Mystification: Double Bind: Praxis and Process
The second seminar of the third (60th anniversary) subseries on
R. D. Laing and Aaron Esterson
Sanity, Madness and the Family:
Families of Schizophrenics
(April 1964)
2. Further exploration of why this book is still not understood
Anthony Stadlen
conducts by Zoom
Inner Circle Seminar No. 291
Sunday 14 July 2024
10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Jean-Paul Sartre 21 June 1905 – 15 April 1980 |
Thomas Szasz 15 April 1920 – 8 September 2012 |
R. D. Laing 7 October 1927 – 23 August 1989 |
Aaron Esterson 23 September 1923 – 15 April 1999 |
Because Marx by experiencing estrangement [Entfremdung, alienation] attains an essential dimension of history, the Marxist view of history is superior to that of other historical accounts.
Martin Heidegger, ‘Letter on “Humanism”’ (1949)
This is the second seminar in a new subseries of fifteen 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 continue to ask 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 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. It seems to make no difference whether the readers are ordinary unprofessional people, psychotherapy students, or eminent psychiatrists.
For example, the British psychiatrist Julian Leff, 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’. But Leff and Vaughn suppose that what needs support by scientific evidence is precisely the claim that Laing and Esterson repeatedly emphasise they are not making: namely, to have, as Leff and Vaughn put it, a ‘theory of the family’s role in the origin of schizophrenia’.
Leff and Vaughn have either failed to read what Laing and Esterson wrote; or, if they have read it, to understand it; or, if they have understood it to believe it.
What did they write? Laing and Esterson 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 by scientific means 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 natural-scientific claim. It is a human-scientific one. It is by human-scientific 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, disguised 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, unthinkingly, that Laing and Esterson are making the same assumption, the same implicit, disguised 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 were in fact making it, which they are not, could only be tested, verified, confirmed, substantiated, or refuted by a combination of human and natural science: human science to test their account of the family interactions; natural science to test their supposed claim of ‘schizophrenia’; and a combination of human and natural science to test their supposed claim (which, of course, they were not making) of a supposed correlation between the family interactions and the supposed ‘schizophrenia’.
Whereas, in reality, Laing and Esterson were claiming something much simpler, which could only be tested by human science: namely, that the way the eleven women related to their eleven respective families made ordinary social sense; 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’, as a human response to how their families related humanly to them.
This radical misunderstanding will be the subject of the first seminar in the new subseries, Inner Circle Seminar No. 290 on 21 April 2024. We shall discuss how the misunderstanding is 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. See:
https://anthonystadlen.blogspot.com/2023/01/60-years-since-laing-esterson-sanity.html
But in today’s second seminar in the subseries we shall consider some more ‘technical’ or ‘theoretical’ (human-scientific, not natural-scientific) terms which some readers have found difficult to understand. We shall ask whether Laing and Esterson themselves may, despite their usual admirable clarity, have unwittingly contributed to these readers’ confusion.
In March 1964, a month before the publication of Sanity, Madness and the Family, the book Reason and Violence: A Decade of Sartre’s Philosophy, 1950-1960, by Laing and David Cooper, was published. It expounded Sartre’s Question de Méthode and Saint Genet, and contained Laing’s translation-précis of Sartre’s recently published, as yet untranslated, Critique de la Raison Dialectique, Tome 1 (1960), of which Sartre in an enthusiastic Foreword to Reason and Violence praised Laing’s ‘parfaite intelligence’. Sartre also commended Laing’s studies of the family as ‘series’ and ‘group’ (technical terms for different kinds of human collectivity analysed in the Critique); presumably Laing had sent him his little known but important paper ‘Series and Nexus in the Family’ (New Left Review, May 1962: 1-15). Sartre wrote that he looked forward to a time when psychiatry would become ‘humaine’.
