" vVHO ~S MAD?WHO IS SN.B?

R D Laing: In search ofa new psychiatry'e

byJames S. Gordon

I"To increasing numbers of readers-psychiatrists as well as patients; politicallactivists and dropouts; the hardly literate,isearching young; as well as middle-class!artists and intellectuals-R. D. Laing islthe guide who most clearly elucidates:the disordered surfaces and depthslof their own lives." .

IIn a work;ng-dass area of Londoo's East End,. near where the River Lem flows over marshes,

Ipast the gasworks, and into the Thames, stands

a three-story, sixty-year-old, dusty brick buildingcalled Kingsley Hall. Nearby are dismal rows of .:modern apartments. The rest of the neighborhood isIcomposed of Victorian homes, converted to multipleidwellings. A few blocks away are pubs, grocery'stores, and other shops. Across the street from theiHall, which stands alone, is a small open space.I Sixty years ago, two wealthy spinster sisters with:social-work inclinations established Kingsley Hall as(a settlement house. In time, the sisters died and!left the building to a foundation, the Kingsley HallIAssociation. Over the years the building served asla center for social, religious, and pacifist activitiesiin the East End.

In 1931, while he negotiated India's fate withIBritain, Mahatma Gandhi slept on a straw mat injone of the tiny cells on the roof of the building. HeIkept a goat in his room and milked it for food.lCabinet ministers, puz~led ?y his choice of locati?n,,came there to talk WIth hIm. On the wall outSIde:Kingsley Hall, a blue and white plaque commemo-!rates Gandhi's visit.

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In 1965 the building was leased to the Phila-delphia Association (Philadelphia means, literaUy,"brotherly love"), a group of Londoners, headedby the Glasgow-born psychiatrist Ronald D. Laing,who are dedicated to "relieving" and investig-ating"mental illness of all descriptions." Though thele2se ended last May, the consequences of the Phila-delphia Association's five-year tenure could be asimportant for the therapy of schizophrenia, indeedfor our conceptions of sanity and madness, as Gan-dhi's visit was for the future of India.

In January, 1970, I went to London to visitKingsley Hall and to speak with R. D. Laing andsome of his co-workers. I had just been appointeda chief resident (administrator, and instructor ofdoctors and medical students taking psychiatrictraining) on a psychiatric ward in New York, andit seemed to be the time to take a trip that hadbeen brewing in me for four years, since I had readLaing's first book, The Divided Self.

Four years ago, although he had already writtenseveral books, Laing's name was known only to asmall number of people who were interested in exis-tential psychiatry and the phenomenology of schizo-phrenia. It was only with the publication of ThePolitics of Experience in ,1967 that he began to beregarded as a major cultural and social critic. LikeNorman O. Brown and Herbert Marcuse, he drewon psychoanalytic insights to make a radical critiqueof Western society. But where Marcuse and Brown'are theoretical and speak in generalities, Laing isimmediate and personal. He speaks directly fromhis own experience to that of his readers. He speaksboth as a therapist with "mad" patients and as aman groping for sanity in a mad world.

In The Politics of Experience the reader is con-stantly made aware of' Laing's own uncertainties.'

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I .Illuminations are shadowed by doubt. The bookbe;:>irs by questioning its own existence: "Few bookstoduring my own psychiatric training, I was deeplydisJatisfied with the theoretical models psychiatristsap lied to their patients and appalled by the sup-pas dly therapeutic techniques that these modelsdic ated or permitted. I was also disturbed by thehas ital psychiatrist's institutionalized position asthe guardian and enforcer of received social values.In he Divided Self, I found a perspective whichhel ed me to understand and experience my patientsdir ctly, without the distorting prism of diagnosticcla sification. In Laing's later works, I began toper eive the outlines of a new, broader conception

.of anity and madness and of the role of the psychia-trist. In these books he had begun to examine thefa~ilial and societal conditions which producedmehtal patients. He had come to see individual

ma~ness as the distorted reflection of a pervasiveso~al and political madness, of which psychiatrywas itself a part. He felt that only through a re-eV~luation of our socially and institutionally definediders about sanity andwadness could he arrive atan conception of true sanity, any true therapy form~ness. Only in a new setting, where all previous

_de nitions and roles could be called into question,co ld this re-evaluation proceed. At Kingsley Hall,for five years, he and his co-workers, together with anu ber of people who had been "mental patients,"were embarked on this venture. I hoped that what

Jarhes S. Gordon, M.D., a 1967 graduate of the HarvardMddica-! School, is a chief resident in psychiatry atth Albert Einstein College of Medicine.

they had learned there could guide me. in my ownundertaking.

I n order to understand the originality and sig-nificance of what happened at Kingsley Hall,it is necessary first to present some of the moretraditional ideas about madness and its treatment,and the critique that Laing makes of them.

There have always, and in all cultures, been somepeople whose behavior was regarded by others asdifferent and unusual. But these people, howeverdeviant or "mad," were not always thought to be"sick." It is only during the last two centuries,in Western Europe and America, that the madman-no longer considered as possessed or saintly, annoy-ing or amusing-has come to be seen primarily as

sick. )The reasons why madness came to be regardedas a disease are complicated.. Thomas Szasz, anAmerican psychiatrist, points/to the fact that inthe industrial era the traditional' Christian categoriesof sin and salvation were displaced by the scientific-medical ones of disease and health.

Advances in pathology in the nineteenth centurydid indeed show a relationship between some madbehavior and damage to the brain. Neurosyphilis,chronic alcoholism, and arteriosclerosis all causedpeople to speak and behave in a mad fashion, andall produced identifiable pathologic lesions. Butthe bmins of people with the most prevalent formof modern madness, schizophrenia (by conservativeestimates one to two percent of all Americans will bediagnosed as schizophrenic at some point duringtheir lifetime), show no pathologic lesions. Nor, atthis time,. has any genetic defect or biochemical ab-normality been conclusively demonstrated in theirbodies. Nevertheless, psychiatrists treat people whoact and speak strangely as if they were diseased.And they look for the signs and symptoms of schizo-phrenia just as a specialist in internal medicinesearches for sugar in the urine of a suspecteddiabetic.

Madness is a personal experience and social fact.Schizophrenia is a medical artifact. But the assump-tion that schizophrenia is a disease dictates thatphysicians declare who has it, and care for those sodiagnosed. It provides the rationale for trying tocure the schizophrenic by the medical means of tran-quilizers and electroshock rtherapy and, with fortu-nately diminishing frequency, surgical intervention inthe form of a lobotomy.

The creation of mental hospitals institutionalizedthis convergence of social fact and medical artifact.In Madness and Civilization, French historian of cul-ture Michel Foucault points out that with the declineof leprosy at t-he end of the Middle Ages, madmentook the place of lepers as social scapegoats. Dur-ing the Renaissance, madmen were expelled fromtheir native cities and confined to boats, the "ships

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o fools." These ships served to isolate and excludetme socially disruptive and sometimes frightening~adma.n from his fellow citizens. At present, withinal medical framework, mental hospitals serve thes~me function. One half of all the hospital beds in~merica are in mental hospitals', and more than one~~h~~~fc~~ese beds are occupied by diagnosed schizo-

Medical students and young physicians who are.b ginning training in psychiatry are taught to classifyt ir most bizarre patients according to categorieswpich owe their origin to ,a late-nineteenth-century

G~rman psychiatrist, Emil Kraepelin. Kraepelinadopted his French contemporary Morel's term" I cmence precoce" ("precocious or early insanity")a d placed under this rubric, catatonic, hebephrenic,a d paranoid psychoses. In his discussion he em-p asized the onset of these conditions in young

pIe and their usual progression to a state ofm ntal deterioration.

