R. D. Laing and Aaron Esterson
Sanity, Madness and the Family:
Families of Schizophrenics
(April 1964)
Sixtieth anniversary reflections
A third subseries (seventeen seminars) on Laing and Esterson’s eleven families
Historically researched by Anthony Stadlen
Explored in film by Yaara Sumeruk
In memoriam Hilary Mantel:
‘The simple words the people speak’
4. Lucie Blair and the Blairs
Anthony Stadlen Yaara Sumeruk
conduct by Zoom
Inner Circle Seminar No. 298
Sunday 30 March 2025
10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
 |
R. D. Laing
7 October 1927 – 23 August 1989 |
 |
Aaron Esterson
23 September 1923 – 15 April 1999 |
 |
Dame Hilary Mantel
6 July 1952 – 22 September 2022 |
 |
| Yaara Sumeruk |
This is the fourth seminar in a new subseries of seventeen Inner Circle Seminars to mark the sixtieth anniversary of the publication in April 1964 of Sanity, Madness and the Family, Volume 1: Families of Schizophrenics by R. D. Laing and Aaron Esterson.
These seminars are unique in two ways.
First: after Esterson’s death in 1999 Anthony Stadlen was entrusted with a large collection of Esterson’s old reel-to-reel tapes from the 1960s. From these he identified those tapes which contained recognisable passages from Laing and Esterson’s book. This made it possible to identify the first names and surnames of the eleven supposedly ‘schizophrenic’ women. Then, through months of work in the excellent Family Records Centre in Taylor House, 1 Myddleton Street, London, which fortuitously and fortunately existed from 1997 to 2008, he eventually identified these eleven women, alive or dead, and their families. He was able in due course to make contact with five of the then seven surviving alleged ‘schizophrenics’, and with other living members of all eleven families, some of whom had participated in the conversations recorded and reported in the book. He conducted research with the surviving ‘schizophrenics’ and family members, leading to a library of twenty-first-century recordings to complement Laing and Esterson’s original recordings from 1959-1962. Stadlen presents his research findings in these seminars.
Second: the film director Yaara Sumeruk, in consultation with Stadlen, is making an extraordinary film based both on Laing and Esterson’s original research and book and on Stadlen’s follow-up research. Her film presents, with the help of remarkable actors, actual family scenes and conversations exactly as reported in the book and/or recorded on the tapes. It is truer to the spirit and letter of Laing and Esterson’s book than Ken Loach’s and Tony Garnett’s two films from the 1960s and 1970s, In Two Minds and Family Life, which unfortunately collude in various ways with the psychiatric assumptions they purport to criticise.
Both Stadlen and Sumeruk will present extracts from their work in progress in this subseries of Inner Circle Seminars.
Stadlen has already devoted two subseries to this book and this research. The subseries starting in 2004 contained eleven seminars, one for each family. The subseries starting 2014 contained twelve, including a final retrospective seminar; and all but one of the twelve were introduced by the great writer Dame Hilary Mantel.
The present, third, subseries, which started in June 2024, is planned to contain seventeen seminars: two introductory; two retrospective; and one for each family except the fourth, the Danzigs, to which we shall devote three seminars, because Esterson went on to develop their case study at book length, in The Leaves of Spring: A Study in the Dialectics of Madness (1970).
Our two initial seminars in this third subseries were devoted to the question why people almost universally misunderstand this book; and we hope by the time of the two retrospective seminars to have come to understand it a little better.
In the second of our two subseries, starting in 2014, all but one of the twelve seminars were introduced by Hilary Mantel, who shone the light of her genius on each family in turn.
Anthony Stadlen wrote an introduction ten years ago to her published introduction to the first seminar of that subseries, focussing on Maya Abbott and the Abbotts. It is reproduced here:
*******************
‘The simple words the people speak’ [1]
An introduction to Hilary Mantel’s introduction [2] to her and Anthony Stadlen’s (2014) 50th-anniversary Inner Circle Seminar on ‘Maya Abbott and the Abbotts’ in Laing and Esterson’s Sanity, Madness and the Family (1964)
Anthony Stadlen
Copyright © Anthony Stadlen 2015, 2020
[Existential Analysis 26,1 (January 2015): 21-24.]
R. D. Laing and Aaron Esterson wrote in Sanity, Madness and the Family: Vol. 1. Families of Schizophrenics (1964: 13):
We believe that the shift of point of view that these descriptions both embody and demand has an historical significance no less radical than the shift from a demonological to a clinical viewpoint three hundred years ago.
