R D Laing

SAŽETAK: Rad predstavlja svojevrstan osvrt na otuđenost u socijalnom kontekstu života u patološkoj "normalnoj stvarnosti", čijim integralnim pripadnicima afirmirane mainstream grupacije nameću vlastite kriterije normalnosti, primjenom znanstvenog pozitivizma, arbitrarno uspostavlje-nih vrijednosnih sudova i oboružani religioznom, političkom i obrazovnom aparaturom. U tu svrhu možemo tvrditi da se sredstva biraju pomno i pro-računato, a shodno tome, utemeljuju se u institucionaliziranoj i političkoj formi s ciljem generiranja poslušne, produktivne i povodljive zajednice de-subjektiviranih subjekata podložnih kontroli i autodestruktivizmu. Psihoa-naliza predstavlja plodno tlo za refleksiju o psihologiji mase, struktural-noj osnovi i instrumentaciji interpersonalnog povezivanja. Psihoanalitički koncepti koje ću prezentirati namijenjeni su razotkrivanju eksplicitnih teh-nika implicitnih političkih agendi. Budući da su implikacije reakcionarnih masa poduprtih ideološkim zamagljivanjem pogubne u suvremenom svije-tu, konzekventno dovode do gubitka klasne svijesti i angažiraju se u svr-hu kapitaliziranja i ignorantnosti stanovništva. Nametanje lažnog putom nevidljivih posredujućih instanci vodi apsurdu, stoga je svaka struktura, koja arbitrarno apelira na tzv. etablirane smjernice ponašanja, djelova-nja i bivanja, ipso facto fatalna jer nije u mogućnosti racionalizirati svoje namjere i prisilno korigira one izvan poretka, ne verificirajući kredibilitet uvjerenja niti kada je poredak izvan pravca. Budući da se filozofija na-lazi izvan problema na koji se referira, kritičkim razmišljanjem možemo modificirati dosadašnje kriterije da bismo uvidjeli opasnost adaptiranja poremećenom društvu.

While it is essential that we live as self-defined individuals, independently negotiating with an independent reality, this experience is not exhaustive of our reality. Such experience is importantly contextualized by two other kinds of experience, each an experience of intimacy. First, independent individuality depends upon a process of childhood development in which identity is formed through a familial intimacy in which the child lives from a non-reflective, bodily sense of a sharedness of identity with another (typically, but not necessarily, the mother). Second, independent individuality finds its healthy development in the establishment of new intimate bonds; these adult intimacies, unlike childhood intimacy, are bonds between persons who themselves have developed the sense of independent individuality and thus have experiential characteristics significantly different from those of childhood intimacy. From a developmental perspective, each of these two forms of intimacy is something good in itself but also something whose good resides in its enabling of something else, childhood intimacy facilitating the transformation into independent individuality and adult intimacy facilitating a transformative engagement with one's own limitations.

The Social Phenomenology of R.D. Laing:
A Re-Appraisal of R.D. Laing, His Relationship to J.-P. Sartre,
and the Psychotherapy of Schizophrenia

Vincenzo Di Nicola, MPhil, MD, PhD, DLFAPA, FCAHS
University of Montreal
Psychiatric Fellow, AAPDPP


American Academy of Psychodynamic Psychiatry and Psychoanalysis (AAPDPP)
2022-2023 Virtual Presentation Series

Brief Abstract

Scottish psychiatrist-psychoanalyst Ronald David Laing (1927-1989) is known for his pioneering studies in the tradition of psychodynamic psychiatry (cf. Ellenberger, 1970) of the alien and alienating experiences that are known under the rubric of schizophrenia (cf. Woods, 2011). Along the way, he explored the "divided self" (Laing, 1960) in the "politics of the family" (Laing, 1969) and the sources of "reason and violence" (Laing & Cooper, 1964) in modern society, creating a model of existential psychotherapy (Laing, 1987a) with his social phenomenology (Laing, 1987b).

L'uomo di superficie descritto dallo psichiatra italiano Vittorino Andreoli, rappresenta il punto di approdo di un lungo processo degenerativo. Questo tipo d'uomo: "ha abolito, con l'aiuto di strumenti tecnologico sostitutivi, il cervello superiore, e ora è in balia delle pulsioni, delle emozioni, delle frustrazioni. E così la violenza istintiva può tracciare il campo del proprio dominio che si fonda sul potere". Tuttavia, la crisi del capitalismo, proprio perché mette tutto in discussione, permette d'ipotizzare strategie di evasione e nuovi e imprevedibili risvolti.