.--- In 1911, the Swiss psychiatrist Eugen :BIeuler,e~phasizing the ~ati~nt's state. of mind rather t?anthf outcome of hls.c!lsease, collled the term schlzo- .p~irenia ("split-mind" or "split-soul"). Bleuler out-lin;ed what he called the primary and secondary

. sY~Ptoms of schizophrenia. The primary symptomsin lude the "4 A's" that still form the basis for firstleQ~Ures on schizophrenia: distortions of Affect (forex mple, the patient is laughing when the situationsh uld call for crying); loose Associations (use ofwords and phrases which do not seem to connectwi~h one another); Ambivalence (a constant uncer-taifty or changing of mind);' and Autism (an ap-pa ent preoccupation with internal concerns and alac of relatedness to the environment). Secondarysy ptoms, often quite obvious and bizarre, but notess ntial to ,the diagnosis, include hallucinations,ne ativism, delusions, and stupor.

he psychiatrist's initial task involves observingor [lUCidating these symptoms in a patient and com-ing to a diagnosis. And a considerable amount oftiq and energy is devoted to perfecting one's abilityin his process. In The Divided Self, Laing pointsout the wrongheadedness of this enterprise. He triesto how how the medical model, with its assump-tio~ of the doctor's scientific objectivity, prevents

rat~er than facilitates his underst,anding of thepa1ent.aing Sees rigid diagnostic and psychodynamicwa s of regarding people as a perpetuation, throughthe Iverbal and conceptual means of psychiatry, ofthe same dehumanizing attitudes which precipitatedtheir emotional dilemmas. He points out that thelan~.uage of psychiatric description is a "vocabularyof ~enigration." People who behave and speak in

wa~ the psychiatrist cannot understand are said tobe "maladaptive," "out of contact with reality,""la ing in insight." The psychiatrist sees the patientthr ugh a filter of diagnostic criteria which doviol nce to a two-sided interpersonal situation. The

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patient is reduced to an organism to be dissected,the psychiatrist to a judgmental anatomist. Bleu1er,Laing reminds his reader, stated that "when all is saidand done [his patients] were stranger to him than thebirds in his garden."

Laing demonstrates the classical clinical psychi-a-tric attitude irt his discussions of an interview ofKraepelin's with a boy who would be diagnosed asschizophrenic:

The patient I will show today has almos-t tobe carried into the room ... [he] sits with hiseyes shut and pays no attention to his surround-ings. He does not look up even when he is spokento, but answers beginning in a low tone, and gradu-ally becoming louder and louder. When askedwhere he is, he says, "You want to know that too?I tell you who is being measured and is measuredand shall be measured. I know all that, and couldtell you, but I do not want to." When asked hisname, he screams, "What is your name? Whatdoes he shut? He shuts his eyes. What does hehear? He does not unders-tand; he understands not.How? Who? Where? When? What does he mean?When I tel! him to look he does not look properly.You there, just look!"Kraepelin notes the young man's "inaccessibility"

and asserts that his talk was "only a series of un-connected sentences having no relation whateverto the general situation." From Kraepelin's point ofview the young man exhibits the "signs of catatonicexcitement." (Post-Bleulerian psychiatrists mightnote inappropriate affect, autism, loose associations,negativism, and perhaps auditory hallucinations.)But Laing suggests that from the young man's per-spective, his words are perhaps a "dialogue betweenhis own parodied version of Kraepelin and his owndefiant rebelling self." Laing concludes: "What isthe boy's experience of Kraepelin? He seems to be .tormented and desperate. What is he about in speak-ing and acting this way? He is objecting to beingmeasured and tested, he wants to be heard," Thesituation, it seems, has two sides. Kraepelin wantsinformation, the boy wants understanding. Theyoperate at cross-purposes, and potential communi-cation is ruptured.

Freud, who created psychoanalysis, emphasizedthe necessity for the psychiatrist to understand hispatient's experience of the world. Through themedium of free associations the analyst could gainaccess to the hidden, unconscious parts of his pa-tients' minds. Once brought to light, unconsciousconflicts could come under the influence of con-scious directive activity. But Freud felt his techniqueswere not applicable to the treatment of psychoticpatients (schizophrenia is the major psychosis). Hethought these patients too absorbed in the innerworkings of their minds-too narcissistic-to estab-

. lish a working relationship with a therapist.In -the 1920s, however, a group of American

psychiatrists, including William Alanson White andHarry Stack Sullivan, undertook the psychoanalyti-

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cally riented treatment of schizophrenic patients.Sulliv n saw his patients' apparently strange speechand b'fhavior not as the signs and symptoms of adiseasr, but as evidence of "difficulties in living." Hefelt that ~he schizophrenic, in the context of a warm

interPJ~rsonal relationship with a therapist, couldcome to understand these difficulties. Both he andhis f llowers, including Frieda Fromm-Reichman

(~he ~SY~hiatrist in Hannah Green's celebrated auto-blOgr phlcal novel I Never Promised You a RoseGard n), Harold Searles, and Otto Will, have em-phasi ed the two-sidedness of the therapeutic en-count r. And they were willing to admit, as themedic lly oriented psychiatric establishment often is

R'~' Laing's most recent book, Knots (pantheo~1$3.95, , has just been published in America. It presents .in c ndensed, poetic fashion what Laing calls"sam of the tortuosities of human interactions." Inhis infOduction, Laing describes his new work this way:"The patterns delineated here have not yet been clas-sifiedby a Linnaeus of human bondage. They are all,perha s, strangely, familiar. I have confined myself to

layin~ out only some of those I actually have seen.Words that come to mind to name them are: knotstanglJs, fankles, impasses, disjunctions, Whirligogs:binds I could have remained closer to the 'raw' datain WJiCh these patterns appear. I could have distilledthem further towards an abstract logico-mathematicalcalcu us...."One f'f Laing's "knots" appears below; others appearon p ges 60 and 65. JSO

Jack knows he does not know.Jill t~inks she knows what Jack does not know, butshe qoes not know he does not know it.Jack I does not know

Jill does not know he does not know,and thinks she knows what he knows he doesn't.

Jack believes Jill.Jack now does not know he does not know.One appy ending.

Jack thinks Jack sees what he does not, 0:-and hat Jill sees what she does not see.

Jill elieves Jack.She ow thinks she sees what Jack thinks Jack sees

an~ that Jack sees it too.They! may now both be completely wrong.

.. Th s .is ambiguous. Jack thinks he is seeingan illUSion; ,is he right or wrong? Jack thinkshe is; not under an illusion. Is he right orwrong? Try it anyway.

Who Is Mad? Who Is Sane?

not, that valid insight and experience are not merelythe property of the psychiatrist. Fromm-Reichman _observed that "mentally disturbed persons who havewithdrawn from their environment are refreshinglyintolerant of all kinds of cultural compromises.Hence they inevitably hold the mirror of the hypo-critical aspects of the culture in front of society."

