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’
3. Maya Abbott and the Abbotts
Anthony Stadlen Yaara Sumeruk
conduct by Zoom
Inner Circle Seminar No. 294
Sunday 17 November 2024
10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
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| R. D. Laing 7 October 1927 – 23 August 1989 |
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| Aaron Esterson 23 September 1923 – 15 April 1999 |
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| Dame Hilary Mantel 6 July 1952 – 22 September 2022 |
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| Yaara Sumeruk |
This is the third seminar in a new subseries of what we have now decided will be 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, disorderly 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 London, which fortuitously existed from 1997 to 2008, he eventually identified these eleven actual women, alive or dead, and their families. He was able in due course to make contact with five of the then seven surviving living 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 ones 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. It is truer to the spirit and letter of Laing and Esterson’s book than the 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.
We have 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 have been 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. His introduction is reproduced here because in today's seminar, too, we are focussing on Maya Abbott and the Abbotts:
Anthony Stadlen
Copyright © Anthony Stadlen 2015, 2020
[Existential Analysis 26,1 (January 2015): 21-24.]
Mantel, H. (2003). Giving Up the Ghost: A Memoir. London: Fourth Estate.
Mantel, H. (2008). Author, author: Every writer has a ‘How I became a writer’ story. http://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/sep/06/1.
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.
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 two 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?
They reiterate in the Preface to the second edition (1970):
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’.
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.
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
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.
But ‘schizophrenia’, in this existential sense, has little to do with the clinical examination, diagnosis, prognosis and prescriptions for therapy of ‘schizophrenia’.
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.
It is crucial, when confronted by such flights of fancy, to recall 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 two 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.
Today she will present, reenacted, the entire set of interactions recorded in Chapter 1, Maya Abbott and the Abbotts. For example, there is a spectacular illustration, absolutely faithful to the tape-recorded dialogue in the book, of how Maya struggles to maintain her sense of reality and integrity when subject to a double bind by her parents in Gregory Bateson’s original sense entailing different ‘logical types’ – not merely a mixed message or contradictory communication. In Sumeruk’s film, the double bind, in this embodied form, is immediately perceptible and intelligible.
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 seminar on Maya Abbott ten years ago. He had written, ten years earlier, 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.’
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