.....the double bind as constituting an entirely new, non-material, principle of evolution, major conceptual revisions may need to be made in our general understanding of evolution as contained within the “modern evolutionary synthesis”.

KEYWORDS:
behavior, communication, context, contradiction, deutero-learning, double bind, epistemology, evolution, incompleteness theorum, kinesics, learning, logical type theory, metacommunication, metamessages, metatheory, mystification, paradox, relationships, schismogenesis, schizophrenia,  scientific elegance, symmathesy, teleology, temporality, transcontextual, transdisciplinary, trauma

L'articolo vuole chiarire il significato del termine "psicosi". Lo fa riassumendo e comparando alcuni storici studi di psicologia, psichiatria e psicoanalisi, integrando alcune ricerche specifiche sulla "schizofrenia" e la "follia". Lo scritto s'inserisce in un quadro di ricerca che intende studiare la relazione tra psicosi, linguaggio, corpo e creatività.

Whereas classical Critical Theory has tended to view phenomenology as inherently uncritical, the recent upsurge of what has become known as critical phenomenology has attempted to show that phenomenological concepts and methods can be used in critical analyses of social and political issues. A recent landmark publication, 50 Concepts for Critical Phenomenology, contains no reference to psychiatry and psychopathology, however. This is an unfortunate omission, since the tradition of phenomenological psychiatry – as we will demonstrate in the present article by surveying and discussing the contribution of Jaspers, Minkowski, Laing, Basaglia, and Fanon – from the outset has practiced critical thinking, be it at the theoretical, interpersonal, institutional, or political level. Fanon is today, a recognized figure in critical phenomenology, even if his role in psychiatry might not yet have been appreciated as thoroughly as his anticolonial and antiracist contributions. But as we show, he is part of a long history of critical approaches in psychopathology and psychiatry, which has firm roots in the phenomenological tradition, and which keeps up its critical work today.

Psychiatry against itself: Radicals, rebels, reformers & revolutionaries. A philosophical archaeology

Journal of The International Association of Transdisciplinary Psychology, December 2015, 4(1): 1-18.

Abstract

This essay inverts the logic of antipsychiatry to describe various movements critical of the profession as psychiatry against itself. Like Alain Badiou’s contrast of philosophers with anti-philosophers, anti-psychiatrists compel the established tradition of psychiatry to confront fresh problems with new perspectives to renew psychiatric thought. The dual themes that emerge from this study are: tradition vs. innovation and negation vs. affirmation.

This thesis is threefold: (1) What is intriguing about the psychiatrists associated with the anti-psychiatry movement and what unites them is negation. In each case, their work proceeds by a key critical negation, to the point that the defining characteristic of antipsychiatric psychiatrists is precisely negation. (2) Each negation and how it was practised made each anti-psychiatrist, depending on his temperament and circumstances, into a rebel, a radical, a reformer or a revolutionary antipsychiatrist. (3) Each anti-psychiatrist wielded an instrument for change that I have coined Badiou’s sickle. Based on a key critical negation, each anti-psychiatrist resisted the suturing of psychiatry to a given subdiscipline, regional practice, or dominant ideology by separating it gently or more forcefully with Badiou’s scalpel, scissors, shears, scythe or sickle to liberate psychiatry as a general theory and practice and return it to its originary task. Four key 20th century Western psychiatrists who were critical of their field are examined through their basic attitudes and contributions to the redefinition of psychiatry.

Scotsman Ronald David Laing (1927-1989) was a radical psychiatrist-psychoanalyst, returning psychiatry to its clinical roots, with his trenchant critiques of Ludwig Binswanger’s existential analysis and psychiatric practice generally, calling for social phenomenology, negating the mystification of mental illness by placing the suffering of the self in social, family, and political context. The French Jacques Lacan (1901-1981) was both a subversive psychoanalyst and a psychiatric rebel, affirming the centrality of Freud in his construction of psychoanalysis while rebelling against both the psychoanalytic and psychiatric establishment, negating the institutionalization of psychoanalytic practice, whether in the academy or in psychoanalytic institutes. Italian psychiatrist Franco Basaglia (1924-1980) was a reformer who instigated psychiatric deinstitutionalization around the world with his key text, L’Istituzione negata, “The Institution Negated” (1968) and by joining the Radical Party in the Italian Parliament that reformed Italy’s mental health legislation. As a psychiatrist, philosopher and revolutionary, Martinican Frantz Fanon (1925-1961) negated nothing less than the claim of European psychiatry to universalism in his radical critiques of the psychology of colonization and identity formation, offering a more humane psychology on which to found psychiatry in a revolutionary program for a new society. Fanon’s critiques were far more trenchant than other anti-psychiatrists, with far-reaching impacts on critical theory, post-colonial studies and Marxist political theory, yet his project remained unfulfilled when he died all-too-young, bequeathing us psychiatry’s unfinished revolution.

