AFTER FREUD AND JUNG, By Peter Mezan Can the analyst who made madness scientifically respectable do the same for the mystic vision? Only unsteadily do I recall those ocea- sionally revolutionary days of the late- awakening Sixties. In Cambridge, Mas- sachusetts, for instance, I recall people ambling down Brattle Street toward their therapists’ offices, in hip pockets and book bags shiny new copies of The Divided Self or, later, The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise—charmed texts of a power to toll the knell, some then thought, of the private mind's once last resort, psychoanalysis. Here ‘was sanction at last for that mote or less secret, mayhe small-minded pride in our potentialities for craziness; for the ticklish suspicion (or was it hope?) that erazy was a place one could legitimately go should things get any worse, a high-class resort where many of one’s friends held advance reservations. To be sure, it was a thought beset by certain qualms—perhaps a shave too near some of one’s most cherished, perishable fantasies and deeply piquant tantrums for absolute conviction, though also not without large and reverent precedent as fond possibilities go. And who was its occasion, but Dr, Ronald David Laing, renegade psychoanalyst? B.D. Laing: the man who gave schizophrenia a good name and who seemed to have rationalized the freak- out; who suggested that, far from ite being a disease process like measles or’ pneumonia to which one is passively subject, schizophrenia coukl be construed as the mind’s natural way of healing that appalling tate of alienation called normality; that it is a homeostatic response to Impossible experiences, which, in the right cireumstances, could go right and lead’ to a broak- through, and that in the wrong circumstances must 20 wrong and lead via a grotesque caricature of the heal- ing process to that brokendown state we know as madness: and, finally, that it is an inner voyage of self Giseovery, of ego death and rebirth, which ought to have cocioty’s sanction and bo guided by cicorones, ieluding ex-petients, who had been on that tri them= In a socloty maniaeslly possessed of an urgo to do some radical veassessing, Laing’s contentions had an instant éclat. He seemed to be speaking our minds, articulating things we felt we'd always guessed intui- tively—tiko our homely conviction that travel is broadening. Of course it was too euoy to forget that there are trips and there are trips: that most schizo- Dhrenies probably only get a8 far trom Trenton as Newark, and that’s nightmare. But, on the other hand, so is Trenton. And some may undoubtedly get a lot further. Yet however much we may have mise strued what he was saying, Laing, assuredly, was get- ting to multitudes of ears, betweon them, here and there, some of the best minds of our several genera tions. Once, I was told, Laing admitted to an analyst friend that every once in a while he couldn’t help getting a furtive pleasure from a sense of having infiltrated the 92 ESQUIRE: JANUARY bourgeoisie, of having secreted himself into homes and libraries where he waits on the shelf between the covers of his books, primed to blow the mind of the unwitting. browser These days, though, with sales of his first books brisker than ever and’sales of his latest (Knots, The Politics of the Family) not very far behind, he is find- ing it all a bit curious. Talking about The Divided Sel and The Self and Others (originally conceived in 1 as a single book), Laing told me recently, “I thought they would last «few years, and after that they'd be filed away in a phenomenological museum as examples of how people were thinking in the Fifties. Still, I'm very gratified by their popularity, especially, it seems, in America.” Early in Mareh a year ago, ranged around the floor of a tall, sparingly furnished room in the northwest of London, a raga quietly twanging from a phonograph in one corner, people were diverting Laing with the latest American rumors about him—stories of repeated hospitalizations, month-long drunks, how his once sym- pathetic and wonderful mind had been wasted by demon acid, how he’s in the habit of punching his patients in the nose, and worse. Laing sat listening, cross-legged on the floor, looking amused and impish. “It really seems to have stuck,” he said, “this image of mo as crazy. I understand that some psychiatrists have even made diagnoses based on my books. I don’t. know; maybe it was The Bird of Paradise that did it? One rofessor of psychiatry at Yale apparently told his Students that it showed distinet signs of & loosening, of associations, which sort of missea tho point. So far 1 haven't beon able to figure it out—what they're got- ting, what they're neoling to ket, from thinking I'm crazy.” I got to Laing tha provious winter by ona of the most circuitous routes you can imagine—much like peoling aan onion in search of its center, which is to say, almost not at all, As it also hanmened, it was just in the nick of time, for at our first meeting (not counting a glancing oncountor in a shoo store, of which mova anon) he announced that at the end of March he would be packing up, family and all, turning over his shingle and leaving London for the country. “Not necessarily thio country,” he added ciroumapectiy with a tetehy eye to his privacy. Except that by then, after an hour or So's acquaintance, it was plain that the direction was to ho unorringly to the oast—to Coylon, as 1 lator discovered, to study meditation, then to India to study yora, and finally to Japan to have a look into Zen, When. T asked him how come, he sighed, rotied nis eyes up into his head and said simply, “Why, to got on with it.” TT, you see, is what in good time I want to try to tell, you about, make some sense of, 1 think what interested me about Laing in the first place was a certain re- semblance to Huckleberry Finn—something boyish, delinquent and uneatchable about him, this man light- ing out for the Territory. Perhaps it’s the impulse thatNOW COMES R. D. LAING I find so congenial. Indeod, I suppose it is virtually automatic: to want to stand at an ideal standpoint instead of just occasionally haunting it, But it is aleo an impulse that excites some consternation, especially among thosa stalwart radicals who still nurse a com- mitment to this world and vestigial faith in polities. For to them the news that somebody they were count- ing among them is making heaven-bent overtures toward the mystical Orient is likely an occasion for some dismay, if not for outright cynicism. And, indeed, of late, with the oceult getting to soem less and tess occult, becoming, in fact, almost ridiculously common- place, one knows the feeling. Even so, setting aside the fakery and silly, sorry charades of the currently be- guiling run-of-the-mill game of mystical footsie, the fact