Fifty years later, the ‘clinical viewpoint’ still reigns supreme – even among most ‘existential analysts’ and ‘phenomenologists’, although Laing and Esterson’s book was published in the series Studies in Existential Analysis and Phenomenology (edited by Laing).
But William Shakespeare saw beyond both the demonological and the clinical viewpoints more than four hundred years ago.
Inner Circle Seminar No. 202, ‘Sanity, Madness and Shakespeare’, on 27 April 2014, marked the four hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth and the fiftieth anniversary of Laing and Esterson’s book. We listened to Arthur Jonathan and Angela Buxton reading aloud the dialogue in which Hamlet contradicts his mother Gertrude’s assertion that he is mad. Then we heard Esterson’s 1961 recording of Mary Irwin resisting her mother’s insistent attribution that Mary is either selfish or ill. The parallels were startling.
The novelist Hilary Mantel, who had just been made a Dame in the Queen’s Birthday Honours, applied for a place at Inner Circle Seminar No. 205, ‘Maya Abbott and the Abbotts’, on her own birthday, 6 July 2014, as (she explained) a ‘treat’ for herself. This was the first of eleven seminars in which I present my research findings on the eleven families in Sanity, Madness and the Family after fifty years. I invited Hilary Mantel, instead, as a guest speaker to introduce the seminar.
Why is she interested in this book? Why has she taken it everywhere with her? In a Guardian article she explained that it gave her the courage to become a writer (Mantel, 2008):
Some of us need a little push, before we recognise we have the right to pick up a pen. In my case it came from a book by the psychiatrists R. D. Laing and Aaron Esterson...
The people in it seemed close enough to touch... Sanity, Madness and the Family is vivid, direct, gripping. It is a series of interviews with families, who each include one member who has spent time in psychiatric hospitals. Each interview is a novel or play in miniature...
So many of these family conversations seemed familiar to me: their swerves and evasions, their doubleness. All the patients profiled in the book are young women. I know their names are pseudonyms, but over the years I’ve wondered desperately what happened to them, and if there’s anyone alive who knows, and whether any of them ever cut free from the choking knotweed of miscommunication and flourished on ground of their own: Ruth, who was thought odd because she wore coloured stockings; Jean, who wanted a baby though her whole family [actually, only her husband – A. S.] told her she didn’t; and Sarah, whose breakdown, according to her family, was caused by too much thinking…
For most of my life I had been told that I didn’t know how the world worked. That afternoon I decided I did know, after all. In the course of my twenty-one years I’d noticed quite a lot. If I wanted to be a writer, I didn’t have to worry about inventing material, I’d already got it. The next stage was just to find some words.
In her introduction to the seminar, she said (Mantel, 2017 [2014]):
I know this, I thought. I have always known it. Moreover, I have lived it, in a sense I have lived it. These family conversations, I have heard them. I could, I felt, have constructed another chapter and called it The Mantels.
In Giving up the Ghost (Mantel, 2003) she gives an astonishing account of her own family. Her historical novels twice won the Man Booker prize.
I wrote to her after reading her Guardian article (Mantel, 2008). I explained that I was researching the eleven families and could answer some of her questions. This was the start of our friendship.
All the others, including psychiatrists, who wrote to her about that article told her how wrong she was.
The ‘professionals’ claim Laing and Esterson said families ‘cause schizophrenia’. But Laing and Esterson wrote (1970 [1964]: vii):
No one can deny us the right to disbelieve in the fact of schizophrenia.
And Mantel, a twenty-year-old ‘laywoman’, understood (2017 [2014]):
Laing and Esterson did not set out to show that family interactions cause schizophrenia. They questioned the existence of the condition, and observed that the behaviour described as psychotic became intelligible, seen in context; to understand the context, you had to listen when the families told you about themselves.
Ordinary people, and extraordinary ordinary people (Shakespeare, Mantel), often see what psychiatrists, and even ‘existential analysts’ and ‘phenomenologists’, do not – or in bad faith will not.
Mantel writes of those who wrote to ‘correct’ her (2016 [2014]):
This long failure to engage seemed to me dishonest.
She ends (2017 [2014]):
Just read the simple words the people speak.
The simple words may be subtle and profound; they may condense, or clarify, complex contradictions and incompatible injunctions. Aaron Esterson once said to me: ‘These are the deepest secrets.’