Two other critical thinkers are examined to complete this study. One is Hungarian-American Thomas Szasz (1920–2012) whom I characterize as a reactionary psychiatrist in the guise of a progressive who negated the reality of psychiatric disorders. Szasz trivialized mental and relational suffering as mere “problems in living,” arguing against the majority of psychiatric disorders having biomedical origins, thus promoting the medical model in its most reductive form. In contrast with the other antipsychiatrists, Szasz’s negation was destructive, leading the way to greater stigmatization of mental illness and diminished resources and services.

Finally, the work of French psychologist and philosopher Michel Foucault (1926-1984) overshadows the entire discourse of anti-psychiatry, just as he informs and impels us to reorder medical perceptions and psychiatric thought, upending the very “order of things.” Foucault’s negation was the most disturbing to psychiatric thought because he questioned the very basis for imagining madness and reason/unreason.

« Sloterdijk, The Art of Philosophy », Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, vol. 10, no. 2, 2014, pp. 327-333.

Since the publication of his Kritik der zynischen Vernunft in 1983, Peter Sloterdijk (1947–) is a well-known and rather controversial figure inside, as well as (to a certain extent) outside, academia. The Art of Philosophy, originally published under the title Scheintod im Denken, Von Philosophie und Wissenschaft als Übung (Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp, 2010) is the sequel of his You Must Change Your Life (translated by Wieland Hoban, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2013), originally published as Du mußt dein Leben ändern. Über Anthropotechnik (Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp, 2009). Both books basically seek to “restore the high status of [philosophical] practice” (p. 6), which means that philosophy should be practiced in everyday life, not remain the privilege of the happy few who happen to enjoy only theoretical speculations. Philosophy is the answer to the question “what is a good life?”—it is not first and foremost an exploration of the meaning and significance of that question. Given the lexicon used by early Greek philosopher, one could add that philosophy should be a secular venture, not a mysticism of sorts, i.e., an ars moriendi, a purification ritual. Sloterdijk thus argues, from the perspective of the radical ethics that emerged with the axial age (Jaspers, 1954), for the “training cultures of antiquity [that] were primarily systems of ethical self-transformation” (p. 8). The book is made of four chapters, of unequal import for the main argument, followed by a Name index.

There are passages in Wittgenstein where he compares his method to psychotherapy and one or two where he seems to suggest that the ‘patient’ has the last word on his ‘illness’ and ‘cure’.  This paper tries to take these seriously, especially in connexion with the idea that victims of philosophical confusion talk nonsense.

Philosophical accusations of talking nonsense made in a polemical spirit are bound to fail, since the only way one can effectively criticise another’s utterance is by attaching some meaning to it.  But if the other acknowledges the possibility that his puzzlement arises from his having been taken in by nonsense, then perhaps a co-operative investigation of this suggestion might be fruitful.  Indeed self-diagnosis ought in principle to be possible.  Ought it not to have happened at least once in the history of philosophy if philosophical nonsense has ever been exposed? 

But there are difficulties.  For example:
a) We must ask whether or not philosophical nonsense, when exposed as such, is supposed to lose all appearance of meaningfulness.  Either answer is problematic.
b) The acknowledged similarity of the methodology under investigation to that of psychoanalysis exposes it to many of the familiar objections to the methodology of psychoanalysis, especially those that draw attention to the misleading influence of suggestion by an authority-figure.
c) The proposal that relentless cross-questioning of a suspected nonsense-talker will eventually lead her to ‘dry up’ (if she really is talking nonsense) seems to involve a version of the so-called Socratic Fallacy.

