Vicky Lebeau is Professor of English at the University of Sussex and Director of the Consortium for Humanities and the Arts South-East England (CHASE). Her latest publication is ‘Aphanisis: Patricia Williams and Ernest Jones’, in Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society (2015). She tweets @VickyLebeau.
Organised by Birkbeck’s Research in Aesthetics of Kinship and Community and the Birkbeck Guilt Working Group, ‘Sanity, Madness and the Family/Family Life: An Urgent Retrospective’ opened to the sights and sounds of In Two Minds: David Mercer and Ken Loach’s controversial ‘Wednesday Play’, first broadcast by the BBC on 1 March 1967. The grain of the image is familiar: the ‘look’ of 1960s docudrama, its privileged claim to a black and white reality. ‘You’ve only got to look at her … I mean, listen to her’: a father’s words, solicited by an unseen questioner, set the scene for a remarkable day of reading and reminiscence, celebration and critique.
The symposium began by falling silent, arrested by the screen. This is the ‘look’ of R.D. Laing on film. First published in 1964, Laing and Aaron Esterson’s Sanity, Madness and the Family fuels both In Two Minds and, a few years later, Loach’s Family Life (1971): the film announced alongside Sanity, Madness and the Family as one of the objects of this ‘urgent retrospective’. Why urgent? Why now?
It is, of course, the 50th anniversary (more or less) of the first publication of Laing and Esterson’s extraordinary book: described by the first speaker, Anthony Stadlen, as ‘one of the great books of the 20th century’, it is clear that Sanity, Madness and the Family continues to fascinate and to provoke. Stadlen reflects that fascination, both in his ongoing research into the 11 families interviewed by Esterson for the book and his care for Esterson’s archive of original recordings of those interviews. One of the most powerful, and uncanny, moments of the day comes when Stadlen plays a few extracts from those tapes. These are voices across time, captured by what seems, now, an ancient technology. Tapes that, for me, answered a question: yes, Loach really did capture the ‘voice’ of what Laing and Esterson were uncovering. Setting the scene for the symposium, those voices, recorded and preserved, suggested how far language, tone, rhythm – the grain of the voice – can capture the dynamics of family life.
‘She’ll go mad if I live’: in In Two Minds, a young woman, anxious, distracted, gives voice to what living in a family can be like. A struggle for sanity, a struggle for life. No wonder Sanity, Madness and the Family remains urgent. If not necessarily welcome. What emerged very clearly through the day is that it can still be difficult to hear what Laing and Esterson were saying: especially, perhaps, their questioning of the very idea of schizophrenia as a clinical entity. Their position is stated clearly (and with some frustration following its initial reception) in the Preface to the Second Edition of the book: ‘Our question is: are the experience and behavior that psychiatrists take as symptoms and signs of schizophrenia more socially intelligible than has come to be supposed?’ At once outrageous and modest, that question generates Sanity, Madness and the Family, its commitment to discovering meaning where others ‘see’ madness: to listen, rather than look.
That such a commitment takes us back to the origins of psychoanalysis in Freud’s work at the Salpetriere – his monumental decision to listen to what hysterics were saying – is part of the interest of Sanity, Madness and the Family. It also underlines the irony of the various ways of not listening to Laing and Esterson addressed by this symposium. On one level, Laing’s own controversial, and often elusive, reputation runs interference: what Chris Oakley describes as the ‘dangerous liaisons’ at the origins of so-called anti-psychiatry in the UK are not well understood (Oakley offers a comparison between the turbulent personal relations between Laing and David Cooper and the powerful interaction between Freud and Wilhelm Fliess at the origins of psychoanalysis in the 1880s and 1890s).