The next month, April 1964, saw the publication of Sanity, Madness and the Family. This book referred the reader to the theoretical background given in Laing’s The Self and Others (1961) and in Reason and Violence. In 1970 Esterson’s The Leaves of Spring: A Study in the Dialectics of Madness was published. It developed to book-length one of the eleven family studies (Chapter 4, The Danzigs) from Sanity, Madness and the Family; referred to the same theoretical background; and acknowledged indebtedness to ‘the philosophic tradition of dialectical investigation, particularly as it is embodied in the work of Hegel, Marx, and Sartre, though it is not a direct application of any of these’.
Key terms which Laing and Esterson use are mystification (from Karl Marx) and praxis and process (from Sartre). Laing also discusses the double bind (from Gregory Bateson), although Sanity, Madness and the Family gives only one alleged instance of it (p. 167). We shall briefly discuss these terms, and Laing and Esterson’s use of them, in what follows.1. Mystification
Laing and Esterson, in these books and elsewhere, employ the term ‘mystification’ and its cognates. The first instance appears to be in the first edition of Laing’s The Self and Others (1961: 135-6) where he writes that a person placed in an ‘untenable position’ is ‘totally mystified and alienated’. The association of mystification with alienation recalls Marx’s linking these words, but Marx is not mentioned. The phrase is removed from the much revised second edition, Self and Others (1969), but a phrase ‘the most intense conflicts’ (1961: 76) in the first edition is replaced by the phrase ‘mystification, confusion, and conflict’ (1969: 71) in the second edition: a clear allusion, though still without mention of Marx, to Laing’s paper ‘Mystification, confusion, and conflict’ (1965), where he does explicitly acknowledge indebtedness to Marx. However, Laing explains Marx’s concept of mystification as ‘representing forms of exploitation as forms of benevolence’, which states only vaguely what Marx’s concept of mystification actually was.
On the other hand, Laing and Esterson’s first allusion to mystification in Sanity, Madness and the Family (1964: 8) is a good example, as we shall see below, of what Marx did mean by mystification, though they do not explain or mention this, or indeed mention Marx anywhere in their book:
‘Phenomenologically, a group can feel to its members to be an organism; to those outside it, it can appear to act like one. But to go beyond this, and to maintain that, ontologically, it is an organism, is to become completely mystified.’
In Laing’s 1965 paper ‘Mystification, confusion, and conflict’ he applies the word ‘mystification’ to the study of family interactions, comparing and contrasting it with Bateson’s (1956) concept of the ‘double bind’. Laing gives, among other examples, some that do indeed correspond precisely to Marx’s concept of mystification, and some that do not, both in family interactions and in the theories of family researchers and therapists about family interactions; but he still does not explain which examples correspond to Marx’s concept of mystification – or even to Laing’s concept of Marx’s concept of mystification – and which do not.
Laing also has a chapter ‘The mystification of experience’ in The Politics of Experience (1967). He writes: ‘Marx described mystification and showed its function in his day.’ But he still does not say what Marx actually said.
This may be seen in the following quotations from Marx’s Das Kapital.
(1 and 2 do not contain the word ‘mystification’ but point to what Marx meant by it. In 3, 4, and 5 he uses the word ‘mystification’ to refer to the mystifying misdescription of the relationship between capitalist and labourer, or landlord and tenant. In 6 he makes his famous accusation that Hegel alludes to the dialectical nature of human relationships but mystifies it by ‘standing it on its head’ as a relationship of abstractions, which are themselves not persons but things.)
1. ‘... das bestimmte gesellschaftliche Verhältnis der Menschen selbst, welches hier für sie die phantasmagorische Form eines Verhältnisses von Dingen annimmt’
[‘... the specific social relationship of the human beings themselves, which here assumes for them the phantasmagoric form of a relationship between things.’]
Karl Marx, Das Kapital, Volume 1, Chapter 1
2. ‘... daB das Kapital nicht eine Sache ist, sondern ein durch Sachen vermitteltes gesellschaftliches Verhältnis zwischen Personen.’
[‘... that capital is not a thing (Sache), but a societal relationship between persons mediated by things (Sachen).’]
