Friday 29th May, R D Laing

Lots of people at this one - some new and some returning. We began with a discussion of what can be understood by the concept of tolerance which was introduced before we had actually got around to the reading but it kept re-emerging in our discussion of Laing's 'science of persons'. We also found ourselves debating the difference between sympathy and empathy and whether Laing is calling for an empathetic relationship between therapist and 'patient' in his insistence that, although we can have no access to the experience of an other, we must take into account that a person's experience constructs his/her 'being-in-the-world'. Should this, we asked, promote an empathetic response and can this be equated to tolerance? We suggested that tolerance implies a moral attitude which does not necessarily require empathy whereas Laing's existential-phenomenological approach includes the concept of love which we understood to mean a response that does not arise from a rational approach to experience but which is more akin to the concept of affect (in eg., Deleuze). We considered Laing's relationship to Freud and object relations theory (in eg., Klein as derived from Freud) but found that his concept of subjectivity seems to demand objectification while arguing against the necessity for the self to be understood in terms of externalised/internalised objects. What we agreed on was the fact that, in calling for a politics of experience, he is interested in the way that categories of normality are produced in (specifically) psychiatric discourse and that, for him, taking experience seriously means attending to the language of psychosis, rather than understanding it as an expression of disorder. On the subject of language, we discussed the fact that he is, himself, unable to produce an adequate vocabulary which does not make use of the psychiatric terms that he critiques but that his understanding of the 'normal' condition of mental functioning as 'schizoid' allows for an understanding of supposed mental disfunctions as part of a continuum and as produced by social conditions rather than a disorder of an individual mind. It was suggested that Laing's ideas about the way that objects should be understood has some resonances with Actor Network Theory (as proposed by Bruno Latour) and that his work thus does have potential for producing ideas for change in social structures. Because we ended by trying to think through how ideas about mental health can help to understand eg., why we acquiesce to oppressive social conditions, it was suggested (by Paul) that our next reading should be from Wilhelm Reich's Mass Psychology of Fascism. Details will be posted to the forum.

See Joanna Moncrieff's Psychiatric Drug Promotion and the Politics of Neoliberalism for a related discussion (thanks Simon).