Known as a rebel who undid the dominant order in psychiatry of his time, R. D. Laing (1927 - 1989) was born in the Scottish city of Glasgow, into a conservative Calvinist family. Intellectually restless, at just fifteen years of age he had already read Voltair, Marx, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and Freud.
R.D. Laing entered the university in 1945 graduating in 1951. At that time there was an intense philosophical tradition in Glasgow linked to European existential thought - the Scottish school of personalists - to which R.D. Laing was very permeable.
For his part, in his first book, published in 1960 - The divided self - Ronald Laing makes special reference to one of the main Scottish personalist philosophers - John McMurray - who affirmed that the techniques of the natural sciences are inadequate for the study of the people.
In contrast, the psychiatry of his time was characterized by a strong somatic content of mental problems - nothing very different from the current vision - to the extent that the most recurrent treatments oscillated between the electro convulsive therapies, induced insulin coma and lobotomies.
In this context, at the Royal Hospital of Gartnavel, R.D. Laing, along with his colleagues McGhie and Cameron, carry out what is known as the game house experience.
Faced with overcrowded hospital facilities with limited health personnel, Laing and his colleagues began to wonder to what extent the behavior of patients - mostly diagnosed with schizophrenia - was not a product of the environment. This is how they dissuaded the director of the hospital - Dr. MacNiven - from granting them a large, comfortable room, equipped and with a lower-than-usual patient-nurse ratio..
The idea was to house twelve of the inmates with the worst prognosis. With a suspicious air Dr. MacNiven gave in to the request. A short time later, the atmosphere of the environment in which these patients found themselves became more relaxed. Eighteen months later, all the twelve inmates, who even before starting the experience were considered intractable and irretrievable, presented such significant improvements that they received medical discharge.
A year later, all these patients returned to the hospital, which led some of Laing's colleagues to argue that schizophrenia was an incurable disease, only partially alleviated by the influence of the environment. For his part, R.D Laing counter-argued that there would be something wrong in the social environment (Beveridge, 1998).
It is in this context that we position ourselves to try to understand Dr. Laing's stated purpose: make insanity and the process of freaking out understandable.
Labeled by some as an anti-psychiatry psychiatrist, by virtue of sharing some of the postulates of the movement that bore that name, he goes so far as to declare that he does not see himself as such, since much of what is known as psychiatric practice is by definition anti-psychiatry.
Other authors, more adjusted in the definition, refer that much more than an anti-psychiatrist R.D. Laing was, in fact, an anti-medical psychiatrist. One of the main questions that arise from Lainguian ideas concerns the scientific-humanist approach to mental problems - especially schizophrenia - pointing out the mistakes of psychiatry in regard to its approach and treatment..
Another of the Lainguian focuses is the family and its role in the origin and development of mental disorders, that could well be attributed to the inheritance-environment interaction.
For Laing, the schizophrenic condition is conceived as the result of an extreme ontological insecurity, an adaptation to dysfunctional communication patterns in the family, an inner journey to heal psychic divisions that force to return to the stages of development prior to the emergence of the false self and a disorder of the service of a political function that seeks to control and socially oppress, all for the sake of a supposed collective good.
As we have already mentioned, Laing's purpose was to make insanity and the process of going mad understandable, giving an account in existential terms of certain forms of insanity, without implying an idea of construction of a theory of schizophrenia.
When trying to understand the set of particular experiences of a certain individual inserted in a certain existential context, behaviors and verbalizations such as those of schizophrenia, become understood, otherwise they maintain an essentially hidden meaning. Are there not other ways of being a healthy schizoid in the world that, from the conventional clinical approach, go unnoticed??
The schizophrenic discontinuity towards its external reality is described by Laing as a basic existential position of ontological security that is opposed to an ontological insecurity where the subject is more concerned with being preserved than with coexisting in a certain balance with others..
The subjective experience that the person is in a situation of ontological dependence on the other, replaces the relational sense established in a genuine reciprocity, with the false self in charge of mediating between the internal universe and external reality.
From the Lainguian perspective, psychosis would be a process in which the subject identifies exclusively with that part of himself that he judges as non-incarnated, thus enjoying a kind of physical invulnerability and a longed-for state of disembodied spirituality..
The body is not an indestructible supporter against the corrosive attack of ontological uncertainties. It is not a bulwark against psychosis - points out Laing (2006). The only thing that the incarnated individual possesses is an integral starting point that operates with reality and that makes the non-incarnate a hyper-conscious contemplator of everything that is carried out bodily..
The operations are thus judged as being only mental. In the schizoid psychic organization, the subject closes in on himself without resorting to a relationship with others. Thus, he himself is all the people who are necessary to him, which in turn drags him into immense despair. His psychic universe impoverishes to the point that the void is installed.
