An introduction to Hilary Mantel’s introduction[2][3] to her and Anthony Stadlen’s (2014) 50th-anniversary Inner Circle Seminar on
‘Maya Abbott and the Abbotts’[4] in Laing and Esterson’s Sanity, Madness and
the Family (1964)
Anthony Stadlen
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.
Anthony Stadlen is a Daseinsanalyst, Independent Effective Member for
Address: ‘Oakleigh’, 2A Alexandra
Avenue , London N22 7XE
Email: stadlen@aol.com
Inner Circle Seminars: http://anthonystadlen.blogspot.co.uk/
References
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. (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.
Mantel, H. (2015 [2014]). Existential Analysis 26,1 (January 2015): 25-35.
[1] First published in Existential Analysis 26,1 (January 2015): 21-24.
[2] Mantel (2015 [2014])
[3] Dame Hilary Mantel introduced Inner Circle Seminar...
[4] Laing and Esterson: 1. The Abbotts. 50 years on. H...
[2] Mantel (2015 [2014])
[3] Dame Hilary Mantel introduced Inner Circle Seminar...
[4] Laing and Esterson: 1. The Abbotts. 50 years on. H...
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