The mental hospitals I have worked in, as medi-cal student, intern, and ps~chiatric resident,have had special teaching wards which areamong the most "advanced" in this country. Pa-tients received intensive individual therapy, and agreat deal of lip service was paid to "understanding"them. At the same time, therapists were told thatthey really knew better than their patients what wasgood for -the latter. We exercised a power overtheir daily lives and rheir thoughts which seemed tocontradict our attempts to understand them and wintheir confidence. We were told not to argue with apatient's hallucinations or delusions. But at the sametime, our superiors and ward staff insisted that wegive patients tranquilizers to make these symptomsgo away. If a patient felt he wanted to leave thehospital, it was up to us to decide whether Of nothe was ready. If he was speaking or acting bizarrely,we had the power to keep him from leaving. Wecould lock the ward door, put the patient in a se-clusion room, or deprive him of his clothes-all thisin his own best interest.

If at any point I resisted using these sanctions,I was told that I was depriving my patients of thebest possible care: "Patients need controls"; "Medi-cation improves thought disorders"; "They'll neverget better if you don't set limits." I found myselffeeling guiJ,ty for going along with these measures.And I felt guilty, or at least beleaguered by afrightened and angry ward staff, when I refused.

Under less auspicious circumstances, those thatmost people who are hospitalized are subjected to,the experience is a disaster from beginning to end.The institutional drama of degradation and mis-understanding often starts in a city ,hospital emer-gency room. For example: a man comes in, pur-sued, as he believes, by demons. A psychiatric resi-dent takes a history from whoever brought him inthe police or perhaps his family, listens politely t~the man, and, unable to grasp much of what he is

.saying, begins to examine his "mental status." To'?etermine whether or not he .is "schizophrenic," heIS asked to interpret proverbs and to subtract sevenfrom one hundred, and seven from that, and soon. If his thinking is "concrete"-as opposed toabstract-if in the psychiatrist's opinion his affectis "inappropriate" and his associations are loose, heis schizophrenic. The man is terrified, and he is

i~jected with a numbing tranquilizer, deprived ofhIS clothes, and hustled off to a locked ward.

The next morning, in a room with other people

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'-'-" .The setting of a psychiatric clinic and men-ral hospi.tal promotes in staff and patients the setbest designed to turn .the metanoiac voyage froma voyage of discovery into self of a potentiallyrevolutionary nature into a catastrophe; into apathological process from which the person re-quires 10 be cured. We asked what could happenif we began by changing our set and setting, toregard what was happening as a potential healingprocess through which the person may be guidedand during which he is guarded.At Kingsley Hall he and his co-workers "changed

This kind of interaction, repeated innumerabletimes and in a variety of situations, gives rise to amore or less stable split between outer and inner,false and true ,self. The child grows into an adultwho sees the outer world of his body and otherpeople as necessary but threatening. He relates toit in ways that appear acceptable, but all the whilemaintains himself aloof from his relatedness. Inlater life his existential truth may be that he is nothaving intercourse with another person, even while

, his body goes through the motions. He is not feelingfriendly even though he is smiling. '

Laing feels that "what is called psychosis (an acuteschizophrenic episode-'a nervous breakdown') issometimes simply the sudden removal of the vdl-of the false self which had been serving to maintain'an outer behavioral normality that may long ago_have failed to be any reflection of the state of affairsin the secret self. Then the self [will] pour outaccusations of persecution [the observed, thoughoLten disguised and distorted, paranoid ideas] at thehands of the person with whom the false self hasbeen complying for years."

Yle~y~d_ from this perspective, treatment by tran-quiJizer~,_ward restrictions, and "controls" repre--~~nts an Jl.ttempt to restore the split between true, ; ~and false_selves, to produce outward compliance ;S.'-\ ~-and deny the validity and acceptability of the inner "< C" 'Iself's accusations and aspirations. In psychiatric jar- y'-': "'" '\ i.

\,l \, I Igon, one hopes for ".~restoration.of the pre-morbid~~ ", ~personality." .c.< ",~\;,.,;

- ,(j, ,"--r:aII}g, 'on the other hand, feels the psychotic epi::'" \-" ,

~ode_may - presenL an_ opportunity for a person to't \!~~begin_to_heal the divisjon inlo true and false selves ;J~''''''!.Q,which has .deformed his life. Therapy involves en- 'LC""/~)-7couraging and guiding the person in the exploration ; \ \ ~ Iof the "inner time and space" into which psychosis: I: "1 Ihas plunged him: "In this journey there are manyo ~~{-Soccasions to lose one's way, for confusion, partial,~. I.,' "Ii;,failure, even final shipwreck; many terrors, demons,'

Going to London was a pilgrimage for me,but one fraught with anxiety and uncer-tainty. If Laing did not in some way live up

About 85 percent of the residents were between.- }-' twenty and forty years old, and about two thirds

I..{j were men. Sixty-five out of the 104 people wereclassified as patients. More than half of them hadbeen previously hospitalized. Three quarters of allthe "patients" who lived there 'had been diagnosedas schizophrenic. Only nine of the sixty-five have

,- /~ been hospitalized since leaving Kingsley Hall.-;::. . But the quality of the lived experience at Kings-7.: ley Hall cannot be measured by statistics. Kingsley::::( .~ \Hall provided troubled people with an alternative.J to hospitalization, an opportunity to live and grow.;- -" ; through their madness. It was a place for "doctors"

and "patients" to shed their restrictive roles andhelp and learn from one another immediately, with-out the distorting medi'ation of a hierarchical medi-

'cal structure, without coercion. It was a place where:; ~d .people could simply be. It was s-imultaneously an

'- )':.,;, experiment in psychotherapy and an attempt atcommunal living.

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the Iparadigm: someone is involved in a desperatestrategy of liberation within the micro-socia'! situa-tion in which he finds himself. We try to follow themo~ement of what is called 'an acute schizophrenicepi$ode' instead of arresting it."4- brochure put out by the Philadelphia Associa-tior~ describes some of the features of Kingsley. Halland presents statistics. The reference point is thetraqitional mental hospi'tal. The statistics representan attempt to demonstrate the therapeutic success,even in traditional terms, of Kingsley Hall:

IAt Kingsley H.all everyone's actions could bechallenged by anyone.

I With no staff and no patients-with the ultimatebreakdown of the binary role system of the insti-tution-no resident has been given by any othern;sident any tranquilizers. or sedatives. Experienceand behavior which could not be tolerated in most

f~milies or psychiatric institutions made heavy butfinally tolerable demands on ,the community,

Members of households [there were several othersmall communities similar ,to Kingsley Hall which

.the Philadelphia Associa'tion established in Lon-don] determined the structure of their days. Thecontext they thus es1ablish fits their experiencerather thanthM of a superimposed "ideal," andresults eventually in people going into society atlarge. Members of households get up or stay in bedas they wish, eat what they want when they want,stay alone or be wi,th others and generally maketheir own rules. DESPITE GLOOMY PREDICTIONSthere have been no suicides to date. [When KingsleyHall closed there still had been no suicides.] Kings-ley Hall accommodates 14 people. From June 1965to November 30, 1968 104 people have stayedthere.

Who Is Mad? Who Is Sane?

to the profoundly sympathetic voice of his books,. if Kingsley Hall were not somehow successful, I

felt that the source of much of my own convictionwould disappear.

I had written to Laing several weeks before goingto England, had told him how important his bookswere to me, and asked jf I could speak with himand visit Kingsley Hall. But I left for London with-out having received a reply.