io there are dopths and ingradients to a decision such as Laing’s that defy putting down to mere theatre —more rigor, T discovered, than revelation, more ays- tem than simple posturing, more science about how the mind happens to work than catechism about how it should. But first let me tell you about the onion, my weaving pursuit of this man who seemed girdled, protected 1 sometimes fantasied, by as many concentric rings of more or less helpful people as maybe even the President. For nearly a year, I was told, there'd been no further interviews—indeed, no lectures, no appearances, no anything. “He gets a dozen requests a week,” an Ameri- can friend of his informed me, “and they all seem to think he must be nuts to turn them down. Would you mind telling me what's so nuts about that?” I shrugged and for the next three months carried on—three months of tacking and shunting on the outskirts of Laing’s scene, of letters going unanswered and phone calls frustrated by no one at the other end, of assurances doled out to whomever would listen as to the impeccable obscurity of my motives. For instance, at home one day I was dropped in on by some hippie friends who told me right away in that endearing if less than crystal- clear way they have that, truly, Laing was out of sight. T could not but agree. Lately, he is almost impossible to get to meet, Serious Marxists I talked to were equally ambivalent, seemed to be tempering their initial copious enthusiasm because of what they took to be a creeping ambiguity in Laing’s more recent. polities, The prominent Harley Stroct analyst I met at a beau monde party on a barge in the Thames was contentedly chatting on about his friend and my former teacher, Erik (Erikson), when I somewhat gracelessly slid in a mention of Laing. The chatter promptly ceased. Finally he said, “His early works were unquestionably mutative achievements—a very original attack on the standard notion of the unconscious. But lately I can’t understand a word he says or writes. A pity, really.” Next I make brave forays into the circles of famous intellectuals just to get a whiff of how the wind blows there. Judging by report and also by his foreword to Lainz and Cooper's Reason and Violence, Sartre gives his blessing. And 90, [ understand, do Erich Fromm, Gregory Bateson, John Gerassi, ‘Jules Henry and Jaeques Lacan. Further aneld, Robert Lowell turns out to be an admirer of Laing’s prose style; and Lévi- Strauss, whose work Laing likes, made a special point of meeting him when he was in'London some months back. Then, cruising likely stroots und asking oceasional people who might or might not know him who Laing might or might not be, I picked up « further collection of particulars signifying almost anything: quack, you, revolutionary, philosopher-king, schizophrenic - dis guised ax a doctor, doctor masquerading: as a schiz0- phrenic, the most recent reincarnation of Aesculapius, This, let me tell you, is traneference on a truly phe- nomenal scale. Given’ such data, you end up deciding either that Laing Is exactly whoever anybody thinks he is, or else that he is exactly not—elther of which, finally, is not an unmeet description of what is the case ‘Angling a course more to the interior of the onion, I Journeyed into the Laing-centered Network of radical peychotherapists and experimental communities. A dis- proportionate number of them, I discovered, were Americans from New York who with other members of the Network had joined Laing in 1965 to help set up Kingsley Hall, his now dispersed intervention-cum- crash-pad center on a dingy back street of London's dingy Bast End, the very same building from which in 1931 Mahatma Gandhi, accompanied by a goat that he milked for sustenance, negotiated for his country’s in- dependence. There, until June, 1970, therapists and diagnosed psychotics lived, ate’ and slept together on equally impromptu terms in the belief that the usual medical model of mental illness and treatment was counter-productive and socially naive. ‘Since the departure from Kingsley Hall, other Net- work communities have been established elsewhere. But the image of Kingsley Hall as the consummate experi- ment in Laing’s therapeutic tacties still persists, and stories about it are traded as a kind of Network currency. From all reports it must have been a remark- able scene, especially at the beginning with everyone gassed up on the high-octane excitement of inventing new social form. The day ordinarily began in early afternoon with the distribution of community tasks among those who were willing or able. Those who weren't, who had chosen to journey into themselves, as the patois went, to see what they could see, were the community's natural aristocrats, The most anticipated event of the day was dinner, held usually between nine- thirty and eleven-thirty al night around a candlelit, fiower-strewn table at the head of which sat Laing, who afterward liked to settle into the lotus position and discourse, sometimes until morning, on psychology and metaphysics, oF tell stories about his boyhood in Glas- gow and his days at medical school and in the arm ‘There were the expectable tussles over the community's organization, Laing arguing that authority becomes ESQUIRE: JANUARY 93POPSHRINK, REBEL, YOGI, tyrannical when it isn’t free to arise and pass away spontaneously, and Aaron Esterson, boyhood friend and coauthor of Sanity, Madneve and the Family, insisting that the community was going to disintegrate without an inoculation of order. Laing recited Lenin from memory; Esterson stalked around with a biography of Stalin. Meanwhile, people went mad, secluded them- selves in a man-sized black ox in the meditation room, threw most things off the roof except each other, ate oF didn’t, sought help or didn’t, ran the strange courses of their voyages into the interior, did not commit suicide and were diseussed by the others in nightlong convocations aimed at maintaining the community's always precarious balance. Very soon the community had become hallowed shrine of the counter-culture, statutory stop on the itineraries of distinguished radical psychiatrists, poets, actors, painters, dancers. ‘There-were experimental drama groups, yoga sessions, dancing most nights, elasses trom the Anti-university of London, seminars on anything, From time to time the neighbors got uptight, broke in, smashed windows and doors, called names, smeared feces in the hall on top of the feces that had already been smeared there by somo of the community's move tvipped-out ar cats, Efforts were made to initiate dialogues with people in the neighborhood, all of which failed. ince those days, the Network seams to have got ‘4 lot quieter—toss messianic, more diverse. The in- habitants, as 1 mot tham in the course of my spiraling uncertainly toward their leader, seemed