Karl Marx, Das Kapital, Volume 1, Chapter 33
3. ‘Das gesellschaftliche Verhälltnis ist vollendet als Verhälltnis eines Dings, des Geldes, zu sich selbst. ... Es wird ganz so Eigenschaft des Geldes, Werth zu schaffen, Zins abzuwerfen, wie die eines Birnbaums Birnen zu tragen. ... die Kapitalmystifikation in der grellsten Form.’
[‘The social relationship is consummated as relationship of a thing, of money, to itself. ... It becomes just as much a property of money to create value, to yield interest, as of a pear-tree to bear pears. ... capital-mystification in the most glaring form.’]
Karl Marx, Das Kapital, Volume 3, Chapter 24
4. ‘Die Vorstellung vom Kapital als sich selbst reproduzierendem und in der Reproduktion vermehrendem Wert ... hat zu den fabelhaften Einfällen des Dr. Price geleitet, die bei weitem die Phantasien der Alchimisten hinter sich lassen ... Pitt nimmt die Mystifikation des Dr. Price ganz ernst.’
[‘The conception of capital as self-reproducing and in the reproduction increasing value ... has led to the fabulous notions of Dr Price, which leave the fantasies of the alchemists far behind them; ... Pitt takes Dr Price’s mystification in all earnest.’]
Karl Marx, Das Kapital, Volume 3, Chapter 24
5. ‘... die Mystifikation der kapitalistischen Produktionsweise, die Verdinglichung der gesellschaftlichen Verhältnisse ... die verzauberte, verkehrte und auf den Kopf gestellte Welt, wo Monsieur le Capital und Madame la Terre als soziale Charaktere und zugleich unmittelbar als bloße Dinge ihren Spuk treiben.’
[‘... the mystification of the capitalist mode of production, the reification of social relationships ... the enchanted, back-to-front and stood-on-its-head world where Monsieur le Capital and Madame la Terre are up to their spookery as social characters and at the same time directly as mere things.’]
Karl Marx, Das Kapital, Volume 3, Chapter 48
6. ‘Die mystifizierende Seite der hegelschen Dialektik habe ich vor beinah 30 Jarhen, zu einer Zeit kritiziert, wo sie noch Tagesmode war. [...] Die Mystifikation, welche die Dialektik in Hegels Händen erleidet, verhindert in keiner Weise, daß er ihre allgemeinen Bewegungsformen zuerst in umfassender und bewußter Weise dargestellt hat. Sie steht bei ihm auf dem Kopf. Man muß sie umstülpen, um den rationellen Kern in der mystischen Hülle zu entdecken. [...] In ihrer mystifizierten Form war s die Dialektik deutsch Mode, weil sie das Bestehende zu verklären schien.’
[‘The mystifying side of the Hegelian dialectic I criticised nearly thirty years ago, at a time when it was still the fashion of the day. [...] The mystification which dialectic suffers in Hegel’s hands in no way precludes him from being the first to represent its general forms of movement in a comprehensive and conscious way. With him it stands on its head. One must turn it the right way up, to discover the rational kernel in the mystical shell. [...] In its mystified form the dialectic became German fashion, because it seemed to transfigure what exists.’]
Karl Marx, Das Kapital, Afterword to second German edition
Translations by A. Stadlen
Sartre in his Critique implies that the theory of Marx and Friedrich Engels, and subsequent ‘Marxism’, while indeed a demystification up to a point, was itself also a mystification. For Marx writes:
7. ‘Die Gestalten von Kapitalist und Grundeigentümer zeichne ich keineswegs in rosigem Licht. Aber ... [w]eniger als jeder andere kann mein Standpunkt, der die Entwicklung der ökonomischen Gesellschaftsformation als einen naturgeschichtlichen Prozeß auffaßt, den einzelnen verantwortlichmach en für Verhältnisse, deren Geschöpf er sozial bleibt, sosehr er sich auch subjektiv über sie erheben mag.’