This article offers an introduction to David Cooper (1931–86), who coined the term ‘anti-psychiatry’, and, it is argued here, has not so far received the scholarly attention that he deserves. The first section presents his life in context. The second section presents his work in detail. There follows a section on the critical reception of Cooper, and, finally, a conclusion that sets out ways in which he might be interesting and useful today.

ESTA HISTORIA FUE UN HOMENAJE, QUE LE HICE A LA PSIQUIATRA ANTIOQUEÑA LUZMILA ACOSTA DE OCHOA, AL RECOGER HISTORIAS, QUE ELLA ME HABÍA CONTADO EN EL HOSPITAL MENTAL DE ANTIOQUIA, CUANDO YO ERA EL JEFE DEL PABELLÓN A MUJERES Y ELLA IBA A VER A LOS PACIENTES DEL SEGURO SOCIAL, HISTORIAS QUE ANTICIPABAN UNA VISIÓN DE UNA PSIQUIATRÍA MÁS HUMANA, QUE EMPEZABA A CRITICAR AL MANICOMIO DESDE ADENTRO.

Il s’agira ici de saisir les enjeux de la pratique
« ethnopsy », c’est-à-dire ethno-psychiatrique et
ethno-psychanalytique. Pour ce faire, on définit tout
d’abord ses prémisses ; puis on repose la question
de l’émergence de la technoscience et de son lien
avec les religions et une certaine politique – toutes
deux centrales pour l’ethnopsy – ; enfin, on propose
une triple clef de lecture de l’effraction psychique,
qui est instrumentale en clinique ethnopsychiatrique
: l’oblitération de la « puissance vaginale »
selon Georges Devereux (1908-1985) ; la modulation
de la « sécurité ontologique » de ronald D.
Laing (1927-1989) et le devenir de la « syntonie »
chez eugène minkowski (1885-1972). en conclusion,
on reprend la question de l’empirisme radical
en psychothérapie, de l’écoute dans le monde de la
santé, et de l’hystérie de la philosophie.

(Published in International Political Sociology).

The concept of ontological security has received increased attention in the security studies literature over the past ten years. This article develops a critical perspective towards ontological security and its mobilisation by IR scholars, arguing that substantive ethical and political resources are produced by resisting the terms of ontological security/insecurity. It argues that the aspiration to ontological security, to contiguous and stable narratives of selfhood, can (violently) obscure the ways in which such narratives are themselves implicated in power relations. Furthermore it argues that attempts to order political life into an ontological/security episteme disciplines or marginalises modes of subjectivity which resist the closure of ontological security-seeking strategies. The article engages queer figurations of subjectivity as mobilised by Judith Butler, Donna Haraway and Jack Halberstam, as well as examples from anti-militarist social movements, to demonstrate traditions which refuse and resist the framework of ontological security. It does this both in order to highlight particular practices and strategies that are written out by an epistemology oriented around ontological security/insecurity, and to show how a resistance to such ordering can enliven political action in various ways.

Whereas classical Critical Theory has tended to view phenomenology as inherently uncritical, the recent upsurge of what has become known as critical phenomenology has attempted to show that phenomenological concepts and methods can be used in critical analyses of social and political issues. A recent landmark publication, 50 Concepts for Critical Phenomenology, contains no reference to psychiatry and psychopathology, however. This is an unfortunate omission, since the tradition of phenomenological psychiatry – as we will demonstrate in the present article by surveying and discussing the contribution of Jaspers, Minkowski, Laing, Basaglia, and Fanon – from the outset has practiced critical thinking, be it at the theoretical, interpersonal, institutional, or political level. Fanon is today, a recognized figure in critical phenomenology, even if his role in psychiatry might not yet have been appreciated as thoroughly as his anticolonial and antiracist contributions. But as we show, he ...

Our identities as individual agents rest on original experiences of intersubjective support (or lack thereof).  In particular, I identify 3 forms of engaging with the world to which we must become habituated and which essentially require intersubjective support if we are to be effective agents.

Sass, like R. D. Laing before him, wants to make sense of schizophrenic discourse.  In 'Paradoxes of delusion – Wittgenstein, Schreber and the schizophrenic mind' he uses Wittgenstein’s later work, particularly the Blue Book, to this end.  Read criticises Sass for not taking Wittgenstein’s nonsensicalism seriously enough and suggests that some schizophrenic utterances cannot be understood at all.  I argue that Sass’s position is more consistent than Read’s, though it is probably true that Sass is the less thoroughgoing Wittgensteinian.  Read’s way of arguing his case exhibits all the difficulties that those who employ the notion of philosophical nonsense are apt to get themselves into.  The denigratory vocabulary he uses to characterise schizophrenic discourse – ‘confused’, ‘inchoate’, ‘incoherent’, ‘empty’, ‘without content’ – is itself confused and confusing, but, more importantly, his talk of ‘transitional remarks’ and his admission that he is himself ‘trafficking in nonsense’ suggest that he is falling into the very error of which he accuses Sass.