variously friendly, freaky, engaging, sometimes exceptional, in general partaking of a kind of visionary ordinariness, But with Laing nowhere to be seen, it ia rather unclear what part, if any, he still plays in their lives, “Why don't you go ask some schisophrenics’” one of the Network's therapists suggests. Okay, T1l go ask some schizophrenies, bearing in mind at the same time ‘that really thore is no such thing. Al over tho Networlt Iam having to bear this in mind all the time, because when I don’t, and then slip reflexively into questions about doctors and patients at Kingsley Hall, T am elhowed politely, “No doctors, no patients—just poo- ple.” At first, if you want to know, I can hardly sup: press a yawn: oh yeah, no doctors, no patients... sure, right on. Because for all the mileage between me and my days a8 a rather poor medical student I am still under tho skin poddling a pathology model of reality: L-you-he-she-it-them more or less sick than me-you- him-her-it-them. Dr. Joseph Berke, one of Laing's former colleagues in the Network who was telling mo about life at Kingsley Hall, assures me that I am not the only one mistaking the world for a hospital, Indeed, it seems to be one of the more deep-down, whacking. great biases of our times. “People would visit, lots of famous psychiatrists and analysts, and afterward we'd ask them who they thought were the schizophrenics and who were the doctors. A lot of the time they couldn't tell, or they'd get it wrong. Anyway, the whole 94 ESQUIRE: JANUARY task in these communities is to develop a new language of interpersonal relations, outside the medical model.” But new language or not, who ever heard of going to schizophrenies for information? Well, I guess R. D. Laing, for one. So I get permission to visit one of the ‘communities in North London, a condemned row house ‘on Duncombe Road with no doorbell, and. sit around the kitehen table sipping tea through a brass straw from a little enameled brass pot and talk to whatever non-doctor-non-patient-just-people shumMe over: Mike ‘Yokum, and Mary Ann, and David from Harvard, and Ellen from Antioch, and Sadie from L. A. (all Ameri- cans ranging from young to middle-aged), and Gregorio from Buenos Aires, and David Bell, formerly 4 computer engineer who now goos by sueh’ names as Little Lamb, My Sweet Blue Angel and Oedipus of the Rex family,'and someone tall who stands by the door ‘an army fatigue jacket working at a pipe like a very Vulean. Nobody unrecognizablo; & few whose behavior seems, well .«, unusual most of them wearing Laing close to their’ hearts—disconcertingly close maybe, if anything. Tdon't know what T should be expecting, but the fact is many of them are sounding like 60 many pages out of Laing’s books, until I am giddy with multiplying intelligences about mustifcations and in- talidations. At-a moment of calm (someone gets up from the table to make brownies) T say so—that they soem by some subtle process of conditioning to have heen rather thoroughly Laingianized. Some don’t know what I'm talking about; athers—maybe yes, maybe no. David Bel, who the rest of the time is muttering 10 himself about “Oedipus of the Rex family, a man of no social intelligence,” says, “Vos, it’s an interesting problem’ Next I went to see a dark, severe-looking, expatriate American lady, 4 social anthropologist and friend of Laing's named Joan Woseott, in hor Hampstead fiat, ‘thickly furmished with the forcign-looking objects of mysterious purposes that anthropologists seem to pick up. She once worked with Laing, is now writing « book on “primitive modes of mischief-making"— shamanism, witeheraft and their relationships to schizophrenia, She offered a comparison between Laing and a god of the Yoruba, a Nigerian tribe she'd spent ‘hwo years studying. “Ronnie has x tremendous talent for turning things upside down in order to free you from old modes of perception. He's like the Trickster, whose name means the guide to travelers. Among the Yoruba the Trickster is regarded as both father and child of all the other gods. He's responsible for ehango, fan essential foreo in any culture. In tribal myths he does things like setting fre to someone's house, then helping the owner get his postessions out, and then he hhands these possessions away to passorsby. Ronnie did the same thing to the old modes of viewing mental ill- ness: he set fire to the hospitals and scattered the patients. Basically, I think he sees his task 2s mediating between man’s present and potential states, The Trick-PHILOSOPHER-KING? stor Ig also x modiator. He's usually pictured standing at a crossroads, He's very cunning. In one myth he ‘walks along the boundary line between two farms woar- ing a hat that's white on one side and black on the other. Neodiess (0 say, this provokes a dispute between the two farmers as to the identity of the trespasser. You see, the Trickster is absolutely against any authority and without any allegiances. He's eapable of transformations, a shape shifter. Ronnie, too, woars many hats—to show people that they see what they want to 02.” T thank the Indy and carry on. From some scientists whom I question about Laing and his work I get quite another story—very likely because to them the mai pitch of his career looks like an assault on the partic ular kind of thinking that they as scientists seem to choose to go in for. It hasn't all been Laing's doing, but it is true nonethaloss that, one way and another, he hax been hoisted to the vanguard of a popular, burgeoning and far from unambiguous attack on the cornucopian, twin deities of our society, seience and technology. It is, a curious phenomenon, in many respects nobly righ- teous and sympathetic, but with some awesome com: ponents of sentimentality and a terrible hunger for conspiraey—any conspiracy—on which to pin the blame for our outsized ills, science being a likely and handy candidate. Nosing around the Network I am prepared for such sentiments; yet I do not like to be smelling, conspiracy, it makes me nervous about the state of my mind. Laing, I am grateful to learn, is not conspiracy minded. Indeed, as far as science is concerned, his literacy is reputed to be nearly as august as his mastery of the psychoanalytic literature. And, in fact, his criticisms go far deeper than a simple charge of con- spiracy: he perceives in the works of most scientists the unconscious perpetration of a deadly sin, a chronic, broad-spectrum perceptual habit of looking at the universe as a collection of more sensible objects; and this includes humans, whom, you'd think scientists would have got by now, it is radically unscientific to regard as things. But it is a habit, Laing is aware, pertaining well beyond the disciplinary boundaries of the sciences—one that historians say seriously captured us sometime around the