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’
1. Introductory seminar
Why is this book still not understood?
Anthony Stadlen Yaara Sumeruk
conduct by Zoom
Inner Circle Seminar No. 290
Sunday 16 June 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 |
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jun/03/hilary-mantel-why-i-became-a-historical-novelist
She brought to our seminars the unique genius of an historical novelist who saw more profoundly than the rest of us the implications of the known historical facts but did not present invention as history. Each seminar began with her wonderful reflections on what is given in the text of the book. She had no privileged access to the cases. She learned what Stadlen had discovered as an historian only as did the other seminar participants, when he reported or played recordings of his interviews with some of the supposedly ‘schizophrenic’ women and many of their surviving relatives in the twenty-first century, and explored Esterson’s original library of tape-recordings on which the book is based.
‘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, Sanity, Madness and the Family... The people in it seemed close enough to touch... 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... 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.’
‘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 told her she didn't; and Sarah, whose breakdown, according to her family, was caused by too much thinking.’
... the crack in the teacup opensA lane to the land of the dead.
And what the dead had no speech for, when living,They can tell you, being dead: the communicationOf the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.
And yet it is so simple.
It is true that R. D. Laing and Aaron Esterson’s research, reported in this masterpiece of 1964 and continued by Esterson in his profound The Leaves of Spring: A Study in the Dialectics of Madness (1970), was a concrete embodiment of the complex theoretical work of their most advanced and radical contemporaries of the 1960s: Jean-Paul Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason; Thomas Szasz’s The Myth of Mental Illness; and Martin Heidegger and Medard Boss’s Zollikon Seminars (although the book Zollikon Seminars was only published much later, and Laing and Esterson knew only Boss’s and Heidegger’s earlier work).
‘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.’Thus they introduced their great phenomenological descriptions of eleven families of ‘schizophrenics’. But, sixty years on, the ‘clinical viewpoint’ still reigns supreme. ‘Existential’, ‘Freudian’, ‘Jungian’, ‘Lacanian’, ‘Laingian’, ‘humanist’, ‘person-centred’ therapists and a galaxy of similarly impressively titled psychoanalysts and psychotherapists love to call themselves ‘clinicians’.
Today people demand ‘parity’ for ‘physical’ and ‘mental health’. This is mystifying, pseudo-scientific language.
Have Laing and Esterson been proved wrong? They wrote:
‘Nobody can deny us the right to disbelieve in schizophrenia.’Why, then, do virtually all commentators, including virtually all psychiatrists and psychotherapists, claim Laing and Esterson said ‘families cause schizophrenia’? These non-readers can not have understood, if they have ever remembered, if they have ever noticed, the first sentences of the second edition (1970) of the book:
‘There have been many studies of mental illness and the family. This book is not of them, at least in our opinion.’
‘Surely, if we are wrong, it would be easy to show that we are, by studying a few families and revealing that “schizophrenics” really are talking a lot of nonsense after all.’
The quotation marks around ‘schizophrenics’ were dropped by the editors of the Penguin edition, thereby betraying the proud claim of Sir Allen Lane, the founder of Penguin Books, in the Lady Chatterley trial (1960): ‘We would not publish a book in an emasculated form. We would only publish it if we were doing what we stated we were doing, that is selling the book as written by the author.’
However, Laing and Esterson themselves contributed to the confusion. After all, they themselves put no quotation marks around ‘schizophrenics’ in their title, or when writing, for example, of making Maya Abbott’s ‘schizophrenic experience and behaviour’ socially intelligible.
It is true that they write, in their Introduction to the book (1964: ):
‘Although we ourselves do not accept the validity of the clinical terminology, it is necessary to establish the fact that the persons whose families we are describing are as “schizophrenic” as anyone is. By “schizophrenic” we mean here a person who has been diagnosed as such and has come to be treated accordingly. Thus we have begun each account by a description, couched in clinical terms, of the experience and behaviour of the person to whom “schizophrenia” is attributed. We reiterate that we ourselves are not using the term “schizophrenia” to denote any identifiable condition that we believe exists “in” one person. However, in so far as the term summarises a set of clinical attributions made by certain persons about the experience and behaviour of certain other, we retain the term for this set of attributions. We put in parenthesis any judgement as to the validity or implications of such a set of attributions.’
But, as Hilary Mantel pointed out, readers like stories. They plunge into the eleven chapters about the eleven women and their families, and do not trouble with the Prefaces or Introduction. She, the professional writer, said she would never rely on a Preface or Introduction to convey such important information. She would wait at least until Chapter 1.
In any event, Stadlen accepted Laing and Esterson’s challenge. He did just what they suggested. He tried to ‘show’ they were ‘wrong’ by ‘studying a few families’ and trying to prove, in the spirit of the philosopher Karl Popper’s Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge (1962), the hypothesis he did not believe, namely, that ‘“schizophrenics” really are talking a lot of nonsense after all’. But the twist was that he studied the very same families Laing and Esterson had studied.
In this third subseries of Inner Circle Seminars devoted to the eleven families he will again, as in the first two subseries, consider each family in turn, reporting his research and focussing on two points:
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