In this article, the National Media Museum’s Curator of Television Iain Logie Baird identifies underlying themes in the film 'Equus' (Sidney Lumet, 1977) to better understand our visceral relationship with modern electronic media, particularly television.  This is accomplished through a considered application of the observations of Marshall McLuhan in the chapter ‘The Gadget Lover: Narcissus as Narcosis’ within his seminal book Understanding Media (1964).  A resonance of Peter Schaffer’s original stage play with the Narcissus myth itself is revealed.  A 10-minute segment from Equus was featured in Animalism, a major gallery exhibition that appeared at the Museum from 8 May to 27 September 2009.  Animalism investigated ‘contemporary media responses to our complex and sometimes uncomfortable relationship with the animal world’.

Though singularity of the self can be understood in different ways, this essay argues that it ought ultimately to be understood temporally, in terms of becoming and the establishment of what Merleau-Ponty calls «personal institutions». Anorexia is used as a case study: anorexics can oscillate between (a) feeling themselves expressed in their anorexic desires, and (b) feeling themselves expressed in their opposition to anorexic desires. I argue, drawing upon Laing's understanding of psychopathology, that neither is their «true singular self» but that singularity ultimately realizes itself in the process of this oscillation. Guided by Merleau-Ponty's concept of «institution», I propose that oscillations result from lived efforts to resolve indeterminately felt existential problems; that the repetitions and «binary rhythm» involved in such oscillations are endemic to personal becoming; and that what enables success rather than failure in such becoming singular are relations with others who act in recognition of this process.

Citation: “Singularity as Becoming Oneself through Others: Lessons from Merleau-Ponty, Laing, and Anorexia” eds. Stefan Kristensen and Till Grohman., special issue on Self and Singularity, Metodo: International Studies in Phenomenology and Philosophy 7 (2019): 37-73.

This paper aims to clarify the meaning of the word "psychosis" by summarizing and comparing historical studies in psychology, psychiatry and psychoanalysis, and including research in "schizophrenia" and "madness". This essay is part of a research project that aims to study the relationship between psychosis, language, body and creativity.

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Introduction
To
‘A sick culture’
[Any appreciative gratitude for this writing may be left
at this PayPal proxy link for your ‘nickel and dime’ donations
https://1drv.ms/u/s!ApcspsqQAspIimyLdrEp4VvmmsGk?e=PT3n0a ]

Inherent Resistance to being Dynamics’ Agent
My entire social interaction has been a repulsion to my style, while their style of consensus has proven itself, in aggregate as the forest, to be so contradictory and toxic, in comparison to their self-identified benign congeniality.

What was classically thought of as me being an anti-social misfit, has turned over the span of history as a demonstration of the neurotic and accumulative societal pathologies. Those “pathologies'' were consensually accepted as the contemporaneous ‘standard of behavior’. Yet those benign, to trivially banal social interactions are and have been the accommodating acquiescence to a general, civil vernacular and colloquial of thought, which provides the false narrative of collegiality which doesn’t challenge the macro because it would be uncivilly disruptive, yet would castigate the micro to the proverbial ‘pointing out the tiny mote in the accused eyes while missing the metaphorical blindspot beam in their own eyes’.

This plays out in both small cliques as well as institutional protocols, in which the pecking order hierarchy, most venal in small cliques and insidiously destructive in the institutional effect consequences. How it came to this is up to speculation. My own take is that it’s part of the limbic response to “existential threats’-those that challenge the particulars of individuals' daily operational conceptions to the point that it’s too great a radical change from their status quo that they refuse the major external accommodation to what has been the group cohesive and adhesive accommodations to their matrix bonds.

