precisely this type of experience – and against amassed aeons of first expulsive and exorcistic penalisation and then diagnostic and quarantine-centred psychiatric institutionalisation – Laing had the keenest of ears.
The discursive definition he arrives at for sanity – as a condition situated in the order of things as they are perceived in the mental health sector at the time of Laing’s writing – clearly demonstrates the author’s acuity to this: ‘sanity is tested by the degree of conjunction or disjunction between two persons where the one is sane by common consent’ (p.36). The constitution of the ‘common’ in this formula is tinged with an establishment authoritarianism in which the readily associated, but less favoured term ‘anti-psychiatry’ garners some credibility; indeed, it is the concentration of power – in which can always reside a latent form of authoritarianism – within the psychiatric conjunction, and its medical gaze, as ‘common consent’, that privileges the ‘one’ – inevitably, the psychiatrically informed one – as sane. Laing’s alternative approach is to hear the other side, the other one; very precisely, the other themselves.
His methodology for doing so is set out in relation to the figure of the Rubin’s vase (in which a vase or two symmetrical silhouetted faces staring at one another can be determined): ‘to look and to listen to a patient and to see ‘signs’ of schizophrenia (as a ‘disease’) and to look and to listen to him simply as a human being are to see and to hear in as radically different ways as when one sees, first the vase, then the faces in the ambiguous picture’ (p.33). Through this latter approach to looking and listening, Laing was not only able to come to a better understanding of his schizophrenic patients, to assist and make some healing ‘progress’ with them, but also to return to discover more about what it is to be schizophrenic, and to contribute new insights surrounding aetiological factors. One such is revelatorily touched upon in his consideration of childhood reliance on certain forms of magical thinking:
It is indeed an important achievement for the child to gain the assurance that the adults have no means of knowing what he does, if they do not see him; that they cannot do more than guess at what he thinks to himself if he does not tell them; that actions that no one has seen and thoughts that he has kept to himself are in no way accessible to