It was more than a week before I actually gotto Kingsley Hall. To some degree this was becausemany of the people who lived there had grown tiredof having visitors. It was their home, and they hadbegun to resent the succession of reporters, psychia-trists, and curiosity seekers who wanted to visit.

When I first telephoned I was told that I couldn'tpossibly understand what the place was about in twoweeks. My telling the man at the other end of, thephone that I wanted to set up a similar communityin an American hospital didn't excite him. Hethought that my effort, like that of Laing's colleagueDavid Cooper, who had tried to restructure a men-tal hospital ward in England, would be doomed.He didn't tell me to come or stay away, just to"keep trying." "Perhaps someone else will inviteyou." Then I called Laing's office and discovered thatI already had an appointment to see him.

I had heard disturbing rumors. about Laing, thathe was periodically admitting himself to the mentalhospitals that he publicly attacked; that he waslikely to be abrupt and inconsiderate, perhaps sloppydrunk. A woman who had met him described himas frightening, "demonic." An American psycho-analyst who knew him fairly well felt that he was acharming man, perhaps the most original and crea-tive psychiatric thinker since Freud. But another,who had met him at the same time, called him "abrilliant and seductive paranoid schizophrenic.'"

My first surprise was his office. It was in a townhouse not far from Harley Street, where many ofLondon's rich and fashionable specialists have theirs.It's hard to say what I expected, perhaps an ornatebut seedy mansion on a deserted street. Nothingso ordinary and solid. His name, together with sev-eral other physicians', was on the door, engravedon a brass plate.

A secretary answered my ring, and showed meinto a waiting room on the ground floor. I sat in astraight-backed Victorian chair facing an electricheater that glowed in the fireplace. Across fromme an attractive blond girl was. reading a fashionmagazine.

After a few minutes, R. D. Laing appeared in thedoorway. He greeted me, shook hands, and led theway, three steps at a time, up two long windingflights.

Laing's consultation room has none of the studiedelegance with which most analysts surround them-selves. It is simple, bare, functional. Two well-stuffedarmchairs with end tables face each other across

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eople "on the run" from mental hospitals,about to have a breakdown, or simply inter-ested in taking part in a new experiment in

communal living came to Kingsley Hall. They hadread Laing's books, or knew someone who lived inKingsley Hall, or had just heard about the place. Thepeople who lived in the Hall decided, if there wasroom, who could move in, with preference given to

work things out among ourselves. But even before wetook over the building, we began to promise peoplewho were in trouble that they could move in." Whenthe building opened in the summer of 1965, it wasalready a new kind of community. People who earnedtheir living as therapists lived communally with thosewho had been legally certified as patients.

When he moved into Kingsley Hall, Laing, likemost of the other members of the community, lefthis family behind. He stayed in a ten-by-sixteen-foot

. room on the building's ground floor, which wasformerly a library and has since served as a medita-tion room and darkroom. Except for about twenty-five hours each week when he saw patients in hisoffice, he spent virtually all of his time at KingsleyHall.

Though he felt "at ease" in the place, the physicaland emotional pace was torrid. During a typical dayLaing wouId return from seeing private patients,spend time with troubled members of the household,discuss communal problems, and preside over anhours710ng dinner discussion which often turned intoa seminar or spontaneous theater event. Going to bedat two or three in the morning, he would awaken atsix or seven, write for several hours, and return to hisoffice. After more than a year, he felt physicallytired, emotionally "drained," and he moved out. Heneeded more privacy, wanted to devote more time tohis theoretical writings. Still, he maintained close con-tact with Kingsley Hall, was visiting several times amonth, publicizing and raising money for the com-munity, and serving as a consultant and adviser in f- iJtimes ~f stress. .. ~,' - ~ I

Durmg the first four years of Its eXIstence, a num-::;:) -r (j'; !ber of other therapists lived in Kingsley Hall. Laing ,I_ ~)--mentioned David Cooper, and Aaron Esterson, co- \.. .)author with him of Sanity, Madness and the Family,-~ ".-as well as Sid Briskin, a social worker. Four young '--:.:; ;psychiatrists, Leon Redle:, Jos~ph Berke, Morton .:.' l _,Schatzman, and Jerome LISS, emIgrated from Amer- .~l:!'-"ica to work with Laing. They lived at Kingsley Hall ........ _~-J:and stayed on after he left. Psychiatrists, sociologisfs, '_.-'poets, painters, writers, and musicians from England, -1. .......,:;; IAmerica, and the Continent were visitors for varying':-: Jperiods of time. Seminars in political, social, and ~_.~ .::therapeutic aspects of psychiatry were held regularly. C _Dancing, painting, weaving, yoga, poetry reading, ,.u y -:>'-lectures, and films were integral parts of life in

those who seemed most in need of it. Laing empha-sized that he never insisted that a given person beallowed to come, that it was purely the community'sdecision.

Once there, those who needed help came togetherwith those who felt they could be of help on a basisof personal affinity, without constraint, without fees.Those who felt like it or needed money worked out-side during the day. Others lived on National Assist-ance. All paid about three pounds a week (sevendollars) into a common fund for room and board.Each of the fourteen people who stayed there at anyone time had his oWh tiny room, which he could shareif he wanted.

Kingsley Hall, Laing explained, was always chang-ing. He felt that what I would see would be quitedifferent from what it had been like several years ago.That winter there was a general feeling of depression.Friction with neighbors, many of whom regarded theinhabitants of Kingsley Hall as dangerous and sub-versive, had caused the Kingsley HaH Foundation torefuse to renew the lease. There was little substanceto the neighbors' charges, but random incidents dis-quieted them: a man who, at a neighboring green-grocer's, had a habit of biting into an occasionalpiece of fruit and replacing it on a pile; another whowandered into peoples' houses and sat in their livingrooms. On one Friday night drunken workmen hadbroken in, shouting obscenities at the "perverts,""loonies," and "lay-abouts." Boys from the neighbor-.hood once smashed down the front door with an ax.Now the building was in a state of disrepair. Windowsbroken by children and replaced had been brokenagain and left un mended. The large rooms wererarely used. In four months the building itself wouldbe vacated.

Laing got up from his chair, put a kettle on the hotplate, and heated water for tea; he opened a bag ofdried fruit and placed it on the table next to me. Hemoved easily around the room, preparing tea, empty-ing ashtrays, continuing to talk. His careful domes-ticity puzzled me; I had hardly expected it from theoracular author of The Politics of Experience.

I. asked Laing about his attitude toward peoples'delusions; toward the ideas they have about them-selves and the world, with which virtually everyoneelse disagrees, and which are often the most obviousand provocative aspect of schizophrenia. For ex-ample, someone's belief that he is Christ, or that thetelevision is sending him messages, or that there is aworldwide plot against him.

Laing replied, "I often differ with people, butdo not feel that it is incumbent on me to im-pose a particular viewpoint on anyone." He spokeabout the personal and cultural origins of the "delu-sions" of several people he knew. Then, after askingif I had read the fifteenth-century Malleus Malefi-carum, he began to tell what first appeared to be anunrelated story about the Inquisition. "It seems thatthe Inquisition dealt with a number of problems that

Who Is Mad? Who Is Sane?

are today regarded as the province of psychiatry.They found that the causes of these problems layin the fact that black magic had been practiced onthe sufferer. If a man complained of impotence withhis wife, the Inquisition would find the man's formermistress and torture her until she admitted she hadpracticed black magic. If, however, someone camealong and proposed a naturalistic or psychologicalexplanation for the man's impotence, he was re-garded as a heretic. Now, however, someone whoclaims that black magic is being practiced on him isregarded as deluded. His belief is a symptom forwhich psychiatrists seek a naturalistic explanation,and often prescribe a pharmacological cure."

