Heidegger’s Zollikon Seminars. A 60th-anniversary revaluation. 3 (2 and 5 November 1964) and 4 (18 and 21 January 1965). Inner Circle Seminar 296 (19 January 2025)

 

Heidegger’s Zollikon Seminars

A 60th-anniversary revaluation

Seminar 3 (2 and 5 November 1964)

Seminar 4 (18 and 21 January 1965)

‘Socrates: The hardest is to say the same about the same’

Anthony Stadlen

conducts

Inner Circle Seminar No. 296

 

Sunday 19 January 2025

10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

 

Martin Heidegger  Medard Boss
Feldweg, Messkirch

Martin Heidegger  Medard Boss
Boss’s home, Zollikon

Anthony Stadlen writes:

Between 1959 and 1969 the German philosopher Martin Heidegger conducted seminars for psychiatrists and a few other professionals at the invitation of the Swiss psychiatrist Medard Boss, mostly in Boss’s house in Zollikon near Zürich. 

The first seminar, in November 1959 (on 4 November 1959, according to Erna Hoch), was in the Bürghölzli mental hospital in Zürich. The second was in the Bürghölzli on 3 February 1960 and in Boss’s house in Zollikon on 5 February 1960. The two men also discussed the daseinsanalytic foundations of psychoanalysis during their holiday together in Taormina, Sicily, in the summer of 1963. There were then ten seminars in Boss’s house between 1964 and 1969. 

Boss, with Heidegger’s collaboration and consent, published in 1987 a book containing reports of the seminars, and of his own conversations and correspondence with Heidegger (Heidegger, M., 1994 [1987], Zollikoner Seminare: Protokolle – Zwiegespräche – Briefe, herausgegeben von M. Boss, second edition, Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann).

Fourteen years later, in 2001, an authorised American translation of the second edition was published (Heidegger, M., 2001 [1994], Zollikon Seminars: Protocols – Conversations – Letters, edited by M. Boss, Evanston IL: Northwestern University Press).

I showed in detail (Existential Analysis, 14.2, July 2003) that this American translation is not trustworthy. While some passages are tolerably translated, others are highly incompetent and give a grossly distorted picture of what Heidegger is saying.

A simple but telling example: Heidegger says the title of a congress of psychologists is ‘reichlich komisch’. Even if you know no German you will probably guess this means ‘richly comic’, and indeed it does; but these (to put it mildly) rather humourless translators render it as ‘rather humorous’, thereby misrepresenting Heidegger’s biting humour, and his no doubt justified contempt, as bland praise.

Another example: According to the American translation, a Zollikon seminar participant on 9 July 1964 mentions ‘the burgher prince’. I have heard this read aloud by a lecturer who was trying to appear to know what it means. Nobody dared ask. Is the ‘burgher prince’ a figure in a German or Austrian or Swiss Novelle or fairy-tale? Actually, the original just reads ‘Bürger-Prinz’. No article, definite or indefinite. Prof. Dr. Hans Bürger-Prinz (1897-1976) was a Nazi psychiatrist and judge, who at the Hereditary Health Court in Hamburg decided which people with a hereditary disease should be forcibly sterilised. Still alive at the time, he was referred to as an eminent authority by the participant in the Zollikon seminar on 9 July 1964 .

Ten years ago, a subseries of our Inner Circle Seminars sought to explore the Zollikon seminars, at a distance of fifty years, as nearly as possible to the day; and – among other things – to remedy these and similar farcical mistranslations together with others much more serious, based on a failure to understand what Heidegger actually means.

We are now (since November 2019) engaged on a second series, sixty years after Heidegger’s original seminars. In Inner Circle Seminar No. 253 on 10 November 2019 we discussed the first seminar, held in the Bürghölzli on 4 November 1959; and in Inner Circle Seminar No. 257 on 3 May 2020 we discussed the second, ‘lost’, seminar, not reported in the original book Zollikon Seminars, held in the Bürghölzli on 3 February 1960 and in Boss’s Zollikon home on 5 February 1960.

