Whatever Happened to RD Laing?

RD Laing tackling a knotty problem.

I cannot pass a dollar book bin without looking in. Not long ago, I came across one in front of a bookshop in Windsor's Walkerville. I dredged up a papeback copy of RD Laing's The Politics of the Family.

Whatever happened to RD Laing? He was the most famous psychologist of the Sixties, as well known as Jung or Freud. Now you hardly even hear the name.

Laing's basic idea was that “mental illness” was not an illness at all, but a coherent response by an individual to an impossible situation. Most often, this was a situation within the family—in effect, the family was mad, its solidarity built on a lie, and one or more individuals within it were sacrificed to sustain the delusion. Laing's brilliance was in analysing the way people can be caught by social situations in “double binds,” in which, whichever choice they make, they are in the wrong. This is the essence of abuse. Depression or even psychosis was the result.

A recent discussion of Laing in the Guardian prompted a lot of comments, which seemed to fall into two groups: comments by professionals claiming that Laing had been disproven, and comments by those diagnosed as mentally ill, or their friends, insisting that Laing was spot on in their own case, or that of their friend.

I don't think Laing has been disproven at all. He was eclipsed, certainly, by a move in psychiatry, encouraged by genetic science, and peaking in about 1990, to ascribe absolutely everything (notably including homosexuality) to genetics. It was the fad of the day, just as everything, including mental illness, was once ascribed to electricity. But since then, the tide has turned, and the actual evidence is piling up that Laing was on the right track all along.

Unfortunately, Laing did not help his own cause. Starting in the early seventies, he seemed to lose interest in his thesis, and indeed to backtrack. He got involved instead in eastern meditation, poetry, alcohol, and rebirthing therapy. I saw him lecture in about 1973, and he already seemed off the rails: instead of talking about psychology, he gave a rambling argument against abortion. A stand that seemed perfectly calculated, of course, to lose him all his political support, which had been on the “New Left.”

Here's what I think happened: both Laing and psychology in general backed away from the Laingian explanation for “mental illness” not because it was wrong, but because it was politically risky. Anyone who does not believe that politics is a major consideration in the field of psychiatry does not know the story of how homosexuality went, in a weekend, from being a treatable mental illness to an unalterable element of self and a human right.

The sad truth is that you can say or do anything you want about the “mentally ill.” They are powerless. But if you say anything against their families, you are bound to get one hell of a political backlash. These are people capable of defending themselves, and in their eyes, if, as Laing believed, they are delusional, you are slandering them. A lot of the “mentally ill” come from highly respectable, indeed prominent, families. This may even be the norm.

And there's worse. If families can drive one or more of their members mad with “double binds,” so too, logically, can other social groups of all kinds: churches, neighbourhoods, governments, employers. This means that 1) some accused families might indeed be quite innocent, the fault lying with another level of social interaction, and 2) you are implicitly challenging all centres of social power—all political entities—with this thesis. 

Backlash? You want backlash? 

Laing himself saw this logical implication, and was courageous or naive enough to level the accusations, in The Politics of Experience, against society as a whole.

Moreover, 3) as a practical matter, neither individual families nor society as a whole are likely to change. So even if Laing's thesis is exactly right, it is not of much commercial value: it leaves psychiatrists and psychologists with nothing to sell.

Certainly reason enough for the profession of psychology/psychiatry to back away from the whole area of enquiry, at least for a generation. Too dangerous to a group of people who, in the end, put their first priority on their own social status and large incomes. And I expect also reason enough for Laing himself to back away—into eastern mysticism, prevarication, the literary approach, and generic “rebirthing.” These are exactly the evasive tactics I would expect in these circumstances. As it was, his controversial stands earned him a persistent rumour that he himself was schizophrenic, and cost him his medical license.

But in the end, all he was saying was what the New Testament has always been saying. And Christianity is presented there as the specific cure. 

Eastern mysticism came damned close.