At the seminar on the Abbotts we heard a 1959 recording of Maya Abbott telling Esterson about her experience. Some participants voiced surprise at his straightforward way of speaking with her. He was struck by her unusual awareness of her bodily experience, and said so. Because of his interest, and his willingness to make time to listen and learn as she explained in detail, we were privileged to hear her describe how she could imitate other people’s actions but only at a price. For example, she could talk with ‘hardened’ vocal cords, but to do so would be to lose touch with the ‘soft’ vocal cords that children have.
Hilary Mantel was clearly moved to hear Maya speak. But she wrote to me (Mantel, 2014a):
It was interesting how hard it was for participants to keep the reality of schizophrenia ‘in parenthesis’. The discussion kept jumping the rails. You said it would be like that.
Who is the phenomenologist here, able to keep the unproved assumption of ‘schizophrenia’ in parenthesis? The ‘existential’ and ‘phenomenological’ participants, or the ‘lay’ author?
Mantel wrote to me (2014b):
I shall always remember the moment of hearing Maya’s voice. Over the years the women who live in the book have become fabulous creatures to me. I no more expect to meet them than I expect to meet a mermaid; they speak from the depths.
Three weeks after the seminar, Maya Abbott died peacefully in her sleep. Hilary Mantel wrote to me (2014c):
I find tears in my eyes. It may be fanciful or superstitious to say this, but perhaps you have released her. Perhaps it was the act of letting her voice free into the room the other week; while her body lay, as you said, bedbound and inert, her spirit was escaping. I felt it was an important moment then and I feel it more now.
References
Laing, R. D. and Esterson, A. (1964). Sanity, Madness and the Family. Vol. 1. Families of Schizophrenics. London: Tavistock.
Laing, R. D. and Esterson, A. (1970 [1964]). Sanity, Madness and the Family: Families of Schizophrenics. (Second edition.) London: Tavistock.
Mantel, H. (2003). Giving Up the Ghost: A Memoir. London: Fourth Estate.
Mantel, H. (2014a). Personal communication. Email to A. Stadlen, 9 July 2014.
Mantel, H. (2014b). Personal communication. Email to A. Stadlen, 17 July 2014.
Mantel, H. (2014c). Personal communication. Email to A. Stadlen, 29 July 2014.
Mantel, H. (2015 [2014]). Existential Analysis 26,1 (January 2015): 25-35.
*******************
In the present subseries, we are honoured by the participation in each seminar of the pioneering film director Yaara Sumeruk, who has developed a simple but profound way of bringing the family conversations in the book to life in a faithful and accurate cinema film that, as members of the first three seminars have confirmed, makes the predicament of the supposedly ‘schizophrenic’ daughters more strikingly and dramatically intelligible.
For those who did not attend the first two seminars in this new subseries, it may be helpful to mention that they were devoted not primarily to individual families of the eleven but to the general question why for sixty years readers have so spectacularly failed to understand this book. It should be emphasised that this does not mean they think they fail to understand it. On the contrary, almost all readers seem to think there is no problem in understanding what the book is about: obviously, they explain, in this book Laing and Esterson are claiming that ‘families cause schizophrenia’. Such readers will usually go on to say that this claim has long been discredited by the advance of scientific biological psychiatry, though some will say the claim was correct. It seems to make no difference whether the readers are ordinary unprofessional people, psychotherapy students, or eminent psychiatrists. But the truth is that Laing and Esterson explicitly insisted that they were making no such claim.
For example, the British psychiatrist Julian Leff (1938-2021), internationally renowned and honoured as an authority on ‘schizophrenia’, and his co-worker Christine Vaughn, wrote in their book Expressed Emotion in Families (1985, p. 1) that Laing and Esterson’s work was ‘supported by little or no scientific evidence’. Leff and Vaughn clearly supposed that what needed support by scientific evidence was, as they put it, a ‘theory of the family’s role in the origin of schizophrenia’. It is just such a supposed ‘theory of the family’s role in the origin of schizophrenia’ that Leff and Vaughn mistakenly supposed that Laing and Esterson were advocating. But Laing and Esterson repeatedly emphasised they were not advocating any such theory. Indeed, they said they disbelieved in ‘schizophrenia’.
Leff and Vaughn either failed to read what Laing and Esterson wrote; or, if they read it, they failed to understand it; or, if they understood it, they failed to believe it.
What did Laing and Esterson write?
Their first reference in the first edition of the book is to Thomas Szasz’s The Myth of Mental Illness (1961), which had been published only three years earlier.
They reiterate, with clear allusion to Szasz, in the Preface to their second edition (1970):
There have been many studies of mental illness and the family. This book is not of them, at least in our opinion. But it has been taken to be so by many people.
This was an understatement of the first order. More than sixty years after it was published, it has been taken to be so by almost everyone.