In Inner Circle Seminar No. 293 on Sunday 6 October 2024 we made a start on the first two Zollikon seminars ‘proper’ – that is, the first seminars recorded as held entirely in Boss’s Zollikon home, both in the original book Zollikoner Seminare (1987) and in the more recent volume Zollikoner Seminare (2018), Volume 89 of the Heidegger Gesamtausgabe. We shall call them No. 1 (24 and 28 January 1964) and No. 2 (6 and 9 July 1964).

We have the advantage now that the 2018 Zollikoner Seminare, the largest volume in the 102-volume edition of his collected works, the Gesamtausgabe, contains an extraordinary quantity of very detailed notes to himself by Heidegger for his Zollikon seminars, including 53 pages for these two seminars of January and July 1964.

The seminar No. 2, on 6 and 9 July 1964 in Boss’s house, is remarkable as the only seminar where the awkward and fascinating dialogue between Heidegger and the baffled participating psychiatrists, including Boss, was taken down in shorthand and reported in full verbatim – by Dr Erna Hoch, a person of great honesty and integrity, as well as humour. This takes us to the heart of Heidegger’s amazing seminars.

Today, 19 January 2025, we shall explore what we are calling Zollikon seminar No. 3 (2 and 5 November 1964) and No. 4 (18 and 21 January 1965). but we shall also recapitulate some of the fundamental points Heidegger tries to convey in that year’s earlier seminars.  

1965 was Heidegger’s most active year in relation to the Zollikon seminars. He made no fewer than five visits. In 2025, as we did in 2015, we devote one seminar to each of his five seminars of 1965, on their 50th anniversaries almost to the day. These five seminars of ours thus have the same structure and time-scale as his: two three-hour sessions (with coffee and tea breaks) separated in our case by a lunch break and in his by a day or two.

Our seminar on 6 March 2026 examines seminar No. 9 of 1 and 3 March 1966.

Subsequent seminars, to be announced in due course, will continue to explore the important Boss-Heidegger conversations and correspondence reported in the book, including their fundamental Taormina conversations of 1963 to which we have already devoted many seminars.

Finally, on 18 March 2029, we shall discuss the last Zollikon seminar, No. 10, held on 18 and 21 March 1969.

Whatever else Heidegger did in his long life, his Zollikon seminars seem an act of decency and piety – even if he and Boss were naive in thinking that clinical psychiatrists, of all people, would be receptive to his radical questioning of the foundations of psychotherapy. Heidegger travelled from Freiburg in Germany to Zollikon in Switzerland, took no payment (according to his trusted assistant, the late Professor Dr. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann – personal communication), and put an enormous amount of work and thought into preparing and conducting these seminars. He explicitly told Boss that he was collaborating with him because he hoped to help troubled people. The protocols of, and Heidegger’s notes for, the seminars can be a force for great good if we are prepared to take them slowly and seriously, and open ourselves to their profound simplicity. They are revolutionary in their return to beginnings, saying ‘the same thing in the same way’ – which, as Heidegger points out and we shall discuss today, Socrates said was the hardest of all.

This does not mean there is nothing to criticise in Heidegger’s or Boss’s approach to, or in, the Zollikon seminars. Boss limited the participation to medical doctors with only a few non-medical professionals. As I showed in my paper ‘Medical Daseinsanalysis’ (Existential Analysis 16.1, January 2005: 169-177), Heidegger colluded with Boss’s aspiration for, and teaching and practice of, Daseinsanalysis as a medical discipline. We have explored the implications of this in many recent Inner Circle Seminars, including Inner Circle Seminar No. 293 on 15 September: ‘“Is the madman mentally ill? No.” – Heidegger 1953’. 

Moreover, if we confine ourselves to one exchange in one seminar, we can see that the issues raised are very complex. Heidegger mentions in the seminar on 1 March 1966, which we shall explore on 1 March 2026, that Boss, at the start of the seminar, has compared the seminars to a kind of ‘group therapy’, in which participants, ‘as in a Freudian analysis’, develop ‘resistance’ to the ‘Heideggerian cure’.

