Homage to R.D. Laing: a New Politics of Experience

Mad individuals in a mad society In 1967, R.D. Laing published his ground­ breaking book, The Politics of Experience. In it, Laing expressed the radical view that insanity, however one chooses to define it, is only "mad" when viewed from the perspective of a mad soci­ ety which forms its social context. Psychiatric diagnosis, he points out, is based on a consensus view of reality which circumvents the notion that we are each constrained to filter real­ ity through our own understanding, through our own experience. This applies to psychiatrists as well as to patients. Laing likens psychiatric diag­ nosis to judging prospective patients according to what is very likely yet another form of insanity. The failure of a person to concur with this possi­ bly mad consensus state is called insanity. Laing quite agrees that the states which we call mad may not be pleasant ones. He compares them with death, since they represent the death of the person's ego identification. But ego death is not, in and of itself, an illness, no matter how unpleas­ ant, challenging or even permanent it may be. It is only an illness to a society which sees it as such. Healing, to such a society, means restoring the person to a "normal" state of personal isolation, greed, loneliness or any of the other concomitants of "properly functioning" ego boundaries. To risk a vast oversimplification of Laing's intent, he sees madness as a necessary and poten­ tially effective vehicle for social and spiritual transformation, in which the alienated individual becomes re-connected with the whole of human­ ity and the world. He acknowledges that this path is fraught with peril; the general disavowal of such processes in society at large virtually guarantees the individual's failure to make something useful of the experience of ego death. Madness is there­ fore a problem, but it is not necessarily the indi­ vidual's problem. It is, rather, the problem of society as a whole. Were society to pay more attention to the experiences and values which seem important to people in their states of madness, we could provide a safe vessel for indi­ viduals called to embark upon the journey to redeem the self through the death of the ego. Arnold Mindell's book, City Shadows: Psycho­ logical Interventions in Psychiatry (1988), repre­ sents a similar position. Working with clients in extreme states of consciousness, Mindell finds that their experiences express the shadow (in Jung's sense) of the society of which they are a part. The experiences of which these clients partake typify just those experiences which are disavowed and often despised by society as a whole-by exten­ sion, the people themselves form a disavowed and despised minority. In The Politics of Experience, Laing never explicitly defines schizophrenia. He does, however, give some of its characteristics, the most prominent of which is "ego death." The person has evidently lost the capacity of identification. This corresponds to Mindell's notion of the missing metacommunicator. The metacommuni­ cative function permits a person to speak about the states of consciousness which she or he experi­ ences. A person who, for instance, is given to wild fits of passion, in which he produces a deluge of verbal material without much regard to the other person's feedback, is not necessarily in an extreme state of consciousness. If he can tell you, in the midst of his verbosity, that he sometimes gets this way when he is excited, and to please excuse him,