In the first edition, they patiently explained:
In our view it is an assumption, a theory, a hypothesis, but not a fact, that anyone suffers from a condition called ‘schizophrenia’. No one can deny us the right to disbelieve in the fact of schizophrenia. We did not say, even, that we do not believe in schizophrenia.
This does not mean Laing and Esterson are not making any claim that can be tested and shown to be true or false. They are indeed making such a claim. But the claim they are making is not the claim Leff and Vaughn imagine they are making. The claim Laing and Esterson are making is not a medical or natural-scientific claim. It is what their colleague Peter Lomas, who participated in the research for some time, would have called an ordinarily human claim. It is by ordinarily human, common-sense means that it must be tested.
Leff and Vaughn, like almost all readers, before considering what claim Laing and Esterson might be making, themselves make an assumption which is itself an implicit claim: namely, that the eleven women in the book are ‘ill’; and that the ‘disease’ from which they are ‘suffering’ is ‘schizophrenia’.
Leff and Vaughn assume, apparently unquestioningly, that Laing and Esterson are making the same assumption, the same implicit claim. They then make the further assumption that Laing and Esterson are making a further claim: namely, that the interactions in the women’s families are causing, or at least contributing to, the women’s supposed or alleged ‘illness’, ‘schizophrenia’.
This claim, if Laing and Esterson had been making it, which they were not, could only have been tested, verified, confirmed, substantiated, or refuted by comparing a statistically significant number of families of supposed ‘schizophrenics’ with a control group of the same number of families of supposed non-‘schizophrenics’ to test their supposed claim (which, of course, they were not making) of a supposed correlation between the family interactions and the supposed ‘schizophrenia’.
However, in reality, Laing and Esterson were claiming something much simpler, namely, that the way the eleven women related to their eleven respective families made ordinary social sense: that it was ‘intelligible’ or ‘comprehensible’ in Jean-Paul Sartre’s terms; or, as the authors cautiously phrased it in the Preface to the second edition of their book, ‘more socially intelligible than has come to be supposed’. It was, they claimed, an ordinarily human response to how their families related to them. To establish this required no control group.
Laing and Esterson made no assumption that the eleven women had ‘schizophrenia’. They made no assumption that the women were ‘ill’. They made no assumption that the women were ‘mad’. They made no assumption that the women had ‘split minds’. They made no assumption that the women were of ‘unsound mind’. They made no assumption that the women had anything medically ‘wrong’ with them. They made no assumption that the women had anything non-medically ‘wrong’ with them. Nor, come to that, did they assume that the negative of any of these assumptions was the case.
Nor did they make any assumption that the families, or ‘society’, were, for example, ‘schizophrenic’, ‘ill’, ‘sick’, ‘mad’, ‘split’, ‘dysfunctional’, ‘pathological’, etc.
The radical misunderstandings based on such false assumptions were the subject of the first seminar in the new subseries, Inner Circle Seminar No. 290, which took place on 16 June 2024. Such misunderstandings are primarily due to people’s failure to read what Laing and Esterson say, in plain English, they are doing in the book. We may suppose that readers do not expect the authors to say what they are in fact saying; and so, even if they begin to notice what the authors are in fact saying, they will dismiss the possibility that the authors might really be saying it; or that, if they are for some reason really saying it, they could actually mean it. See the notice for the first seminar:
https://anthonystadlen.blogspot.com/2023/01/60-years-since-laing-esterson-sanity.html
In the second seminar in the subseries, Inner Circle Seminar No. 291 on 21 July 2024, we considered some more ‘technical’ or ‘theoretical’ terms which some readers have found difficult to understand. We asked whether Laing and Esterson themselves may, despite their usual admirable clarity, have unwittingly contributed to these readers’ confusion, particularly about Sartre’s concepts of praxis and process. See the notice for the second seminar:
https://anthonystadlen.blogspot.com/2023/01/karl-marxs-concept-of-mystification.html
A further source of confusion was that, unfortunately, Laing went on, almost immediately, in talks collected in The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise (1967), and elsewhere, to confuse and mystify the issues that he and Esterson had so lucidly expounded in Sanity, Madness and the Family. In that book, as we saw, they had written unequivocally:
In our view it is an assumption, a theory, a hypothesis, but not a fact, that anyone suffers from a condition called ‘schizophrenia.