Boss claimed to have had analytic sessions with Sigmund Freud as a young student in Vienna in 1925, although (as Gion Condrau and I have shown) he exaggerated their number. Aleš Wotruba, who with his wife Sarka participated as young students in the final Zollikon seminar, has told us that Boss insisted that daseinsanalytic trainees should study, even more than Heidegger, Freud’s papers on technique. If Boss really believed the seminars were a form of therapy, should he not have been true to Freud’s ‘fundamental rule’ that ‘one should communicate without criticism all that comes to mind’? But Condrau, who was in turn Boss’s army comrade, colleague, deputy, and successor, reported that Boss told participants in the Zollikon seminars that they must not ask Heidegger about his Nazism. Are we to presume that, as a result of Boss’s prohibition, they were able to ensure that during the seminars this question never once crossed any of their minds? (See p. 167 of my review of Condrau’s book Martin Heidegger’s Impact on Psychotherapy (Existential Analysis 14.1, January 2003: 162-178.))

However, Boss is making a serious point in speaking of group therapy and resistance. He says that ‘resistance’ has arisen, in the form of the objection that Daseinsanalysis is anti-scientific: first, because Heidegger’s discussion of natural science is (allegedly) valid only for classical, not nuclear, physics; second, because psychotherapy is in any case not a procedure like physics.

Heidegger questions whether the seminars are a ‘cure’. He recalls that ‘semen’ means a seed, and hopes these evenings may succeed in strewing a seed that will sprout here and there. He says a philosophical seminar is always in the situation of Socrates, who said that what is most difficult is always to say the same thing about the same thing.

He now repeats his explanation that physics objectifies nature, and argues that this is even more so for nuclear than for classical physics. Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle certainly does not change this.

Heidegger demonstrates how a discussion of ‘stress’ in a journal of psychosomatic medicine is couched in the objectifying language of physics. He discusses how this negative critique can become a positive one by showing how the language of his own Being and Time can open up the discourse on ‘stress’ in a way appropriate to human science. He quotes Hölderlin: ‘... we are a conversation.’ ‘Stress’, he stresses, makes sense only as part of this ‘conversation’, whether as a ‘burdening’ or an ‘unburdening’.

On 3 March 1966, the second evening of the same seminar, Heidegger reiterates that ‘stress’ belongs to ‘the constitution of human existence determined by thrownness, understanding, and language’. He discusses Plügge’s account in the psychosomatic journal of being ‘stressed’ by the sound of his neighbour’s children but not his own. Heidegger summarises his paradigmatic daseinsanalytic opening up of the concept of ‘stress’ in the sentence: ‘Unburdening and burdening are possible only through the human being’s ecstatic being-outstretched.’

While we have discussed in many seminars this and similar revelatory elucidations by Heidegger, we have also acknowledged what the Finnish psychotherapist Martti Siirala called the 

‘violent elements in the absolutist claims for “Daseinsanalysis” to a direct access to the phenomena in an adequate, undistorted way’

to be taught to the unfortunately defective client, who supposedly lacks this vision. Many have been seduced not only by scientism (technological tinkering) but also by this daseinsanalytic absolutism (patronising preaching). In these seminars we strive through our dialogue to do justice to Heidegger’s clarifying vision but also to transcend its avoidance of dialectic. Here we can draw on his own early, abandoned notion of diahermeneutics.

You can attend any or all of these seminars. Each is self-contained, but it would be advantageous to attend them all. And, of course, if you came to the previous cycle of Inner Circle Seminars on these Zollikon seminars ten years ago, this is now an opportunity to deepen your thinking on, and through, them. Like any serious subject, they are inexhaustible.

Please do get hold of, and peruse, the text of the relevant Zollikon seminar each time. Preferably buy the book. The unsatisfactory American translation is good enough for this purpose; I will correct flagrant errors. I will not be showing the text on screen; I would prefer you to refer to your own copy. If necessary I can email you a photocopy of each seminar.

6 October 2024

(Inner Circle Seminar 293)

Heidegger’s Zollikon Seminars 1 (24 and 28 January 1964) and 2 (26 and 9 July 1964)

‘How does Herr Rohr relate to this table here?’

19 January 2025

(Inner Circle Seminar 296)

Heidegger’s Zollikon Seminar 3 (2 and 5 November 1964) and 4 (18 and 21 January 1965)

‘Socrates: The hardest is to say the same about the same.’

9 March 2025

(Inner Circle Seminar 298)

Heidegger’s Zollikon Seminar 5 (10 and 12 March 1965)

‘In making-present the Zürich main railway station, we are directed not to a picture of it, not to a representation ...’