It’s not what I, at least, did not comprehend until nearly 7 decades into my own life. It took being ‘the iconoclastic’ in grammar school, the growing recognition by me of a social disaffection in junior/middle/high school. I had a beginning self-validation of myself and ways in college from the demonstrated shallow signifying by the preponderance of my peers and authority figures. Then the military service whose hallmark for me besides the importance of consistent self-discipline, was the abuse of title and authority by those whose titles required them to have a fiduciary duty before their own personal self-interests or aggrandizing. Civilian life was not only more ot the same recognized of the abuses of position and authority, but the banal obedience to protocols that inflicted institutional injustice and perpetuated the individual mindsets of both vapid collegiality as well as cynical opportunism.

What makes this worse, is that these forms exist throughout cultures and societies from the most debased to the most privileged, and across all ethnicities and races. This perception I have makes me wonder, how I could have developed to not being one cohesive or adherent to these noxious mindsets. I came to this conclusion.

The ‘Tabula rasa’ conception, noted by Aristotle, the Stoics, John Locke, and David Hume was incomplete, due to their era’s ignorance of the fetus in the womb being affected not only by what the bearer ingests, but the external surroundings’ effects, kinetically and psychologically on the bearer of the fetus. With this caveat to the ‘tabula rasa’, the fetus’s advent to this temporal dimension is one of no conscious predispositions except for its physiological sustainment of nutrients and nurturing.

For me the incidental postpartum nurturing had the unique feature of being in a non-consciously intentional cloistered environment. Many of the ways and “rules” of social interaction weren’t experienced, thus were never learned. The rules of behavior came from parents and the logic for their rules. That has been and continues to be my underlying foundation for my logic and its rationalizations. Reaffirming outside sources from biographies and other media noting the inspirational and the dastardliness of people, their ideas and action gave me an even broader sense of the forms of logic and their unique applications for my analysis of things.

Whether this was attributable to the coincidences of the unique timing and placement of me along my timeline is equally astoundingly improbable, as me having a predestined commission simultaneous to the coital precipitation of my physical conception. I dunno.

What I do know is my strong affinity to not only the dicta of Genesis 18: 10-30, Job 1: 6-11, Bhagavad Gita 3: 20-26, Futul al Ghaib 27th Discourse, Franz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth and Black Sin, White Mask, RD Laing’s Politics of Experience and Self and Others, and the most pivotal self indictment,  David Riesman, Nathan Glazer, and Reuel Denney’s The Lonely Crowd; but also the corollaries that led to my own improvisations leading to my present character dynamic.

This dynamic has me in the otherwise skeptical-to-cynical mindset of a “grace” of being ‘lucker than deserved’. The “luck” has given me forebodings and deja vus, as well as fortuitous portals of happenstance for my many times clueless as a naif's efforts. This grace has gotten me through many eye-of-a-needle circumstances. All those times of unfortunate or zealous attitudes by me, it’s never been because of my relative or comparative  ‘goodness’. Perhaps being for my honest earnestness may have been the only quality for such facilitating redemptions.

Because of the beneficence of that grace, I feel an obligation to pay-it-forward. I have been getting better at ‘paying it forward’ as I acknowledged the more substantial rewards of being a tribune for an inquisitive earnest honesty, than aligning in cohesive conformity or slavish adherence to whatever is the temporal norm of the era. Being a celebrant of the possibilities moment, then some pro forma conformist gestures and signification of the social or cultural order has also made me more prudent of the focus to where I extend my energies. The consequence of that has me more monastic, if not less gregarious when the opportunities present themselves.

The reason for my more monastic approach is because of the odiousness of the metastatic sickness spreading itself in all the dimensional depths of this culture. The anecdotal reason for this conclusion will be the subject of the elaboration of this theme, ‘A Sick Culture’.

This article explores archival accounts of the experimental community, Kingsley Hall (1965-70), established by R. D. Laing, the radical Scottish psychiatrist. The paper contributes to renewed interest in Kingsley Hall, R. D. Laing's radical psychiatry and UK counterculture. Archival sources enable not only the further exploration of already known figures but also let us hear previously unheard voices. Following a discussion of archival materials, the Hall is analyzed thematically and historically as (i) an inner spaceship; (ii) an embattled middle-class countercultural plantation; (iii) a site of spiritual renewal and development; (iv) a single-building arts colony; and (v) a countercultural experiment. Finally, it is argued that with re-evaluation of 1960s and 1970s counterculture now underway on the Left, the Hall’s experiment in Laingian countercultural psychiatry—as we may fittingly call it—may yet inform future radical projects (in mental health and beyond).