But now in The Politics of Experience Laing wrote a chapter with the title ‘The Schizophrenic Experience’. He claimed that some people called ‘schizophrenic’ were embarked on a voyage into ‘inner space and time’; and that ‘the schizophrenic’ could be ‘the hierophant of the sacred’. He wrote (p. 107):
Perhaps we can still retain the now old name, and read into it its etymological meaning: Schiz – ‘broken’; Phrenos – ‘soul or heart’.
The schizophrenic in this sense is one who is broken-hearted, and even broken hearts have been known to mend, if we have the heart to let them.
It is true that Laing continues:
But ‘schizophrenia’, in this existential sense, has little to do with the clinical examination, diagnosis, prognosis and prescriptions for therapy of ‘schizophrenia’.
But why does he want to give an ‘existential’ sense to a medical ‘condition’ on whose existence his own research has thrown grave doubt? Such pirouettes by Laing, a grandmaster of equivocation, exasperated his colleague Esterson, as it did Szasz and Stadlen. Laing’s words, too clever by half, perpetuated the mystification that there was, after all, a ‘condition’, indeed an ‘illness’, ‘schizophrenia’, and a person, indeed a ‘patient’, the ‘schizophrenic’.
This sentimentalising and romanticising of ‘schizophrenia’ and the ‘schizophrenic’ – as if it had been established that there is such a condition and such a person, with Laing as their psychiatric or ‘anti-psychiatric’ guru – was perfectly in tune with the mood of the ‘sixties’, and was absurdly intensified in such books as Anti-Oedipus (1972) by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, which taught, for example, that ‘the schizophrenic’
does not substitute syntheses of contradictory elements for disjunctive syntheses; rather, for the exclusive and restrictive use of the disjunctive synthesis, he substitutes an affirmative use. [...] He is not simply bisexual, or between the two, or intersexual. He is transsexual. He is transalivedead, trans parent-child.
Such flights of fancy should be evaluated in the light of the simple statement, quoted above, by Laing and Esterson in their Preface to the second edition (1970) of Sanity, Madness and the Family:
No one can deny us the right to disbelieve in the fact of schizophrenia.
In the first three seminars in the present subseries, Yaara Sumeruk has already illustrated the above considerations by presenting striking extracts from her extraordinary film based on the book. These filmed extracts startlingly clarified sequences of family interactions recorded in the book.
Sumeruk’s brilliant filmed enactment of conversations in the book is a momentous advance on the films In Two Minds and Family Life directed by Ken Loach in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Although Laing and Esterson were consulted by Loach and by Tony Garnett, the late producer of these films (who himself participated intensely in our previous series of seminars on the book), these early films in many ways colluded with the conventional fictions of an ‘illness’ called ‘schizophrenia’ and a ‘patient’ called the ‘schizophrenic’.
Yaara Sumeruk’s film-in-progress, by contrast, accurately conveys both Laing and Esterson’s philosophy and their methodology. It compellingly reveals that what Laing and Esterson recorded, reported, and wrote about, phenomenologically, is the very stuff of life. There is no ‘psychology’ or ‘metapsychology’ deeper than this, or ‘behind’ it. As Esterson said, ‘these are the deepest secrets’. But they are open to all. All is there, on the surface, in what people say and do to one another, for instance round the kitchen table.
Adrian Laing, son of R. D. Laing, participated in the seminars on Maya Abbott and Claire Church ten years ago. He had written, twenty years ago, in the second edition of his biography of his father (2006):
The highly respected Anthony Stadlen, who has practised as an existential-phenomenological psychotherapist in London for over thirty years, continues to this day to hold well-attended and regular seminars in London on a wide variety of existential-psychotherapy-related topics, including dedicated all-day sessions focusing on the individual families featured in the ground-breaking work Sanity, Madness and the Family, first published over forty years ago.’
It is now sixty years since the book’s publication. It is still not understood. Your participation in, and contribution to, the seminar will perhaps make it understood a bit better. In any event, you will be welcome.
This will be an online seminar, using Zoom.
Cost: Psychotherapy trainees £140, others £175; reductions for combinations of seminars; some bursaries; no refunds or transfers unless seminar cancelled
Apply to: Anthony Stadlen, ‘Oakleigh’, 2A Alexandra Avenue, London N22 7XE
Tel: +44 (0) 7809 433250
For further information on seminars, visit: http://anthonystadlen.blogspot.com/
The Inner Circle Seminars were founded by Anthony Stadlen in 1996 as an ethical, existential, phenomenological search for truth in psychotherapy. They have been kindly described by Thomas Szasz as ‘Institute for Advanced Studies in the Moral Foundations of Human Decency and Helpfulness’. But they are independent of all institutes, schools, and universities.