11 May 2025

(Inner Circle Seminar 301)

Heidegger’s Zollikon Seminar 6 (11 and 14 May 1965)

‘We now make a leap to the body-problem.’

6 July 2025

(Inner Circle Seminar 304)

Heidegger’s Zollikon Seminar 7 (6 and 8 July 1965)

‘Is the body and its bodying ... something somatic or something psychic or neither of the two?’

23 November 2025

(Inner Circle Seminar 310)

Heidegger’s Zollikon Seminar 8 (23 and 26 November 1965)

‘Whence comes the insight that ... the Sein of the Da is ecstatic ... ?’

1 March 2026

(Inner Circle Seminar ?)

Heidegger’s Zollikon Seminar 9 (1 and 3 March 1966)

‘Unburdening and burdening are possible only through the human being’s ecstatic being-outstretched.’

18 March 2029

(Inner Circle Seminar ?)

Heidegger’s Zollikon Seminar 10 (18 and 21 March 1969)

‘The book lies here next to the glass. But how are two human beings, standing together, together?’

These will be online seminars, using Zoom.

Cost: Psychotherapy trainees £140 per seminar or £700 the subseries of the next six Zollikon Seminars seminars (discussing Heidegger’s seminars 3-9), others £175 per seminar or £875 the subseries of six; some bursaries; payable in advance

Apply to: Anthony Stadlen, ‘Oakleigh’, 2A Alexandra Avenue, London N22 7XE

Tel: +44 (0) 20 8888 6857     E-mail: stadlenanthony@gmail.com

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 colleges.

Does Heidegger allow space for free will? Raymond Tallis conducts by Zoom Inner Circle Seminar 295 (15 December 2024)

 

Does Heidegger allow space for free will?

Raymond Tallis

conducts by Zoom

his eleventh Inner Circle Seminar: No. 295

introduced by Anthony Stadlen

Sunday 15 December 2024

10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Raymond Tallis

Raymond Tallis is one of our best-loved invited speakers. Today he conducts his eleventh Inner Circle Seminar, twelve years after his first on 2 December 2012. 

Professor Tallis has shown in ten profound Inner Circle Seminars that he is one of the world’s leading demystifiers of what he calls the ‘neuroscience delusion’ (‘neuromania’) and the ‘intellectual plague of biologism’ (‘animalism’). His ruthless, good-humoured exposure of reductive natural-scientism continues the tradition of Heidegger and Szasz, for example, but is utterly his own.  The heart of the thinking, which has informed all his more than thirty books and all the seminars he has conducted for us, is in harmony with the underlying philosophy and raison d'être of the Inner Circle Seminars as a whole. Psychotherapists are free to choose to go on pretending to be ‘validated’ by ‘neuroscience’; but their work, such as it is, sometimes radically transforming and helpful, sometimes best passed over in silence, speaks for, or against, itself, as the case may be; and no pseudo-scientific ‘validation’, or ‘invalidation’, can disguise this.

Raymond Tallis is one of the select few who affirms and advocates human language to depict and describe the human world and human relationships.

In his book Logos Professor Tallis exposes the absurdity of the argument that evolutionary biology or neuroscience show that our thinking is merely a function of our bodies-as-objects-for-science and therefore can have no truth-value of its own unless it is in some way itself derived from evolutionary biology or neuroscience, which are taken to be ‘objectively true’. But those sciences are themselves human creations, and therefore, by this argument, not ‘objectively true’. Professor Tallis remarks that those who use this argument are worthy successors of the Cretan of old who said all Cretans were liars.

Our enthusiasm for his work in general does not mean that in his Inner Circle Seminars we simply sit at Raymond Tallis’s feet (as we may imagine them below his friendly Zoomed countenance) and accept his arguments without question. Through dialogue and disagreement we hope to approach a little closer to truth.

Raymond Tallis introduces his seminar today as follows:

Does Heidegger Allow Space for Free Will?