By not raising defenses against the loss of a body part, his efforts focus on preserving his self by virtue of the terror that his own dissolution causes - non-being. On the other hand, and contrary to the conventional postulates that schizophrenia is a set of mere somatic substrates that are expressed in someone regardless of the system in which they are inserted, the schizophrenic procedure is seen by Laing from a perspective of social praxis.
The concept of praxis and process-praxis are inspired by the Sartrean ideas expressed by Laing and Cooper in the book Reason and Violence - A Decade of Sartrean Thought (1972), where they state that existentialism and Marxism have the same objectives, being that the former seeks the man wherever he is, and the latter absorbs the latter in the idea. The human being is not unknowable, but unknown.
For Laing and Cooper, diseases acquire their true significance when they are seen as a concrete translation of the alienation of man. The existentialism, aided by psychoanalysis, he can only study the situations in which man is lost in childhood. It is evident that the Marxist conception that the social actions of a person are conditioned by the general interests of his class, is not at all incompatible with the idea of conditioning of the current action by the infantile experience.
The most advanced societies - yesterday and today - face a serious problem of social isolation, also called loneliness. “I cannot experience your experience. You cannot experience my experience. We are both invisible men. All men are invisible to each other. " (Laing, 1967) Our ignorance of one's own identity and the identity of the other can be altered with social phenomenology, which Laing defines as the science of one's own experience and the experience of others..
A knowledge interested in your behavior and my behavior, as I live it, as well as yours-mine as you do. But Laing clarifies that the experience-behavior is not a simile of internal-external since this means saying that my experience is intra-psychic, assuming that it would be a certain psyche that houses my experience, being that my psyche is my experience and vice versa.
Focusing on the therapeutic experience, Roland Laing states that psychotherapy must configure a stubborn attempt by two people to recover the totality of the human being through the therapeutic nexus. The patient must be accepted in the here and now, and not in the change. The man to be himself must move away from normality, being madness that allows him to be and be in proper harmony with himself.
Laing, confronting the installed powers of psychiatry, does not share the models of insanity, much less the way it is approached - in particular with regard to schizophrenia - and seems to be right when we consider that it is more than a therapeutic process. of a human-technical encounter. This makes the other an object of examination, which consequently degrades him in his quality of subject..
It is a misunderstanding to think that sanity consists in the ability of someone to adapt to external reality and madness a failure of this attempt.
According to Lainguian thought, madness is like a journey that seeks to remedy the terrible state of alienation that we call normality (Rivera, 2011). We verify with some ease the validity of some of the postulates of R.D. Laing, while the advances of human thought in the areas of the so-called health / mental illness binomial seem to have made little progress, among other things because the dominant model insists on staying within the parameters of normality / abnormality. But of course, over so many nebulae so many other lights come to clarify our vision.
It is unavoidable to mention that a large part of R.D. Laing reflects his own life experience. If we start from the base of what was his formation as a child, it does not take much effort before beginning to understand that the first break that Laing makes is precisely with his cultural roots of strong conservative religious tinge in his family bosom. Even more so if we consider that it was a son manifestly unwanted.
It is important to note that his humanistic-existential vision did not present vestiges of a mystical-spiritual order in its beginnings, but, later, a certain relevance of this aspect emerges. Could this phenomenon be framed as an attempt to return to its Christian roots? It is quite possible that much of R.D. Laing has been a permanent attempt to justify their own life history and experience.
This does not detract from your work and effort, on the contrary, in our view it gives you a sense of greater authenticity. Facing the status-quo of medical-psychiatric corporatism, challenging and denouncing excesses and opposing alternatives diametrically opposed to the dominant thought, is not a task that everyone is willing to take on and follow..
One thing we can make clear is that despite the advances registered in areas such as neurosciences, pharmacology and therapeutic interventions, people with schizophrenia continue to carry the painful weight of stigma and the blame for phenomena derived from their being and being in the world, and the so-called normals continue to believe that we have nothing to do with that.
References
Beveridge, A. (1998) R. D. Laingrevisited. Psychiatric Bulletin, pp. 452-456.
Laing, R. (1967) The politics of the bird of paradise experience. Critical Editorial: Barcelona.
Laing, R. (2006) The divided self. (5th ed.) Editorial Fund of Economic Culture of Spain. S.L.
Laing, R. & Cooper, D. (1972) Reason and Violence - A Decade of Sartrean Thought. Editorial Paidós: Buenos Aires.
Rivera, F. (2011) Laing a rebel who defied the prevailing psychiatric order.
Yet No Comments