I listened to his narrative in rapt silence, won-dering if he was putting me on. Certainly he waspointing out that ideas which once made up a domi-nant "therapeutic" ideology, the Inquisition's de-monology, would now be regarded as "psychotic de-lusions." But did he also mean that psychiatricthought was, itself, a delusional system, no differentin essence from the Inquisition's demonology? Per-haps he did. I'm still not sure. At any rate, he wenton to say that "delusions .are as culturally relative~s life-style and family structure," and that there f' 0was no absolute way of determining their validity. ISome were culturally sanctioned and validated, othersnot. He had, in his story, provided a larger frame-work for the consideration of the whole problemof delusions, psychiatrists' as well as patients'. Theanecdote was a kind of mental judo, turning myquestion back on itself.

I asked Laing other questions about his own writ-ings. Was the "Bird of Paradise" the record of anLSD trip? I knew that Laing had used LSD andthat he found it helpful in psychotherapy and asa means of self-exploration. "No," he replied. "Itwas merely a description of some of the things thatmake up my own inner life." He reminded me thatFreud in The Interpretation of Dreams and ThePsychopathology of Everyday Life had written abouthimself, and Laing contrasted his accessibility withthe self-imposed anonymity of modern "Freudian"analysts. Freud, Laing added, was still "the best ofpsychiatric writers."

Before I left the office Laing gave me the namesof several people who had spent time at KingsleyHall, and during the next few days I contacted them.

Somehow, I felt unsatisfied with my first dis-cussion with Laing. I wanted something morefrom him than a glimpse of how his mindworked and a description of Kingsley Hall. I wasn'texactly sure what it was. Thinking I might get closerto him if I gathered material for a biographicalsketch, I asked if I could record our next session.He reluctantly agreed; then, later, changed his mind.

Perhaps Laing sensed my craving for more inti-mate knowledge, because when I next came to him

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he asked if I wanted to sit in on an interview that"(\ ~ he was conducting with a family~ .

" .>--.. ,:, >. '. The parents w~re .elderly lower-mIddle-class peo-, ,', I.. pIe, from a provIncIal town, whose son had been

, '::!~: ,,. diagnosed as schizophrenic and hospitalized. ThroughI.. , ,i' 'i' Laing's widely publicized BBC broadcasts on schizo-,A '~( phrenia; they had heard of his work and had come,~ ~ _ t to him after a series of resigned" dismal prognoses~ j ~ "from local psychiatrists. Their son was currently on

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sibly a genetic or biochemical disorder or that it wassecondary to an innate lowered threshold to certainkinds of stress.

He described, with amused tolerance for his own"scientific procedure," the sociometric process bywhich he had selected the twelve most "out-of-con-tact" chronic schizophrenic patients on his ward. Hehad two nurses each day take the twelve who werechosen to a pleasant room in another part of thehospital. There, with decent occupational and recrea-tional facilities, treated simply as human beings, theycould do whatever they pleased. On the first day,the patients, many of' whom had hardly moved orspoken in years, had to be wheeled or pushed off theward. "On the second day," he recalled, "an hourbefore the ward door opened, they had gatheredaround it talking, laughing, jumping up and down:it was enormously moving."

Within eighteen months all twelve, many of whomhad been ,hospitalized for ten or fifteen years, wereout of the hospital and back to their families. Withinanother year they were all back in the hospital.

To Laing this suggested, first, that "a change inthe way schizophrenics were treated could radicallyalter the nature of their schizophrenia," and, second,that the family creates the "disease" in the indi-vidual. Interest in individual schizophrenics gaveway to studies of the families of schizophrenics. Heconducted these in association with the psycho-analytically oriented Tavistock Clinic. He went onto an elaboration of a theory of interpersonal rela-tions based on models derived from psychoanalysis,phenomenology, and communications theory.

And this work in turn led to his critiques of a.society which, he says, produces, and is maintainedby, destructive families and warped interpersonal re-

, lations. And ultimately to the creation of KingsleyHall.

There, in the context of a new family and society,the diagnosed schizophrenic could rediscover andbegin to redefine himself. "My interests," he said,"fell into line like a row of skittles." For the present,his interests have taken him somewhat away from-Kingsley Hall. He is devoting much of his time totheoretical writings-right now, "an attempt to reviseFreud's theory of defenses."

I wanted to get some idea of Laing's politics. Howdid he reconcile his position as a psychiatrist withhis own sweeping criticisms of the society whichproduces and maintains psychiatrists? Didn't he feelthat he-and by implication I and other psychiatrists-should be more directly active in helping to shockwhat he describes in The Politics of Experienceas the "often fibrillating heartland of a senescentcapitalism"?

Laing spoke only for himself: he said that hewas "not an activist in the ordinary sense of theword." "Living in England," he observed, "maderadical activism less pressing than in America." Be-sides, he felt that he was "temperamentally not very

Who Is Mad? Who Is Sane?

well suited for it." His own energies are devoted towhat he calls "microrevolutions," profound changesin individuals, families, hospitals, and other smallinstitutions. These changes may, in turn, bring aboutothers, not through dramatic confrontation but bypersonal contact. Kingsley Hall, it is clear, is onesuch microrevolution.

Our time was up, and Laing led me down thestairs to the door. We stood outside for a moment."You can tell your friends in America," he said,grinning, "that I'm not in a mental hospital." Weboth laughed. "Good luck in your scene back there."

When I left Laing's office, I felt satisfied. Even if hedidn't have "the answers," he was unafraid of pur-suing his questions and living with the contradictions" ~-,Qthey brought. He is a dedicated professionaL with \..~.,.t~-'V;-.3revolutionary ideas, a staunch opponent of our civili- .; ;V',~ ,fzation's "abdication of ecstasy," who produces care- ;--~~:. " lful scholarl~ books; a distant and .ironic person who ~~'c.,I.(J.. l::can make mtense felt contact wlth others; a man (-;- .. ,./-'" .accustomed to the depths of despair and the many ,faces of alienation, who prepares tea and treats visi-tors with politeness. I had no nagging doubts about'his "sanity," and the rumors regarding his hospital-izations seemed trivial.

In the days that followed, in speaking to peoplewho were close to Laing, I found no hint of confirma-tion for these rumors. I can only attribute their per- -sistence, and the fascination they hold for many ofLaing's readers, to the degree of discomfort that hisideas have engendered. The parallel that comes tomind is the response of the medical establishment toFreud's early work. Freud pointed out that the in-tensity with which his contemporaries vilified him andhis theories of infantile sexuality was evidence of the .Jstrength of their defenses against their own child-

Kingsley Hall a "mental hospital," and someof the people who lived there were outraged.

I paused for a moment outside the building, lookedat the plaque commemorating Gandhi's visit and atthe array of broken windows. I was reminded of anabandoned parochial school. I sat on a bench acrossthe street and tried to imagine what it would be likeinside. A girl came out of the front door and walkedin my direction. "You must be here to see Mary,"she said. I said I was. "She's leftthe door open. Thebell doesn't work. The children have broken it." Shewalked away, and I got up, crossed the street, andpushed open the' scarred double doors.