seventeenth century with the convergence of Francis Bacon, market capitalism, re- thrmed retin and’ tie siirund-dy-roukan semi: Fhe technical name of this perilous game is reification—the reduction of a human to the status of an object—and it happens all the time. Thus, reify somebody is assuredly what I blithely do every time, say, that Teall my par- ents Ma and Pa with nary a second thought to who else they may be. It is also, Laing points out, what the best-intentioned psychiatrist does, only to far greater effect, when, on the basis of some ambiguous signs of nuttiness and the evidence of other people's discomfort (usually families and police), he designates someone a schizophrenic. As wielded by’ Laing, with an imagina- tion equally at home in Aesculapian dream healing and contemporary neurophysiology, the eritique is rather grandly epochal, for, far from being caught up in the bristling whodunit of now, Laing deliberately cultivates ‘8 timeaweep of ever increasing dimensions. Thus, he says he tries to think in units of at least a generation about most things and figures conservatively that twenty generations is about the right measure for re- percussions that are still very much with us (yhich, he notices, puts us fairly cheek by jowl with the witch bumert of the Inquisition; and he wonders, in the tne likely event of our making it that far, whether twenty generations hence we shall be remembered any more warmly). He questions, in other words, this fondness of ours for elevating our culture's peculiar habit of mind, of only 2 couple hundred years’ standing, after all, into a sine qua mon of human cognition. And he suggests that there may be in this habit 2 generous Aollop of disguised superstition, for which sciontists do not seem to love him the more. Still wending my roundabout course, T step up the magnification and look next to Laing’s profession proper. The terrain in Britain is all too familiar. There is the usual array of psychoanalyst, assorted schools and institutes and political wings of institutes, with whom Laing, in theory, has varying degrees of con- nection and sympathy. Nominally, at least, he is iden- tified with the Freudian Institute of Psychoanalysis, where he did his training. But the political and ideological ins and outs of these afliliations are very complex and, in a larger view, perhaps, a storm in the wilderness. For the heartland of British psychology is occupied almost entirely either by conditioning-mind- ed behavioral and experimental psychologists, like H, J. Eysenck, who thinks Laing is evil, or organically disposed psychiatrists, like William Sargant, chief psychiatrist at London's St. Thomas’ Hospital, who nee complained about having to mop up after Laing’s failures. Laing has never replied, but his attitudes to ECT (electroshock) and drug therapy, Dr. Sargant’s favorite regimen, and to the usual, socially naive, ex- elusively biochemical approaches to schizophrenia are widely known. Basically the argument begins and ends with the simple fact that nobody has the slightest idea what schizophrenia is, never mind what causes it, There is no general agreement about the criteria for atiqamsing no bakeaiata scat aneauphysiniagical. not biochemical; there is no consistent prepsyehotic personality; there is no identifiable organic pathology. either during or after; and there is no clear genetic pattern to its incidence in families. In sum, it may not even exist, All there is are some people (quite a lot fof them) who seem to have queer experiences and who sometimes act in queer ways from certain other (may be-themselves queer) -points-of view. Where this puts Laing is hovering over the existen- tialist camp of psychoanalysis with a weather eye kent intently trained back on Freud. It is not easy to formulate the nature of his rift with Freud, but in ESQUIRE: JANUARY 95LATEST REINCARNATION part it is a matter of trying to redress Freud’s truly inspired overemphasis on genital sexuality to the neglect both of bodily experience that is not specifically genital and of the mind's more summary powers to transcend itself More particularly, as far as Laing’s view of Schizophrenia is concerned, there is a special dent to & theory developed in the 1950's—Gregory Bateson's elucidation of the role of the “double bind” in the etiology of schizophrenia, Bateson, an esteemed anthropologist, has credited Laing with being one of the few people fully to understand the theory and its applications. The double bind refers to a family situation of no-exit in which somebody is repeatedly subjected to simultaneous, absolutely contradictory messages of two different types (one, say, verbal and the other, physical), thereby creating a logical dilemma in which’ he cannot remain but that he also cannot escape, except perhaps by developing the symptoms of schizophrenia, constructing an inner world co- inhabited by contrary versions of reality, which is hardly what one could call making a satisfactory escape One simple example is the child whose mother ex pressly commands him to love her while signifying at tho same time by her actions that she does not want his love, that if he loves her, he will be punished, and also forbids him to notice the contradiction. Av Bato- son observed. this is a logical technique that in, Zen Buddhism is used to achieve Enlightenment: “One of the things [tho Zon Master] does is to hold a stick e pupil’s head and say fiercely, “If you say this, real, I will strike you with it, If you say this stick is not real, T will strike you with it, If you don’t say anything. I will strike you with it.’ In the family it leads elsewhere Now mone of this reasonably straightforward tare is getting me any closer to payching out the jitters that Laing's name keeps bringing on as I rummage for news of who he is. And, indeed, there was some. thing else that up to now T had been dodgins—partly just more rumor of the sort that spontaneously materializes around anybody famous, but also 2 sense, referred easily enough to his books, that Laing was, as people kept nudgingly saying, “into mysticism.” Now 1 ean recall a time not so long gone when myeticaloceult waa a loaded five syllable device for instantly conjuring up to uninitiated imaginations the obsessions of cranks, thinge like poltergeists, Rridey Murphy, U.F.O.s, ancient Dickensian ladies summon- ing the ‘spirits of dead husbands, ungrammatical ads for thio or that path to truth at the backs of shady- looking barbershop magazines, and a lat of religious mysteries that one was always being enjoined not to worry about, to accommodate aesthetically (if at all) as metaphors and allagories, the poeticisms of less plenarily enlightened ages. But times, as they are wont, have changed. These days, determining what is and isn’t real seems more than ever a matter of 96 ESQUIRE: JANUARY guesswork. The millennium is at hand, revelations are back and mysticaloceult now tends to mean Sonny and his friends. The question is, is what we are witness- ing a religions revival, or is it only America again, doing its thing? The last time T was back, a computer in Grand Central Station cast my horoscope, people in saffron robes and ecstasy were chanting Hare Krishna in front of my bank, some stockbrokers I know were playing the market by casting the I Ching (and swearing by it, incidentally), Allen Ginsberg was singing OM MANI PADME HUM in a Chicago court room, my former Harvard roommates were deep in meditation, and some of the most sober and intelligent of my friends were into The Tibetan Book of the Dead, cabalism and the tarot. And in all this riot, what of Laing? It takes some careful charting to expose the faney footwork that brought Laing’s head to where it seems to be. The underlying premise is that mystical or transcendental experience is only special and unavailable in the sense that unconscious experience is unconscious—which is simply to say, says Laing, first, that they are both authentic, demonstrably operative modes of experience; sovond, that they are different from ordinary waking perception, but by no evident necessity any more or less “real”; and, third, that their difference lies at partly In our failing to recognize or communicate ‘them he ‘unconscious’ is what we do not communicate, to ouroelvee or to one another.”® As an instance of Laing's crafty method of stripping a phonomenon of everything but the obvious, this is a neat manifesta. tion of what I shall eall the Laing Magic Mirror Effect ‘a trick and not a trick, 2 case of the mind being ‘uicker than the mind by becoming ta itself a looking glass, Laing calls it “the true natural scientific meth 0d.” He also sometimes calls it “existential phonom- enology.” a way of tuning one’s mind to an uncom. promising, razor-edged innocence, making for an ideal vantage point from which ta look at things. As a tech- nique to blow the mind on, it is eminently respectable, even outside of philosophy and psychology. It is a Swiftian gambit often adopted, for instanee, by the finest of our science-fiction writers to dramatize just what @ kindly, sensitive Martian, ax yet unconsigned to any of the predominating Terran world-views, might make of our allegedly reasoning behavior, and how from that he might be supposed to infer the na- ture and qualities of our experience. Except that by Laing's example we ourselves adopt the ideal postures of visitors to our own planet by awakening our mirror minds, by becoming conscious of being conseious of this or that. By the Mirror Effect, sciewce, for example, is how tho scientists who happen to be around happen to behave. Common sonso, that canonical fetish by which we think we can tell, democratically, what's real from what isn’t, turns out to be no more (or less) than ‘what most people at a given time seem to think they and Fie heit and O1hers.OF AESCULAPIUS, MAYBE? the others think is go: “Oh, Just see what, wonderful Now Clothes the Emperor’a fine tailors have made him!” By the time we get to schizophrenia, the lacka- day world is ina rout: a name given to one group of people for saying, hearing, feeling or doing things that other people, tha onaa who give them that name, don't. And the name is only preliminary to a whole range of rather peculiarly violent-seeming actions that are then taken against them for what they are told is their own good—like locking them up (hospitalization) . drugging them into submission (chemotherapy), zapping them in tho hoad with many volts (ECT), and lopping off pieces of their brains (leukotomy and lobotomy). Given such data, and applying to it the principle of the Mir- ror Bffect, you find that on, say, # hospital ward, there 4re two regions of experience to try to make out: that of the poopie who get locked up and that of the peo- ple who lock them up. When you do, Laing warns, you may discover, on the one hand, that the better part of people's violence toward other people is pro- Jection of self-hatred, and, on the other, that the bet- tor part of psychosis ix sometimes. transcendental Which (note) does not mean alvways, Not only is evel psychotic definitely not an unacknowledged Soeratos, Dut Laing also pointedly denies (in one of the weightier sentences In The Politics of Experience) “that psy- chotie exporiones necessarily contains this element more manifestly than sane experience.” ‘Assimilate the Magic Mirror Effect, and you find yourself cultivating a special facility of mind that Laing (and others) describes as metanoia. It is one of a number of concepts that for the past year or so Laing has been worrying with characteristically obsessive enthusiasm. He seems to work this way, in fits of intense and exclusive interest. One year it was the pre-Soeratic philosophers, another time it was neurophysiology, or early Western music, or mathe- matical logic and set and group theory, or Buddhist and Vedanta phenomenology, or Freud, whom Laing reread from A to Z. Last year it was metanoia. If to be paranoid is, in a sense, to be in perpetual oppos n to your own mind, then to be metanoid is to be beside it—that is, to change it, or to shift from one mode of consciousness into another from which you have a perspective on the first. A frequent perceptual effect of indulging in this meta-blow-job of the mind seoms to be a reversal of figure and field, of foreground and background, wherever you happen’ to be looking. The zoo effect is one example: set against a norma- tive background of doctors and attendants, a mental patient's behavior will undoubtedly look very strange; reverse your perspective, however, and suddenly the patient may seem rather more familiar and sym- pathetic than his keepers. Wherever that puts you, it isn't where you were just before. Laing thinks that ‘most of us are stuck in one perceptual bag, mistakenly crediting it with being the only one, or anyway the only valid one. And that goes, by the way, for most psychotics, too, who tend in our job-minded culture, Laing has noticed, to turn quite quickly into career schizophronica, A# a consaquence Luing’s own way of trying to assist them ave sometimes consciously mind-blowing. Once, for example, Laing was sought out by a diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic who on arrival set straight to work painting a pleture of global persecution by invisible death rays, Laing waited until he was through, thon, pulling out all tho stops, said, “You think that's persecution? Now let me tell you how you're really being persecuted." The point. is, iat astonishes Laing is not so much the fact. that paranoids think they're being persecuted when aps parently they are not, but that they always seam so shocked at the thought