In a previous seminar, I made the case for the reality of agency in the face of the currently dominant naturalist, scientistic philosophy that seemed to demonstrate its impossibility. At the heart of my defence of free will was an appeal to the distinctive nature of actions and that in virtue of which they are put together. Agents engage with the natural world from a virtual outside: their actions are the realisation of prior envisaged possibilities and of the tensed time in which possibilities are located (such that they are occasioned by an envisaged  future informed by a past that is present). Actions are radically different from other material events that are propelled into being by past events which are their causal ancestors.

There is some overlap between this account of the properties of the human agent and Heidegger’s Dasein that is ‘ahead of’ and ‘cares for itself’. However, Heidegger’s resistance to addressing the question of embodiment and his desire to avoid any hint of a Cartesian dualism – so that he marginalises the body-as-object – brings problems for understanding agency. The endeavour to dissolve individuals into “being-in-the-world” makes it difficult to see how Da-sein is individuated and how, consequently, its agency has a point d’appui; in particular how its actions are located in physical space and physical time. 

Heidegger’s failure to deal with embodiment (flagged up by Sartre and Merleau-Ponty) is not, I shall argue, adequately addressed by his invoking a distinction between the body-as-object (Körper) and a living body open to the world (Leib). There are many reasons for claiming this but one I shall examine in some detail is the necessity for an ontological democracy between the body and the material world in order that human being should have, and pursue, an agenda that serves specific needs. 

While I shall shrink from the blasphemy of accusing the Heidegger of Being and Time of even a hint of idealism, the ‘world’ in which being-in-the-world has its being seems to lack those intrinsic properties that a) transcend the human subject and b) have come into being prior to the emergence of such subjects. The permission Heidegger gives himself to start from, and remain within, a realm outside the natural world, while it may seem to deal with the challenge of determinism undermines, even empties, the very idea of an agency on account of removing any ultimate basis for Dasein to have a particular agenda. It is not surprising that his notion of freedom weakened in his later writing to Gelassenheit or authentic non-willing.

The heart of these seminars is dialogue. It will of course be possible to argue in depth with Professor Tallis if you disagree with any of his points or positions, or indeed if you think, as some authorities on Heidegger do, that his argument as a whole today is based on a serious misreading of Heidegger.

Raymond Tallis is a philosopher, poet, novelist and cultural critic, and a retired physician and clinical neuroscientist. He ran a large clinical service in Hope Hospital Salford and an academic department in the University of Manchester. His research focussed on epilepsy, stroke, and neurological rehabilitation.

He trained in medicine at Oxford University and at St Thomas’s Hospital in London before going on to become Professor of Geriatric Medicine at the University of Manchester and a consultant physician. He was an editor and major contributor to two key textbooks in the field, The Clinical Neurology of Old Age and Textbook of Geriatric Medicine and Gerontology, and author of over 200 original scientific articles, mainly in clinical neuroscience, including papers in Nature Medicine, Brain, Lancet. In 2000, he was elected Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences in recognition of his contribution to medical research. Among many prizes, he was awarded the Lord Cohen Gold Medal for Research into Ageing. He played a key part in developing guidelines for the care of stroke patients in the UK. From 2011-14 he was Chair, Healthcare Professionals for Assisted Dying (HPAD). He was a member of the Council of Royal College of Physicians between 2016 and 2019. He is a member of the criteria-setting group for the UK Research Excellence Framework 2021 in philosophy.

He has published fiction, poetry, and 30 books on the philosophy of mind, metaphysics, philosophical anthropology, and literary and cultural criticism. Aping Mankind (2010) was reissued in 2016 as a Routledge Classic. Of Time and Lamentation. Reflections on Transience (2017; 2019) a comprehensive inquiry into the nature of time was widely praised. NHS SOS (2012), co-edited with Jacky Davis, examined the destructive impact of Tory policies on the NHS. Logos. An Essay on the Mystery of the Sense-Making Animal was published in Spring 2018. His most recent volume of verse – Sunburst – was published in November 2019.

A series of eight seminars on Humanism given in the philosophy department of Charles University Prague, formed the basis of his book, published in 2020, Seeing Ourselves. Reclaiming Humanity from God and Science. A defence of free will – Freedom. An Impossible Reality – was published in May 2021 and an issue of the philosophy journal Human Affairs was devoted to it. Professor Tallis has based a number of Inner Circle Seminars on these books.

