactional, it is transexperiential and herein is its specific human quality.’ (Laing 1990: 44) Behaviour therapy is given the most damning treatment of all. It is described as ‘the most extreme example of such schizoid theory and practice that proposes to think and act purely in terms of the other, without reference to the self of the therapist or the patient, in terms of behaviour without experience, in terms of objects rather than persons. It is inevitably therefore a technique of non-meeting, of manipulation and control.’ (Laing 1990: 44-45)