of being persecuted. Roeauso, actually, he is far more astonished by how many pe ple think they're not being persecuted when to. his view they so clearly are. This second variety of de- lusion, he says, is much the more common—"and,”” he remarked recently, “we don't even have a word for that one.” ‘What this betokens—a little curiously considering the libertarian constructions that are popularly laid at his door—ia Laing’s oxpectation that people take con scious responsibility for where their heads are at, for changing their minds when their minds are making their lives uninhabitable. This is, you must admit, a Jong way from Easy City. And, in fact, for all the ae- cusing rumors that he colludes in his patients? fan- tasies, or that he brings too much of the outside world, into his consulting room, or that he is too motherly, or not motherly enough, patients of his assure me that, at least as an analyst, Laing’s technique is scarcely less ‘tough or orthodox than those of other virtuoso Freud- ians of a lesser notoriety But there is, it must be said, a further aspect to this, picture of contractual rigor that is not so recognizable ‘or 0 easily reconciled with orthodoxy—an aspect that augurs, if you will, the culminating, coming-on-to beatific payoff, My first glimpse of it, as far as Laing is concerned, was on the occasion of my hearing a r cording of a talk delivered in August, 1969, to the Association of Humanistie Psychologists in Silver Spring, Maryland. The speaker was Baba Ram Dass, Known previous to his Indian sea-change from social scientist into mystic as Dr. Richard Alpert, the ex- Harvard psychologist who with Timothy Leary helped make LSD the household goblin it has since become. By way of charting his route from psychedelies to yora, Baba Ram Dass was describing his method of therapy and cited his indebtedness to R. D. Laing “IVs total guts ball. You see, the therapist is con- stantly putting himself totally on the line. And the thing is, it's a great way to get stoned out of your head, because what happens is after a little while you're looking: at his face, and it starts to turn a liquid, and you go through all the external hallucinations, and you see that everybody is your (Continued on page 160) SQUIRE: JANUARY. 97‘and when those honors were sufficient for me to do justice to his virtues, I began te get my revenge for his infamy, and then I revived him inside the ar- mored tomb and left him there rolling about in horror. That was long before the fire ants devoured Santa Maria del Darién, but the mausoleum is still ine tact on the hill in the shadow of the dragons that climb up to sleep in the ‘Adlantie winds, and every me T pass through here [ bring him an automobile Toad of roses and my heart pains with pity for his virtues, but then I put my car to the plaque to hear him weeping inthe ruins of the erambling trunk, and if by chance he has died again, 1 bring him back to life onee more, for the beauty of the punishment. is that he will keep on living in his tomb as Tong as Um alive, that is, forever. i Translated from the Spanish by Gregory’ Rabasea. AFTER FREUD AND JUNG, NOW COMES R.D. LAING: POP-SHRINK, REBEL, YOGI, PHILOSOPHER-KING? LATEST REINCARNATION OF AESCULAPIUS, MAYBE? (Continued from page #7) mother and your father and your child and your lover and your enemy—and every one of them you've got to love and accept ‘You've got to accept your ten thousand horrible visions and your ten thousand Deautiful visions. 1 learned this from Ronnie Laing in England. I went over to England onee, and Tim (Leary) told me to look: up Ronnie, and we met about five minutes in a pub, and Ronnie said we ought to take acid, LSD, together T'said sure, so we made an appointment, ‘and a few days Inter we met, and we sald whose LSD shall we use, and he said, well, his was legal, 80 we decided to use his, He was so far out. I mean, the minute we took LSD he took off his elothes and started to do yoga. This was three or four years ago, and I had never seen anything like this. 1 mean, I was ready to tarn on Miles Davis and lie down and, you know, have a groovy ses- sion with this high’ head. He did this yowa, 0 I watched for a while—like T don't know what's going on, but I'l watch, I'm cool . . - super-cool. Then he came over to ‘mie and he looked at me in a very protective way. And I felt that look eliciting in me all the childlike needs to be protected, And I felt. my face changing and my whole orientation ‘going into that, We stoot in that tor 8 second, and then T sw his face melt and he became this fantastic, delieate child that needed to be protected, and T felt that eliciting in me all the mro- fective things, And what we did in the next five or six hours, completely sie Tently yo lived out (this is feniliar to many of you, but masbe not under acid find this intensely) each of theve ey biotic roles: lovers, friondsy enemies, father-child, teacher-student «sever ‘one yaw catld think of, And we eversed thom. And some ef them stuck ws be feause they wore 20 seary—to_ accept Doing lovers? ts accept being encmics? to yeally hate? But we had to accept that one tao hefore we could get on with it. And now what happens t= that T look into somebody's eyes, sind within about thirty seconds the liguid thing starts, and his face starts 9 change, and I'm going throagh all these change: And hho's going through it, iy you see only eyes and Just more and more light, and. finally You just see light, and you don’t see a face anymore. And then you're ina state that is just go... It's a place You get where it’s breathtaking. You ean't cateh your breath, its 20 exquie itely high to be in that’ place with an- other person. It's like ‘you suddenly found yourself out on a journey to the ‘moon, and you're just suddenly’ in this 60. EOQUIRE: JANUARY place, this quiet, centered, extraordi- nary place. And you're both digging i simultaneously, how exquisite itis. Then at that point you've made the contact, you've started to become a conscious ness. And then the person has become freed that much more. If I see one di- Iemma with Western man, its that he can't aceept how beautiful he is. He fean't secept that he is pure Tight, that he's pure love, that he's pure conscious ness, that he's divine, He can’t accept It, It seared the hell out of me the frst time I saw it, 1 was embarrassed, be- cause T'was told that If you're a good Doy, if you do good, you're all right for now. But watch it! Like original in, conditional love, whatever you want to call it. And suddenly I was experienc- ing this place in me that just was, and it was that beautiful.” Of course, Baba Ram Dass is not en. franchised to speak for R. D. Laing. Same trip perhaps, different airline tll, there is a little matter of ecstasy, which in goneral we seem to have lost Certainly Iam in short