I entered a large dark room which was about ascold as the January day outside. It looked as if ithad once been a chapel or auditorium, but was nowwithout pews or chairs. On one side, dozens of can-vases leaned against the wall; to the right were stonestairs. At the head of the stairs, next to a pay tele-phone, was a door with a tree painted on it. Thebranches looked like arms. This was where Mary

. Barnes had lived for over three years.While I was wondering whether I had arrived too

early, Mary came up behind me. She led the wayback downstairs, through the auditorium and into"the library," the room where Laing had lived. "I'lllike living in Ronnie's old room," Mary told me."Besides, it's larger than mine was." She apologizedfor the condition of the room as we pushed asidepiles of clothes, paint tubes, scrapbooks, and glassjars. We sat on the floor, Mary in a pink quiltedhousecoat and slippers, her thick dark hair, framing abroad, deeply lined face, flowing over her shoulders,her knees drawn up against her chest; me shiftingoccasionally from one position to another when, dur-ing the next three or four hours, my body let me knowI was uncomfortable.

There are, in the literature of psychotherapy, someremarkable first-person accounts of human growthachieved through madness. Hannah Green's I NeverPromised You a Rose Garden and MargueriteSechehcye's and her patient Renee's Autobiographyof a Schizophrenic are two. To me, the story of Mary.Barnes, a forty-seven-year-old Roman Catholic andformer nurse, who is now a painter and author ofchildren's stories, is even more striking.

Unlike almost all psychiatric patients, Mary hasbeen allowed and encouraged to experience. "thenatural healing process" of madness, the "initiationceremonial through which the person will be guidedwith full social sanction into inner space and time"of which Laing speaks in The Politics of Experience.Mary's experience is crucial to Laing's model oftherapy in the same way t-hat Freud's early hystericalpatients were to psychoanalysis. It is quite unlikelythat it could have taken place anywhere but KingsleyHall, and even there a great strain was felt by theother inhabitants.

As she talked of the two periods of months duringwhich she was quite mad, of the slow evolution of her

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trust in Joe Berke, who became her therapist, andof the discovery of herself as a painter, the lightgradually faded from the room until we were sittingin darkness. After a while, Mary lit a candle. In thelight of the candle I could see changes flicker acrossher face as she spoke of her life: the shy child whohad been told she was awkward and untalented, theembarrassed adolescent, the constricted nursing in-structor barely holding on to ,her sanity, the frenziedadult smearing feces on the walls, and the gentle wisewoman who was able, in the calm born of greatsuffering, to tell me straightforwardly what she hadgone through.

Mary's speech is quiet, direct, melodious, andmodest. She uses some expressions often: "goingdown" for plunges into madness; "it went in on me"for anger that she turned against herself; "baby" asan adjective; "out" for people who are sociable-"he was very out"-and "in" for those who arefeeling introspective.

Since I took no notes and want to convey as di-rectly as possible the quality of Mary's experienceand her language, some of what follows is quotedfrom a paper of Laing's, some from Morton Schatz-man's chapter "Madness and Morals," included inJoe Berke's book of essays on counterculture, andsome directly from Mary's own writing.

Through Dr. James Robertson of the TavistockClinic, Mary had gone to Laing in 1963 toask for help. She had been in a mental hospi-tal in 1953 for a year with a diagnosis of schizophre-nia, and had maintained herself since then as a nurs",:ing tutor in a general hospital. But she saw her dailylife as a rigid, anxiety-laden, and constricted facade.She began to sense "that I had lost myself sometimein my life a long time ago." She felt she was on theverge of another psychotic episode, but this time, in-stead of the padded cells and shock therapy of themental hospital, she wanted "to go back to before Iwas born and come up again." Laing told her that hewas trying to establish a place where she could livethrough this experience, and Mary agreed to try to ."hold on" until he could do so. During this time Marycontinued to work at her job. Severe anxiety attackswere frequent. At night, with great effort, she pulledherself together for the next day's work. Periodicallyshe visited Laing.

Nineteen months later Kingsley Hall opened, andMary Barnes moved in: "At first so great was my fearI forgot what I had come for. Quite suddenly, Iremembered, 'I've come here to have a breakdown,to go back to before I was born, and come upagain.''' She continued to work for two weeks, buteach night when she came to Kingsley Hall she "re-gressed." "Life became quite fantastic. Every nightat Kingsley Hall I tore off my clothes, feeling I hadto be naked. Lay on the floor with my shits andwater, smeared the walls with feces. Was wild and

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noisy about the house or sitting in a heap on thekitchen floor. Half aware that I was going mad,there was the terror that I might not know what Iwas doing, away, outside of Kingsley Hall." Shewrote to the hospital resigning her position and thentook'to bed, "went down" into her madness and backin time to infancy.

"The tempo was increasing. Down, down, oh, God,would I never break?"

She stopped eating solids, was fed milk from abottle by Joe, by Laing, and by others. She rarelyspoke and lay immobile for hours at a time. "In bedI kept my eyes shut'so I didn't see people but I heard

~hem. Touch was all important. Sometimes my bodyseemed apart, a leg or an arm across the room. Thewall became hollow, and I seemed to go into it asinto a big hole. Vividly aware of people, I was physi-cally isolated in my room."

During this time there were several crises. Joerecalled that at one point Mary stopped sucking,urinating, and defecating; she was returning to acompletely womblike state. She lost weight, grewweaker. The community met and decided that theycouldn't let her continue this way, and that atKingsley Hall they felt uneasy about putting in thefeeding tube and catheter ~hat would be necessary.They told Mary their decision, and gradually shebegan to suck again. Somewhat later the smell of thefeces she smeared on the walls became annoying:Mary\ room was next to the kitchen. Again the com-munity debated. Eventually it was decided to letMary continue. Each time a crisis came up the mem-bers of the community came together to decide whatto do. Each step on Mary's journey was also a stepin the community's development.

As Mary "came up" out of the madness she put ontrousers, played ball, and danced, as she had neverbeen allowed to as a child. Joe gave her some grease

,crayons, and in November, 1965, after five monthsat Kingsley Hall, she began to "scribble black breastsall over the walls of the hall. Suddenly a pictureemerged, a woman kneeling with a baby at herbreast."

"About the house, left over from decorating, were'old tins of paints and brushes. On the walls of myroom I painted moving figures, on my door twiningstems and leaves, and on the table an orange birdappeared. Finding odd lengths of wallpaper I madepicture stories. Then on strips of wallpaper backing,and on the walls of the house, I painted big, very big,at high speed. Through the spring of 1966 workpoured out, all my insides were loose, the painting,like lightning, was streaking from the storm of me.Joe suggested 'paint the Crucifixion'; I did, again andagain; hungry for life I wanted the cross."

Joe was with Mary every day, talking, playing withher, taking her shopping. For a long time she felt"Joe ar:.d I are not separate." But there were frequentcrises of trust. Mary told me that once when theywere eating together, Joe put salt on his food. She

Who Is Mad? Who Is Sane?

was desolate: "Joe," she said, "what have I donethat you had to punish yourself?"