[‘I draw the figures of the capitalist and landlord in no way in a rosy light. But ... my standpoint, which conceives the development of the economic formation of society as a natural-historical process [sic, emphasis added], can less than any other make the individual responsible for relationships whose creature he remains socially, however much he may subjectively raise himself above them.’]
Karl Marx, Das Kapital, Preface to first German edition
Translation by A. Stadlen
Similarly, Sartre sees Heidegger’s praise (above) for Marx’s account of history as itself a mystification and reification, because, in Sartre’s view, Heidegger’s philosophy is ‘existential idealism’ which ‘subordinates the human to Being other than man’, as Laing puts it in Reason and Violence (1964: 116).
Laing and Esterson give many specific occurrences of what they call mystification in the family interviews in Sanity, Madness and the Family. But they appear to have missed an opportunity to state their central hypothesis specifically in terms of mystification in Marx’s sense (or Sartre’s development of it). For their hypothesis is that the very concept of ‘schizophrenia’ is a mystification precisely in that sense, as that concept misrepresents a ‘human’ relation between persons (primarily in the family) as a ‘natural’ relation between things (the ‘illness’ of one daughter, the ‘imbalance’ between ‘things’ in her ‘mind’ or ‘brain’). Esterson is clearer about this in The Leaves of Spring.2. Double Bind
Laing and Esterson could also have reasonably argued that the central mystification they studied in Sanity, Madness and the Family, that the ‘schizophrenic’ women were alleged to be ‘ill’, was, precisely, a ‘double bind’. It may be that the readers who do not understand the point of the book are caught in this mystification which is also a double bind.Laing discusses the double bind in The Self and Others (1961) and its (much revised) second edition Self and Others (1969). The double bind is mentioned on the dust covers of the two hard-back editions of Sanity, Madness and the Family (1964, 1970) but only once in the text (ibid., p. 167), although there are instances in the family interactions where it could have been applied with accuracy. It is often used erroneously (though not by Laing or Esterson) to mean any kind of mixed message or contradictory attribution or injunction; but it has a precise meaning defined by Bateson and his colleagues (1956), with six complex ‘necessary ingredients’, in terms of Bertrand Russell’s theory of Logical Types in his and Alfred North Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica, Volume 1, Chapter 2 (1910). The crux is that the contradictory communications are, as Bateson conceived them, of different logical type: a communication and a metacommunication.
Laing wrote in The Self and Others (1961: 141) and Self and Others (1969: 129) that the 1956 work of Bateson and his colleagues on the double bind had ‘revolutionized the concept of what is meant by environment’. Laing did express doubt as to whether ‘the Logical Type theory, which arises in the course of the construction of a calculus of propositions, can be applied directly to communication’ (1969: 129). He also claimed that ‘in real life there probably will be at least three persons involved’ (1969: 128); but a two-person double bind can surely arise, for instance, between a single mother and her only child.
The theory of the double bind prepared the ground for Laing and Esterson’s work. For this reason, and because it has been generally banalised and misunderstood, though not by them, we shall examine it today.
3. Praxis and Process
Both Laing and Esterson also place great stress on the terms ‘praxis’ and ‘process’. They claim they are using them as Sartre does in Critique de la Raison Dialectique. They define and use Sartre’s term ‘praxis’ correctly, but they (jointly and separately) define and use the term ‘process’ in two, contradictory, senses, only one of which correctly conveys Sartre’s term ‘processus’.
Sartre in the Critique uses both ‘praxis’ and ‘processus’ to refer to human (not natural) events. ‘Praxis’ simply means human, freely chosen action. ‘Processus’ is a human, usually group, happening or development or procedure that merely looks like a natural, mechanistically determined event or fact. Sartre states explicitly (1960: 542; English translation 1976: 549) that neither praxis nor processus is deterministic. This is what one would expect, since both describe human rather than natural events. Laing made an excellent English précis of this section in Reason and Violence (1964: 153-4), of exemplary clarity; but he seems subsequently to have forgotten or ignored it.
