However, although in this chapter Laing has outlined the ‘going-astray’ of Freud’s enterprise and those that followed Freud, he is often keen to underscore the enormous admiration he has for the courage with which Freud laid the terrain. And it is equally clear that he sees himself as continuing along Freud’s path:
Freud was a hero. He descended to the ‘Underworld’ and met there stark terrors. (…) we who follow Freud have the benefit of the knowledge he brought back with him and conveyed to us. He survived. We must see if we now can survive without using a theory that is in some measure an instrument of defence (Laing 1964: 25).
Laing’s second major challenge to mainstream psychoanalytic thought relates to the concept of ‘unconscious experience’.
The Unconscious
Throughout his work, Laing seems to be engaged in a struggle to resolve his own understanding of the unconscious. In the introduction to Sanity, Madness and the Family, Laing and Esterson warn the reader that they will not be analysing the unconscious motivations which are, they do not doubt, at play within the individual members of the families they are studying:
Our findings are presented with very few interpretations, whether existential or psychoanalytic. (…) The psychoanalyst frequently makes attributions about the analysand’s motives, experiences, actions, intentions, that the analysand himself disavows or is unaware of. The reader will see that we have been very sparing about making attributions of this kind in respect to the members of these families (Laing & Esterson 1970: 25).
There seems to be a subtle disparagement of these psychoanalytic ‘attributions’ and yet, on numerous occasions, the authors seemingly cannot resist such an analysis. For example, in the footnote on page 42:
Clearly, here and in every other family, the material we present is full of evidence of the struggle of each of the family members against their own sexuality.
Again, on page 55, another footnote states:
We remind the reader once more that we are fully alive to the inferences to which these facts point, namely Mr. Blair’s struggles with his unconscious incestuous feelings towards Lucie, her mother’s jealousy of Lucie and her husband, and Lucie’s own sexual attachment to her father.
And yet again on page 80:
A psychoanalytic construction would be that Mrs Church saw Claire through a film of projective identifications.