In June, 1966, "feeling it go in on me," Mary tookto her bed again, but with the support of the com-munity she was up in a few months. "In the autumn,with oil pastels and a sketchbook, I made morestories with pictures, including 'The Hollow Tree' for

'Ronnie's birt'hday and 'The King and the Donkey.'''Since then, Mary has been painting and writing

steadily. She has had four shows of her work andw'as preparing for another when I saw her. The paint-ings-dozens of which she showed me after we hadtalked, on canvas, boards, sheets of wrapping paper,and the walls-reminded me of a hybrid of Munchand Rouault. I bought two from her, vivid, powerfulrenderings of Saul struck down by God on the way toDamascus, emblems to me of the blinding force ofMary's own transformation.

Laing's introduction to the catalogue of her Cam-den Art Center exhibits seems apt: "In her paintingMary puts outside herself with a minimum of medita-tion what is inside her. Paintings are executed withher finger not because she cannot use a brush, butbecause she prefers (often) not to. She is not pro-fessionally proficient in the art of composition, notbecause of the failure to master the means for thisend, but because hers is not the end that this is ameans towards. We must take her on her terms...."

Two paintings by Mary Barnes: Saul Struck Down by God

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Mary still feels that in many ways she is "not verygrown up." She continues to see Joe in therapy, con-tinues to learn more about herself. Though she couldhave lived elsewhere, she preferred, until its closing,to stay at Kingsley Hall, which she regarded as home.There, according to other members of the community,she was a highly valued therapist. Having gone sodeeply down and come out, she is unafraid of others'madness. A terrified girl would speak with no oneelse but came to Mary, slept in her room for days,and drank the mixture of warm milk and honey thatMary prepared for her. When Mary was "down" Joehad given it to her.

Pifter I looked at some of her paintings, Maryshowed me around Kingsley Hall: the largerooms, now not regularly used, where com-munal meals were eaten, seminars and entertainmentheld; the roof garden; and some of the individualrooms where people I had met had lived. After awhile we came to "the flat," a living room on thethird story of the house. Several people sat aroundan electric heater sipping tea, chatting, and reading.Just off this room, in a small kitchen, someone wascooking. Mary introduced me to a couple of peopleand left to continue her packing.

I sat down close to the heater, beside a youngman who held his head in his hands. The wall abovehim was covered with graffiti. One read "HaroldPinter was here with his friend Franz Kafka." Fur-ther up were black three-quarter circles, solid sweepsof pigment, the breasts that Mary had first painted.After a while, the girl I had seen on the street cameout of the kitchen and offered me tea. We sat insilence for a while. I grew uncomfortable and askeda polite, inane question. Abruptly, she got up. I feltalone, an awkward snooper.

A meticulously dressed man of about thirty-fivecame over and introduced himself as David. I toldhim I recognized his voice from the telephone, andhe smiled with satisfaction: "So you've finally gothere." He began to talk animatedly about the Eve-ning Standard article: "Kingsley Hall is not a hos-pital, and we are not Laing's patients unless wechoose to be." He said he was thinking of suing theStandard, and was sending copies of the article to themembers of the Philadelphia Association.

David went on to describe the vitriolic public at-tacks that members of the organic and behavioristEstablishment had recently launched against Laingand Kingsley Hall. He said that William Sargant, thechief psychiatrist at London's St. Thomas's Hospital,and one of those quoted in the Standard, had com-plained of having to "take care of Laing's failures."He also suggested I read "an absurd article" in whichthe psychologist H. J. Eysenck, long a critic of psy-choanalysis, accuses Laing (and David Cooper) of"using these poor suffering victims as a platform forpseudophilosophical arguments."

A tall young man, long-haired, bearded, wide-

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eyed-a figure out of Saxon legends-wandered by,grimacing, folding and unfolding his arms. He saidsomething about "Green helmets" and "Princeton,New Jersey." I sat very seriously, uncomprehending,in my best listener's posture.

Everyone else continued about his business. Inthe kitchen there was a discussion about the properway to cook a Christmas pudding. The voices grewlouder, more argumentative. An older man left thekitchen, silent, obviously angry. His advice, at firstsolicited, had been rejected.

David was carefully mounting copies of the Stand-ard article on heavy paper. The girl returned to theroom, sat down again with a magazine. The man nextto me was looking into the electric flame of theheater, warming his hands. /\

Suddenly the bearded man burst out laughing. Istarted to laugh too, aware of my own self-consciousseriousness. He told me that he was "in the iono-sphere," and that the "air [was] thin." I asked if itwas "lonely," and he said, serious now, that it wasand that 'he "could corne down but am not sure .if I, ~want to." Feeling closer to him, I let go of my ~psychiatric demeanor, and for a while, through puns,mimicry, and self-caricature, we carried on a con-versation. He poured some more tea for me.

During the two day-long visits I made to KingsleyHall, I spent about half my time with Mary, talking,helping her move five years' of possessions from herold to her new room, and looking at her paintings.The rest of the time I sat around the flat. The peoplewho passed in and out became accustomed to mypresence as I relaxed in theirs. I was questionedabout psychoanalysis and lectured on electricalenergy.

Feeling more comfortable, I asked some peopleabout their attitude toward Laing's theories. A few,like Mary, were unabashedly enthusiastic. But many,to my surprise, were somewhat skeptical. One manwryly observed that "previous encounters with psy-chiatrists and mental hospitals have numbed me totheoretical arguments."

Kingsley Hall, almost everyone seemed to agree,was a good place-Peter, Mary Barnes's brother, anda newcomer, strenuously objected to the lack of pri-vate cooking facilities-a home, or a haven in stormytimes. Laing's writings interested people less thanLaing himself, toward whom there seemed to be adeep but grudging warmth. Even though he no longerstayed there, and couldn't stop the lease from run-ning out, he, and the rest of the Philadelphia Associa-tion, still cared and still fought for Kingsley Hall:against family-sponsored health officers, bent ondragging erring relatives back to mental hospitals;against public attacks from other psychiatrists; andagainst an often hostile neighborhood.

Mary told me that with the building soon to bevacated, no psychiatrist in residence, and the futureuncertain, people were reluctant to "go down." Shesaw the community .as wary, its members self-pro-tective, inclined to keep their defenses up. She said

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that several people were in therapy with Laing andthe others with psychiatrists who had lived in Kings-ley Hall, and that any community member couldget help free or at low cost. But it seemed unlikelythat anyone would now risk the profound journeyinto himself that Mary and others took in the earlier'years.

Still, the dozen people at Kingsley Hall, many ofwhom had been diagnosed schizophrenic, some.among them having been for long periods on mentalhospital back wards, were finding a way to live withone another: free from restraints .and coercion, notneeding tranquilizers and shock therapy, independentof "ward administrators," and without benefit of.rules and regulations.

An American medical student who had been atKingsley Hall the year before told me that even ifshe couldn't understand what people were sayingto each other they obviously understood one another.In two days I couldn't really understand what thecommunity was saying to itself. But I knew that itspoke in accents of mutual acceptance and opendisagreement, in deeds of kindness and "appropri-ate" impoliteness-in anguish and humor andguarded hope.

Just before I went to say good-bye to Mary, theyoung man who sat by the -heater told me that hewas afraid to loosen his tortured and precarious holdon his "normality" to seek a new, more stable kindof sanity. He said he felt "like a ship on the edgeof darkness." The image seemed appropriate forKingsley Hall as well. Soon the building would bereturned to the pacifists who had lent it, five yearsago, to Laing and his friends.