Laing and Esterson (1964: 8) define the term ‘process’, misleadingly, to mean ‘a continuous series of operations that have no agent as their author’. In other words they wrongly define it as if it were really a natural, mechanistically determined event. But they use it, in practice, confusingly: sometimes incorrectly to mean simply natural events; and sometimes correctly to mean what Sartre actually does mean by ‘processus’, namely, as explained above, human (usually group) events which only appear to be natural events having no author, but which it is the purpose of his book to demonstrate can be revealed by dialectical reason to be not natural, not deterministic, but socially intelligible as deriving from human praxis.
Esterson (1970: xii) explicitly, but wrongly, defines ‘process’ as referring simply to natural events, as does Laing both in his paper ‘Mystification, confusion, and conflict’ (1965: 350) and in his much later confused presentation in 1985 to the first Evolution of Psychotherapy conference (1987: 203-4) when Szasz was a justifiably exasperated respondent (1987: 210). Esterson (ibid.) even gives an allegedly defining example of ‘process’ which he asserts is ‘deterministic’, apparently without realising that this contradicts Sartre’s definition.
The whole purpose of Sartre’s Critique is to demonstrate that ‘processus’, while appearing to be a natural event, is socially intelligible by dialectical reason as the outcome of human praxis. Sartre’s project is to make history itself socially intelligible.
The error of Laing and Esterson is, on occasion, to treat Sartre’s ‘process’ as if it actually referred to nature, rather than merely appearing to refer to nature but actually being socially intelligible as human praxis. In other words, their error is precisely to mystify, in the Sartre-Szasz-Marx sense, Sartre’s concept of process.
Sartre sometimes refers to processus as inertia or the practico-inert. It is metaphorical inertia, just as ‘mental illness’ is, as Szasz insisted, metaphorical illness. To confuse or identify Sartre’s ‘inertia’ with Isaac Newton’s ‘inertia’ is, in Laing and Esterson’s words (above), ‘to become completely mystified’.It is also important to recognise that distinguishing between the human and the natural does not have to entail a cartesian dualism. Sartre insists in the Critique that his concept of the human and the natural is not dualistic. (And, since processus only appears to be naturally determined, the question of a dualism of praxis and processsus does not arise.)
Heidegger observes that tears cannot be understood by natural science although their physical properties can be. Szasz observes that a wedding ring cannot be understood by natural science although its physical properties can be. Heidegger and Szasz are making the same point, and Laing made it too.
It is not dualistic. The two ways of seeing tears or a wedding ring, the personal and the physical, are like the two ways of seeing a human being, as person or as organism, which Laing discusses in The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness (1960), published a few months before The Myth of Mental Illness. As Laing puts it, in the language of existential phenomenology, each of the two ways of seeing is a different ‘initial intentional act’. Laing writes:
No mountain need have laboured to bring forth this pair of mice, the human and the natural, if they had been all that Sartre meant by ‘praxis’ and ‘processus’, as Laing and Esterson at times misleadingly assert, although at other times they obviously understand what he meant.
It is crucial not to lose sight of their simple, unassuming question as they restate it in the Preface to the second edition of Sanity, Madness and the Family (1970: viii):
Are the experience and behaviour that psychiatrists take as symptoms and signs of schizophrenia more socially intelligible than has come to be supposed? [Emphasis added.]
This makes sense as ordinary English. It also makes sense when stated in terms of Sartre’s actual technical notions of praxis, processus, and social intelligibility correctly defined as Sartre meant them. But one can understand the question without using or understanding them.
However, such is most readers’ mystification by, and investment in, ‘schizophrenia’, which Szasz called ‘the sacred symbol of psychiatry’, that they persist in misreading this simple question as if the seven words emphasised were simply not there.
The greatness of these books transcends these errors; but it may well be that the errors have contributed to the almost universal misunderstanding of Sanity, Madness and the Family and, on the rare occasions it is noticed, The Leaves of Spring. We shall try to remedy this today. Your questions and contributions will be warmly welcomed.
Cost: Psychotherapy trainees £140, others £175; reductions for combinations of seminars; some bursaries; no refunds or transfers unless seminar cancelled
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