R.D. Laing: His Work and its Relevance for Sociology (RLE Social Theory) by Martin Howarth-Williams

Author:Martin Howarth-Williams [Howarth-Williams, Martin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138997028
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2016-05-20T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 4

LAING’S WORK AS A TOTALITY

When I go beyond a certain range it’s outside of my direct horizon, therefore I’ve got to rely on the writings and personal communications given to me by other people. Then like everyone else I’ve got to try to piece together some tentative information–picture of what the whole thing is like (Laing, 1968).

THE TOTALIZATION

We must now face up to the hardest task: the attempt to grasp Laing’s work as a ‘totality’; in using this term, we do not wish to reify Laing’s work, to say it comprises merely this insight, that fact, and the other opinion. Yet, we wish to be able to grasp it in some sense as a whole. What we shall attempt to do, then, is demonstrate and render ‘graspable’ the overall coherence of his work as a dynamic system of psychiatric, political and theoretical practice. This is not an exercise in inventing non–existent self–consistency. Rather, it is a specific recognition that any river, for all its waterfalls, rapids, whirlpools – in a word, its fluidity – has a source, banks on either side, and a general direction of flow towards the sea. (A sea, however, is not definable in these terms.)

It will be recalled that the central issue that we have discovered in Laing’s work is that of Intelligibility (using the word in its everyday as well as Sartrean sense). Specifically, we found that each stage that we isolated was in some way concerned with the problem of understanding, or rendering intelligible, some aspect or level of the ‘human scene’. This is what we refer to when talking of the ‘heuristic consistency’ of Laing’s work. Furthermore, we found when examining the transitions from stage to stage, that such transitions were usually, though not solely, motivated by inadequacies in hitherto existing means of rendering intelligibility.

It would be a mistake, however, to consider Laing’s theoretical development as purely linear; to imagine, simplistically, that stage 1 represents the crudest, and stage 7 the subtlest, schema for producing intelligibility. The theoretical structure of Laing’s career is not, vis–à–vis temporality, one–dimensional.

Let us recapitulate. Stage 1 led on, irrevocably to stage 2, and stage 2 to stage 3. At stage 3, however, we found a theoretical schema – Sartrean Marxism –, the potency of which was not exhausted by Laing’s practical application of it. This was not true of stage 2, for instance. For at the end of stage 2, Laing had gone as far as he could with that theoretical schema. At the end of stage 3, this was emphatically not the case. Now one aspect of the reason for this is that the Schema of stage 3 is dialectical: it denies the self–sufficiency of any one level of conceptualization. Thus, dialectically, to understand the individual requires studying his own family context. But to understand the Family as a phenomenon, apparently irrational, requires studying its context; and so on. The nature of the theoretical stance of stage 3, then, has sweeping implications which I would summarize

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