supply and ‘would happily know where to get some more, Mallarmé’s "L'enfant abgique son extase,” and the propheey in Amos that there will be a time of famine in the land, “not @ famine for bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the Lomd”—theae are among the paradigmatic enords afton wing in Laing’s books, “That time,” says Laing, “has came to mass, Tt is the present age.” ‘The obvious next question, then, is where do we x0. from here, ‘whieh is precisely the problem to whieh Laing Twas addressed al his work ‘The particular route he has been fol- lowing is not untried. People have been that way before and have lett some signs, Our relizions, to name one of the archives Laing has been combing, are Toaded with them. Indeed, until fairly recent times, such things were taken. for ranted, sere commoted by s0 simple a name (for so remarkable a state of mind) as piety. To us, who find such states of mind bizarre and inaccessible, {he name sounds droll or quaint. Vain would say that we aze alienated, that fome process for entering into ‘these states of mind “may be une that all of us need, in one form or another," that ‘this process could have a central func ion in a truly sane society.” And these slates of mind do eeem to happen regions of many quite ordinary people's experience beyond the pale of the ordi- nary, beyond what we think of as wal- wral consciousness (the Emperor's same old clothes), that no amount of skep- tical argument is able to conjure away. The main difficulty, however, about journeying into those regions is that There ave few domestic maps of any reliability, so we must take what we ean get in the way of directions In the East, of course, they have been quietly charting these regions for cen: turies, developing an assortment of techniques that are easily as rigorous ‘and systematic as regards “inner” re- ality as are our Westorn seienees in relation to “outer,” phenomenal reality. This, for some reason, commonly sur- prises many people. For most of us, Inured by the reductive spirit of our times to a notion of religion that is at its best metaphorical of the proverbial “higher human yearnings,” at its worst, some ensate species of nostalgia, the forthright mettle and unambiguous pre- cisenoss of thoze techniques is at frst diMenlt to take in. For what we have to realize is that this is not religion in that customary, depotentiated sense but a detailed and progressive method, me tHeulously’ tailored to the requirements of actual human nature, for getting down to the business of entering into other-than-ordinary states of eonaeious- and that this method is the prod- uct of careful observation and a lumi nous apprehension of that actual human nature apprehended nol abstractly but as habitual patterns of specific be havior descending even to the levele Physiology and biochenvietey. Tn the Wert, parhape the nonreet we havo eome to such proceduses ie in Dey choanalyris. And for analysand 1 may Say, the nows that what's real is far more tieklish a problem than mast peo ‘le bumping around th thete liven tend to think isn’t so novel a» exatie, Execpt for certain simplistiealty rationalized cop.outs not really attributable to the Master Nimsel(—Itke that analysis ts ‘meant to adjnest you toward « more con pliant resignation to your lot, or to im. prove your technique at making the Dest of a bad situation—kreud’s “tall ing cure” In its more. sophistientod turns Is a nearer ery than one mignt guess to the Interior route known él where ay the path to Enishhtenment is not for nothing, one feels, that. the idea of psychoanalytic cure’ remains however arehly in some respeets, 2 still ‘unsoonded article of faith, or that both patients and analysts persevere regard. Jess in pursuit of a dimly and rienly anti-intuited end that, whatever else fane may think of It, nas constituted for ‘auite a time now the only even partly alive religion In town. And also Tike ‘analysis, the mystie way Is no mere hop, skip and a jump, Yet, there is a point on the tumpike, near the approach to some of the cor‘tones of our normative.reality edi. fice, like our notions of time and space, and the idea that things line up natural” Ty within a system of dualities like good bad, inside-outside, real-unreal, and so fon, where the prototypical analyst is likely tobe seen, taking a powder rather like stopping, out of respect, fust short of the Emperor's underwear. His reluctance ie understandable, but itis difficult to maintain. For the prob- em about drawing se dainty 0 line is that it simply will not hold: eventuatty there comes a dawning and ho will thon have to recognize that men and not reality make these distinctions. And then he will come up sgainst a knotty ‘one about which Laing wrote one of his first books: self and other, you and not-you—e distinction to which the tune cling for dear life and whose Joss to the inoune ie the cracking of their minds and hearts. ‘When that begina to go, when you ea (or, rather, need) no. longer paint. to that body of yours with absollite pro prietary assurance, then “you” are be- ginning to be where “RK. D. Laing” bas heen sporting and reconnoitering for some years, And what's more, if you ‘want to (which is a very hard question for most of us), you can get. there, Dehind your own’ private Imperial pa- rade of thoughts, feclings and sensu tons—everything, in fact, you always assumed was familiar old egole you by procedures readily available even to common, garden-varicty humans like we. Not, mind you, that you and all your baggage will simply up and disappea These procedures are not magical—no smmicks, no potions, no fancy ineanta- tons or “shazams.” Nor is it their ob- ject to make your sensations go away Or to rid you of a self you don't happen to like. Indeed, to talk this way is to forget that what we are really consid ering is no less a matter than the path- ways to sainthood and divinity. It is true, of course, that any one of us is ‘competent, But sainthoods are no easier to come by now than they used to be, ‘and the fact is for most of us the question will just never arise. But say for the moment that it docs, that, hav. ing the makings of a saint, you are pre- pared to act on it. It it more like equa himity, what you will be after—a kind of peaceful coexistence or free associa tion with your thoughts and sensations, neither clinging to them nor alienated from them, but simply watehing them arise, abide and pass away. And for this all you will need to do, ultimately, fs to risk everything . . . whoever you may be, y this time I had talked to more than ‘two dozen inhabitants of succossive- ly more inner circles of Laing’s onion, and all of them had kept nudging me ‘on toward the same theoretical center of all these goings-on—that,hypotheti- eal place where three of my letters had disappeared without