A reading of one case study in R D Laing and A Esterson, Sanity Madness and the Family, trying to highlight the cognitive (epistemological) aspects of a schizophrenic's predicament. Written in 1970 or 1971, published in 1972, it does not use the word gaslighting (now added to the original title) but approaches the idea epistemologically.

Zone of the Interior is a satirical novel by an American, Clancy Sigal, about 1960s British anti-psychiatry, in particular, R. D. Laing, the radical Scottish psychiatrist and his idea (shared most notably by David Cooper, another existential therapist working in England) that schizophrenic breakdown might be a natural, healing process. Sigal's little-known novel can help us think about the nature of anti-psychiatry and contribute to the resurgence of interest in it as we approach the 25th anniversary of Laing's death. While Sigal, who was a patient and collaborator of Laing and worked in a democratized hospital unit set up by Cooper, lampoons anti-psychiatric doctors, the novel is a fundamentally sympathetic critique of anti-psychiatry: patients and nurses are the heroes, ordinariness wins out over madness as self-discovery, and anti-psychiatry is skillfully linked to issues of class, gender and New Left politics.

INDICE

PREFAZIONE - MEMORIE DI UN CURATORE (Pietro Piro) » p. 13

PROLEGOMENI

PROLEGOMENI PER UNA CRITICA ALLA CULTURA.
(Rolando Ruggeri) » p. 21

TRISTI TOPOI. NOTERELLE PER UNA FILOLOGIA FUTURA
(Gianfrancesco Iacono) » p. 39

PER UNA CRITICA DELLA RAGIONE CHIMICA
(Daniele A. Morello) » p. 47

DISILLUSIONI FILOSOFICHE
ILLUSIONE. ROTTURA E COSTRIZIONE
(Giulio Randazzo) »  p. 53

L’UOMO SENZA ILLUSIONI. CRITICA E
ATTACCAMENTO ALLA VITA.
(Fabio Treppiedi) » p. 65

LA MORALE DELLA STORIA - PER UN’ETICA
MATERIALISTICA
(Andrea Luigi Mazzola) »  p. 83

MA CHE MODI SONO? CAPITALISMO COME
(MANCANZA DI) STILE DI VITA.
(Giacomo Pezzano) » 103

BREVI NOTE SU SVILUPPO TECNICO,
FATICA E PROGETTO DI VITA.
(Giovanni Nancini) » p.  121

ECCITAZIONI
DINAMICHE DELL’ESPROPRIO ESISTENZIALE
(Ruggero d’Alessandro) »  p. 133

IL MOMENTO IN CUI IL FILO PENZOLA LIBERAMENTE
TRA DUE PUNTI, E SORRIDE ALCUNE NOTE A
MARGINE SU GIOCO, POSSIBILITÀ, LEGGEREZZA
(Viviana Vacca) »  p. 151

INFINITO MALINCONICO.
NOTE DAL PRESENTE IN DISSOLVENZA
(Valentina Rametta) »  p. 161

LA VACCA GRASSA È BULIMICA.
IL LINGUAGGIO CINEMATOGRAFICO
NELL’EPOCA DEI NATIVI DIGITALI.
(Giuseppe Vitello) »  p. 173

CONCLUSIONI

UN UOMO QUASI NUOVO
(Marcello Marchetti) » p. 193

SU UNA PRESUNTA SCUOLA DI CUI QUESTO
LIBRO SAREBBE IL FRUTTO
(Pietro Piro) »  p. 199

GIOCHI MARGINALI
SCACCO ALL’IMBRUNIRE
(Loreto Cimino) »  p. 205

LITURGIA DEL FUOCO
(Vincenzo Celano) » p. 206

LA BALLATA DELLA CITTÀ NUOVA
(Franca Albergamo) » p. 207

This blog post, taking a London exhibition on the nature of the asylum as its starting point, considers R. D. Laing's radical approach to asylum, his experimental community at Kingsley Hall, East London (1965-70), and the cultural significance of Laing's ideas.