Equally, whether a valuable description of Sanity, Madness and the Family or not, the reach of ‘anti-psychiatry’ as a means to politicize the ‘mental illness system’ (to borrow Suman Fernando’s phrase) is apparent: basically, Laing and Esterson’s insistence on ‘social intelligibility’ is a powerful means to resistance. However limited by its post-war UK context Sanity, Madness and the Family may be, the quest for social intelligibility provides a way of thinking and feeling against both the ‘globalisation of Eurocentric mental health and diagnoses’ (Fernando) and the ‘taboo against talk[ing] about what happens in families’ (Jacqui Dillon). It also brings into focus the critical value of being unintelligible, its potential challenge to what becomes intolerable, but invisible, in our daily lives: Robbie Duchinsky’s brilliant exploration of ‘flat affect’, its appeal to the women described in Sanity, Madness and the Family, carved out a space to think about emotionlessness, or reserve, as a means to forge a survivable life in the era of neoliberalism. Similarly, Oliver James tribute to Laing echoed through the symposium: ‘We miss Laing in our society … We need a voice saying that we live in a mad society.’
Do we? And is that voice Laing’s? That I think so may well have to do with my own first encounter with Sanity, Madness and the Family (stories of ‘first encounters’ with the book punctuated the symposium). But there was one crucial point of unease that also ran through the day: the ‘family blaming’, or, even more controversially, ‘mother-blaming’, that, for some, marks the limit of Laing’s significance. The gender dynamics of Sanity, Madness and the Family are obvious: the 11 patients are women (‘It happened,’ Stadlen insisted, ‘that Esterson was working in an acute Admissions ward for women’). Less obvious is the claim that Laing and Esterson are accusing families, especially mothers, of driving their children mad. ‘Mad’ is the clinical entity in question (again, the reception of Sanity, Madness and the Family is a testament to the difficulty of holding out against diagnosis as such). For Lynne Segal, to read the book in context – for example, the ‘Angry Young Men’, John Bowlby’s psychology of attachment, the situation of the post-war lower middle-class family and, above all, the everyday lives of mothers – is to recognize that Laing ‘never got to grips with the real power dynamics’ of the family; by contrast, for Lucy Johnstone, the critique of ‘family-blaming’ is, or can be, a strategic move to discredit Laing and his work. To not read, to not listen to, Laing.
Persistent, unresolved, that impasse resurfaced at key moments in discussion both on the panels and from the floor (the question of how maddening it might be not to be allowed to feel guilty about a child’s ‘madness’ suggests the range and subtlety of discussion). Certainly, there is a strong pull to collapse the ‘social’ into the family in Sanity, Madness and the Family: in practice, its exploration of ‘social intelligibility’ is an exploration of the relations among members of the family, and, largely, between mothers and daughters. Occasionally, we get a glimpse of a wider kinship network: ‘We must remember,’ as Esterson and Laing put it in the course of discussion of the Church family, ‘that the parents are struggling desperately within the limitations set them in turn by their parents. Her mother rebelled against her own mother, once.’
In other words, if there is ‘madness’ in the family, it is trans-generational, a form of transmission – via language, gesture, expectation – from parent to child. Above all, in fact, Sanity, Madness and the Family speaks on behalf of the child: the child living on in the adult, the child in the daughter, even, sometimes, the child in the mother. It is a dramatic archive of how one member of a family – in this case, daughters – can embody its symptoms. To put that child, that daughter, first – to listen to her voice above others – is to discover a dreadful phenomenology of undermining at work in family life. A phenomenology inseparable from the social and sexual dynamics on which Segal insists: in the 1950s, perhaps, it was bound to be daughters who exposed this?
What Laing and Esterson document is something like a structure of transference, one that remains relevant to the very different formations of family life at the beginning of the 21st century. Relevant and urgent. If, as Andrew Asibong put the point, ‘culture can act like a family’, then Sanity, Madness and the Family is also offering a way to think about the mechanisms of scapegoating so apparent in the contemporary moment (the assault on ‘welfare dependence’, the appeal to the distinction between ‘workers and shirkers’, is only the most obvious example in current political rhetoric of both Left and Right). Above all, what ‘An Urgent Retrospective’ brought to the fore is the need to put ‘social intelligibility’ at the heart of a critical psychoanalysis – and, crucially, what can happen when psychiatry puts itself on the side of the daughter.
Links
URL for podcast:
In Two Minds:
Leave a Reply