But Mary Barnes was pretty sure that new Kings-ley. Halls would be created, new places,' which, asshe put it, would be "good enough to take all theshit of all the people." Places where people could

There must be something the matter with himbecause he would not be acting as he does

unless there wastherefore he is acting as he isbecause there is something the matter with him

He does not think there is anything the matterwith him because

one of the things that isthe matter with himis that he does not think that there is anythingthe matter with him

thereforewe have to help him realize that,the fact that he does not think there is anythingthe matter with himis one of the things that isthe matter with him

-From Knots

Who Is Mad? Who Is Sane?

go back to where they had "gone wrong" and makea new start. I left her, late at night, looking througha pile of sketches. She told me to "come back' any-time."

he Kingsley Hall experience is the centralnode, Laing the master switch in a "Net-work" of men and women who are dedicated

to practicing and living a new kind of psychiatry.Energy seems to flow from him and his writings,touching in others sources of creativity which sparktheir own projects. Excitement, discoveries, informa-tion are passed in all directions.

The young psychiatrists who lived there over thepast five years found at Kingsley Hall the same kindsof possibilities for growth and change as did theformer "mental patients" who came there. The psy-chiatrists' paths of discovery were less agonizing thantheir patients', but they were more fraught with toe-stubbing ironies. The first problem, very difficult foreven the most relaxed acolyte, was to unlearn therole of doctor, to drop the self-protective, self-de-feating guise of the sane man in the midst of lunatics.

Joe Berke, the huge black-bearded bear of a manwho worked so tirelessly with Mary Barnes, de-scribed how this process began for him: when hearrived at Kingsley Hall, recently graduated frommedical school, he met a young man named "An-drew" who had spent nine of -his twenty-one yearsin a mental hospital. "Andrew" had been diagnosedas a catatonic schizophrenic and presumed beyondhelp. He shuffled around Kingsley Hall speaking tohimself under his breath. When he wanted to talkto someone, he put his face right up against theirsand spoke, often incomprehensibly. This unnervedJoe, who, for weeks, in spite of his good intentions,had continued to regard "Andrew" as "that nuL" Onemorning Joe rose early and went down to the diningroom. "Andrew" came in at about the same time.Standing there, in the early morning light, half asleep,off-guard, they smiled at each other. After that,"Andrew" was just Andrew, and he and Joe beganto get to know one another.

The others described similar experiences, meet-ings, and friendships with people .who had been pre-viously given up by psychiatrists as "hopelessly di-lapidated, burnt-out schizophrenics." Sometimestheir relationships turned into somewhat more for-mal psychotherapeutic ones, often not.

When I visited last January, none of the psychia-trists lived at Kingsley Hall anymore. Cramped,cold quarters and the arrival of wives who felt theneed for more privacy precipitated their leaving.But all were still actively involved in Kingsley Hall.

To Leon, whose wife had just had a child, Kings-ley Hall was itself a "baby," with whose growth anddevelopment he was intimately concerned. LikeLaing, and Mary Barnes, he viewed its closing inMayas merely the end of its first phase.

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When Kingsley Hall did close, Mary Barnes tookan apartment of her own, the first she has ever had,and there she paints and writes. Most of the otherswhom I met in January moved into two condemnedbuildings which Leon managed to rent from the localcouncil. Joe .and Marty are in the process of organ-izing another house-hold, and Laing himself describedplans for eventually opening up a larger, more com-fortable therapeutic center to which psychiatristsand others could come for training.

But the Network has spread well beyond thiscentral core. It comprises eighty to a hundred otherpeople, predominately in England, but .also on theContinent and in America. Leon, who edits theNetwork Newsletter, described it in the first issueas a "London-based group of people concerned withliberation particularly in the contexfof human ex-perience and behavior; of making sense of one'sexperience of oneself, the other, the world; of libera-tion from institutional psychiatric thought and pr.ac-tice; of healing and making whole, mind-body-soul;of being."

Already two new households on the Kingsley Hallmodel are in the process of opening in America,one in New Haven, the other in San Jose, California.

. Members of the Network have begun to publishbooks on their experience. Leon is editing a bookof writings by people who stayed at Kingsley Hall.Joe and Mary are finishing a book entitled MaryBarnes: Two Accounts ot a Journey Through Mad-ness, which will be published here this year. Otherswho spent time at Kingsley Hall are writing aboutit and trying to set up similar communities.

As I spent time with members of the Network,I began for the first time to feel p.art of a largerpersonal and professional context which made senseto me. In spite of geographical and professional iso-lation, I had really been part of it for several years.Joe said, half-jokingly, that "if the Network is inyou, you .are in it." I was reminded, first, of the

League in Hesse's Journey to the East and then,more concretely, of t,he missionary excitement thatpervaded Freud's early circle.

A new way of looking at madness has givenbirth to a new kind of therapy. Patients'and therapists' strategies of liberation havebegun to coincide. New places for them to "workthings out," to "discover the wholeness of being hu-man between them," are being created. The insightswon from understanding madness are being used totransform the social worlds of the "mad" patient andthe "sane" doctor. Kingsley Hall, the Network, andthe new communities in America are among the firstof these transformations. These new developmentsin psychiatric theory and practice, sometimes re-ferred to as Anti-Psychiatry, parallel and catalyzedevelopments in the larger society.

At Kingsley Hall the barrier between the "sane"doctor and the "mad" patient was removed. In hiswritings, Laing, starting with an attempt to describemadness, ultimately questions the sanity of the so-ciety which erected this barrier: "A little girl ofseventeen told me she was terrified because the AtomBomb was inside her. That is .a delusion. The states-men of the world who boast and threaten that theyhave Doomsday weapons are far more dangerousand far more estranged from 'reality' than .any ofthe people to whom the label 'psychotic' is affixed."

Laing holds up to his readers a vision of a worldin which all of us are "bemused and crazed crea-tures, strangers to our true selves, to one another,and to the spiritual and material world." He insiststhat the way out of this pervasive madness isthrough profound personal and social transformation.

The metanoiac voyage that took place at KingsleyHall must become possible for all who need and wishto embark on it. Perhaps "mental hospitals," re-versing history, can become ships of sanity. 0

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THE HOLLOW TREEby Mary Barnes (for Ronnie's Birthday)

There was once a tree in the forest who felt very to the sky. The other trees looked down and gaspedsad and lonely for her trunk was hollow and her and didn't know whether to turn their branches po-head was lost in mist. Sometimes, the mist seemed litely away or whether to try and cover her empti-so thick that her head felt divided from her trunk. ness and blackness with their green and brown. TheTo the other trees, she .appeared quite strong but tree moaned for her own life and feared to be suf-rather aloof, for no wind ever bent her branches focated by theirs. She felt she wanted to lay bare,to them. She felt if she bent she would break yet and open, to the wind and the rain and the sun,she grew so tired of standing straight. So it was and that in time she would grow up again, full andwith relief that in a mighty storm, she was thrown brown from t,he ground. So it was, th.at with theto the ground. The tree was split, her branches scat- wetness of the rain, she put down new roots and bytered, her roots torn up and her bark was charred the warmth of the sun she stretched forth new wood.and blackened. In the wind her branches bent to other trees and

She felt stunned and though her head was clear as their leaves rustled and whispered, in the darkof the mist she felt her sap dryas she felt her dead- and in the light, the tree felt loved and laughed withness revealed when the hollow of her trunk was open life.

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