Sass, like R. D. Laing before him, wants to make sense of schizophrenic discourse.  In 'Paradoxes of delusion – Wittgenstein, Schreber and the schizophrenic mind' he uses Wittgenstein’s later work, particularly the Blue Book, to this end.  Read criticises Sass for not taking Wittgenstein’s nonsensicalism seriously enough and suggests that some schizophrenic utterances cannot be understood at all.  I argue that Sass’s position is more consistent than Read’s, though it is probably true that Sass is the less thoroughgoing Wittgensteinian.  Read’s way of arguing his case exhibits all the difficulties that those who employ the notion of philosophical nonsense are apt to get themselves into.  The denigratory vocabulary he uses to characterise schizophrenic discourse – ‘confused’, ‘inchoate’, ‘incoherent’, ‘empty’, ‘without content’ – is itself confused and confusing, but, more importantly, his talk of ‘transitional remarks’ and his admission that he is himself ‘trafficking in nonsense’ suggest that he is falling into the very error of which he accuses Sass.

Is There Such A Thing As Philosophical Nonsense?

For the best part of a century now philosophers have been accusing each other of talking nonsense.  This practice presupposes that people can be wrong in thinking they mean anything by what they say, that there can be an illusion of meaning.  But the assumption that illusions of meaning are possible has not, I believe, been seriously examined; nor has the problem of how such illusions could be diagnosed been seriously addressed.

This book extends the work of a number of recent writers on Wittgenstein who have advocated an'austere' view of nonsense, but in a more sceptical direction than they have taken.  It argues that nonsensicalism (the theory and practice of accusing your opponents of talking nonsense) is radically misguided and should be abandoned.

The possibility that illusions of meaning occur outside philosophy - in dreams, in certain hoaxes, in madness or under the influence of drugs - is also examined.

Psychiatry and rock music are unlikely bedfellows. It is also strange to think that a psychiatrist's ideas might relate closely to a countercultural movement and feature in its publications. Yet music, psychiatry and the underground press were bound up together in the 1960s and early 1970s, when a Scottish psychiatrist called R D Laing (1927-89) was the most famous therapist in the world. This article considers tracks by The Beatles, The Deviants, Quintessence, Syd Barrett, and Pink Floyd.

This article presents a Deweyan reading of the processes of critique, experimentation, and reform that took hold of a minority of psychiatric institutions in Western Europe during the nineteen-sixties and seventies, under the influence of the so-called Italian and British antipsychiatry movements. Framed within a specific understanding of the sixties, the article examines these complex theoretical and institutional operations against the background of John Dewey's idea of democracy, which it interprets, above all else, as the constant provision of material, intellectual, and human resources for the people to directly transform their environment and themselves in increasingly complex and creative ways. After acknowledging the historical and conceptual discontinuities that exist between these two autonomous bodies of knowledge, the first section presents a summary of Dewey's philosophy. Next the article sheds light on Basaglia's and Laing's antipsychiatric projects by interpreting them as a sustained effort to distinguish between schizophrenia as a first and a second disease, an epistemological search in the midst of which each of them ended up creating new institutions that necessarily embarked their inmates on a radical process of Deweyan growth. The key role of the sixties counterculture is emphasized at this point, and examples from Gorizia's and Trieste's asylums, as well as British community households, are read in terms of Basaglia's and Laing's negative and affirmative dialectics, respectively. Finally, in the last two sections, the article argues that antipsychiatry's analysis of psychotic behavior significantly enlarges Dewey's understanding of the circuit of growth and experience, and that Dewey's ideas of growth and experience provided, in turn, a missing criterion for defining mental health and deriving coherent therapeutic and institutional concretions.

This article outlines a family resemblance in the work of authors
and film-makers of the 1960s and 1970s in Spain. In the light of
the international zeitgeist most often termed “antipsychiatry,” the
works of Michel Foucault (1926–1984) and R. D. Laing (1927–1989)
make up the critical focus for the formulation of an “antipsychiatric
aesthetic” in Spanish literature. In the novels Tiempo de silencio (1961)
by Luís Martín-Santos (1926–1964) and Volverás a Región (1967)
by Juan Benet (1927–1993), and the film El espíritu de la colmena
(1973) directed by Víctor Erice (1940–), this antipsychiatric aesthetic
explores the relationship between doctor and patient in poetry as
Scottish antipsychiatrist R. D. Laing had in practice. Contemporary to
Foucault and Laing’s critique of the managerial doctor figure, these
three texts re-enact this critique and extend its remit to embody the
reader–writer/author–text/text–reader dialectic. Consequently, a
specifically Iberian school of critical theory becomes apparent, that
responds to the existential writings of Miguel de Unamuno (1864–
1936). Embedded within these poetics are attempts to reframe the
ontological anxieties that stem from a subjective experience of silence
and control.