Politics of the Mind by Iain Ferguson

Author:Iain Ferguson
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781910885673
Publisher: Bookmarks

The Divided Self

Ronald David Laing was born into a working class household in the Govanhill area of Glasgow in 1927. He discussed his early life experiences and upbringing in considerable detail both in an autobiography, Wisdom, Madness and Folly, and in lengthy interviews with the writer Bob Mullan, later published as Mad to be Normal (also the title of the 2017 biopic referred to above). While the particular circumstances of his childhood and adolescence were clearly significant in terms of his later development (not many Govanhill children attended the state-aided “independent” Hutcheson Grammar School, for example), here the focus will be on his ideas and activities from the time when he became a psychiatrist in the 1950s.

Laing’s first book, The Divided Self, was published in 1960 and was based on his earlier experiences of working as a young psychiatrist firstly in the army (this was the period of National Service) and then in Glasgow psychiatric hospitals between 1953 and 1955. In Mad to be Normal, he gives a flavour of the treatments on offer within psychiatric hospitals as he found them at this time:

[I]nsulin coma was the standard practice everywhere with electric shocks sometimes being give in the middle of the coma. In the army and at Gartnavel [Royal Hospital] there was the usual range of treatment from the pre-tranquillisers of paraldehyde and barbiturates and bromides to electric shocks and insulin and lobotomy… One of the consultants at Killearn [army hospital] went round to Gartnavel once a week and did a lobotomy. I was revolted by this practice on sheer clinical grounds, and with the utter casualness with which it was done…142

As Laing makes clear, he was not alone in questioning the use of these new physical “treatments” in this period. Some older psychiatrists also refused to perform lobotomies or administer ECT, while elsewhere in Scotland the social psychiatrist Maxwell Jones was developing the therapeutic community approach to working with people with mental health problems. Laing’s approach, as exemplified in The Divided Self, however, was distinctive in two respects.

Firstly, his emphasis on the “intelligibility” of severe mental illness, including schizophrenia: rather than seeing the speech and behaviour of those labelled mentally ill as meaningless babble and random antics, the output of disordered brains, he argued that these behaviours could often be understood as a more or less rational response to current or past circumstances, usually involving intolerable family pressures and demands. That view also informed Laing’s practice during this period. He showed great solidarity with those labelled schizophrenic. He would on occasion, for example, spend time alone with patients held in padded cells, listening to and seeking to communicate with them.

Part of the power of The Divided Self, then and now, lay in Laing’s ability to provide explanations of the ways in which seemingly meaningless psychotic behaviour could often be more rational than it appeared. So for example, he cites a classic psychiatric case study in which the apparently mad words and behaviour of a young male patient were presented

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