His most recent books are Prague 22. A Philosopher Takes a Tram through a City’ (Philosophy Now Publications, forthcoming 2024) and Circling Round Explicitness. The Heart of the Mystery of Human Being (Acumen, 2025).

In 2009, the Economist Intelligent Life Magazine described him as one of the world’s leading polymaths. The critic Stuart Kelly said of him in Scotland on Sunday in 2016 that ‘he is one of the very few contemporary thinkers whom I would unequivocally call a genius’. He has four honorary degrees: DLitt (Hull, 1997) and Litt.D. (Manchester, 2001) for contributions to the humanities; and DSc (St George’s Hospital Medical School, 2015; University of East Anglia, 2017) for contributions to research in medicine.

For an account of how Raymond Tallis writes his extraordinary books, see his article ‘My writing day: In my favourite pub, the staff turn down the speaker in my writing corner’, in The Guardian Review of 29 April 2017:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/apr/29/my-writing-day-raymond-tallis

Nicholas Fearn wrote in The Independent:

When Kirsty Young was asked to name her favourite guest on Desert Island Discs, the rock star Paul Weller was beaten into second place, for her own luxury item would be the writer Raymond Tallis.

Raymond Tallis, whose eleventh Inner Circle Seminar this will be, kindly confirms that our seminar structure, in which dialogue is of the essence, enables him to communicate and reflect on his ideas. He wrote, after his first Inner Circle Seminar, The Intellectual Plague of Biologism, on 2 December 2012:

The seminar was for me an incredible experience. I have never previously had the opportunity to discuss the topics we covered in such depth with a group of people who came at it from such different angles but in a way that I found illuminating. I learned a lot. It was a tremendous privilege.

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  

E-mail: stadlenanthony@gmail.com

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.

Maya Abbott and the Abbotts. The third seminar of the third (60th anniversary) subseries on Laing and Esterson’s Sanity, Madness and the Family: Families of Schizophrenics (1964). Anthony Stadlen and Yaara Sumeruk conduct Inner Circle Seminar 294 (17 November 2024)

 

R. D. Laing and Aaron Esterson

Sanity, Madness and the Family:

Families of Schizophrenics

(April 1964)

Sixtieth anniversary reflections

A third subseries (fifteen 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.

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 third seminar in a new subseries of fifteen 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.

We have already devoted two subseries to this book and these families, starting respectively twenty and ten years ago, in 2004 and 2014. Now as then, the heart of the subseries is eleven seminars, each devoted to one of the eleven families in the book. Anthony Stadlen will again guide discussion in detail of the family conversations in the late 1950s and early 1960s reported in the book, and of his own interviews in the present century with members of the families including, when they were still alive (as two are even today), the daughters labelled ‘schizophrenic’.

This time, however, there have been two initial seminars, devoted to the question why people almost universally misunderstand this book; and there will be two retrospective seminars, in which we shall hope to have understood it a little better.

In the second of our two subseries, starting in 2014, all but one of the twelve seminars were introduced by the great novelist Hilary Mantel, who shone the light of her genius on each family in turn.

Stadlen wrote an account ten years ago of her contribution to the first seminar:

‘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. (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.

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[1] First published in Existential Analysis 26,1 (January 2015): 21-24.
[2] Mantel (2015 [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.

These first two seminars of this third series 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’.

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  

Unfortunately, Laing went on, almost immediately, in talks collected in The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise (1967), and elsewhere, to confuse the issues that he and Esterson had so lucidly expounded in Sanity, Madness and the Family. Laing wrote that some people labeled ‘schizophrenic’ were embarked on a ‘voyage’ into ‘inner space and time’; that ‘the schizophrenic’ could be ‘the hierophant of the sacred’; and that perhaps we could retain the word ‘schizophrenia’ which means etymologically ‘broken-hearted’. But, wrote Laing, ‘even broken hearts can mend if we have the heart to let them’. This sentimentalising and romanticising of ‘schizophrenia’ and the ‘schizophrenic’ – as if it had been established that there is after all such a condition and such a person, with Laing as their guru and ‘anti-psychiatrist’ – 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, where we learn, 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.

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 further extracts, with special focus on 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 methodology and their method. 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, 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.’

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  

E-mail: stadlenanthony@gmail.com

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.