trace and where the phone went unanswered exeept once when some lady, who said she was a friend of Laing’s, and just happened to be in his office, said she thought he prob- ably wasn't seeing anybody, ever. Still undetarred, one day 1 call up Leon Red= Jer, one of Taing’s colleagues, who prom ines to mention me when he sees Laing in the next day or so. As an after thought [ mention that maybe Laing ‘will be intorested to lenow that ho'd met mo once before: “Tell him T was the gay with the bush jaokot in tho shoe Store last epring.” Later the same after noon a Indy ealls up claiming to be Laing’s cocretary: “Dr. Laing will see you tomorrow morning at eleven. Ob, and Dr. Redler said to tell you that the bush jacket hetpad.” ‘had hoon an unexpectedly sunny day on tho King’s Road in Chelsea, pas ‘rolled, aa ie the custom of a Saturday fm lato spring, with dense swarms of bejeweled hippies, bemused onlookers, 1 fow doddering veterans of Ypres and the Mame from the nearby Royal Hos pital in bright-red_soldier-pensioner's regalia, at a street corner some Sclen- tologists touting leafets, fastening innocent passersby with knowing, perse= eutory looks. Ina men's shop T recog nized him from the spooky cover Dhotograh of The Self and Othere— ecyrsct, shadowy, X-ray eyes beneath a high angled brow. We both bought trousers; he got green velvet, I got black corduroy. Then, a few minutes later, it was in a shoo store to which Twas returning a pair of “fine Italian footwear” that had fallen apart in a wook, I wae waiting, and R. D. Laing, mped in a chair across fom me, was being admirably pationt with sallow faced, long-haired salesman who for un. imaginable reasons was being vorY 76 Iuctant about fetching him the sandals he wanted. Por the second time the salesman had sauntered dosultorily buck to the storeroom, when suddenly Laing smiled, hunched his shoulders and, walk. ing over, stooped toward me and burred in a cantering Scottish brogue, “I hope you don't mind my asking like this, but T was wondering where you got ‘that bush jacket you're wearing. It's just the sort of thing I could use, lots of pock- ets.” He gestured at my many pockets, A little startled, I may say, at being thus precipitately ousted from my ha bitual state of trance, and stifling a rather edd, momentary impulse to pre. sent him with my favorite article of clothing from off my back then and there, I falteringly explained that the Jacket came from Africa. Laing nodded amiably, pushed his hands into the pockets of his new velvet trousers and returned to being patient with the sales- man who just then reappeared with yet another pair of the wrong sandals. Laing sighed. suppose,” he be: gan reflectively, hesitated and began again, “I suppose I could go barefoot, But I'm a doctor, you see, and there are some people who might think it a bit odd.” , on an undecidedly grey Wednes- ‘day, carrying my transistorized Japanese tape recorder, a notebook, the bbush jacket (it is too cold to be wearing it, so Tean only suppose I am bringing it’ as a talisman to insure that Laing will materialize in the same form sa be: fore) and three mental pages of time polished questions, I walk past the cor ner of Queen Anne Street (where Laing worked for three years, between 1962 and 1965, as director of the Langham, Clinie under its founder, Erie Graham. Howe, an imposing and reverend June Buddhist analyst who fell out inge over the Issue of drugs), past number 18 (the office of Charles F. Rycrott, Laing’s tormer analyst), \d Fing the bell beside the brass name: Plate, faintly lettered through much rubbing, on the door of 21 Wimpole ‘Street, London W1, England. It is a de- ‘ure and handsome terrace house in a row of early Victorian burgher dwell- ings—a goodly ery from Gandhi in a loineloth gambling for the future of In- dia from his tiny room in Kingsley Hall. ‘A round, cheerful little woman ushers me into a large, empty, sr0and-loor waiting room, once undoubtedly a well- to-do faiily’s sitting room, with high, straight-backed chairs, a fireplace in disuse, and on a tall, sturdy table an lunedifying arcay of ‘newspapers and magazines, A few minutes later Laing appears, crab-fashion, half-turned to go back out the door, holding a buneh of aiail. He is smaller and shehter than T recall, gaunt, dramatically lined and homed face nnd mussed, dark, early hair going grey at the ends and thin on top. Under a brown suede jacket he Is ring @ green work shirt buttoned up to the neck and partly hanging: out of his unmatehing green velvet. trou sors. ‘There is a sly disorder to his elothes and bearing that T find imme diately attraetive—“F = says smiling before T ean brandish the slumitying bush jacket at him. In his ‘expression there Is a young man's sort of unassuming wispishness and a mer- eurial elreumspeetion, like an old sqult= rel’s. You hardly ever eateh him looking at you straight on for long, perhaps the habit of many years as an analyst be- hhind the couch, As we climb the stairs to hie consulting room, he shows me & free-form ceramie tile he received by the moming post—some eopper-colored blotches on a green background—with a scrawled letter: “Dear Dr. Laing, I have read your book, The Divided Self, and... ." “I get some very odd things in the mail," he says. Jpine’s alice is large and. Faustian, painted a forest green. It is deep in shadow and furnished ascetically swith a dark-grained, scholarly austerity. A desk is by the windows facing onto some backyards and chimneys, the couch unobtrusively against one wall, book- shelves along the other, and two large, comfortable armehairs, each with an fend table, facing each’ other at a dis- tance of about ten feet. I take the one facing the windows, while Laing sits, legs erossed, in the other, shielding his eyes ‘with one hand from Tknow-not= ‘what light and watching me at a skew angle, He says nothing, waiting for me to begin, and in a way that lets me Know held be quite content to go right on saying nothing for as Tong as I eared to be watched, “Who are you, Dr Laing?” Now I ESQUIRE: JANUARY 161nerstones of our normative-reality edi- fee, Tike our notions of time and space, and the idea that things line up natural ly within a system of dualities like good Dad, Inside-outside, real-unreal, and 30 on, where the prototypical analyst is Likely to be seen taking a powder— rathor like stopping, out of respect, Just short of the Emperor’s underwear, His reluctance is understandable, but it is dimeult to maintain, For the prob- Jem about drawing 30 dainty a line is that it simply will not bold: eventually there comes a dawning, and he will then have tw recognize th and not reality make these distinctions, And then he will come up against « knotty ne about which Laing wrote one of his rst books: self and other, you and not-you--a. distinction to which the sane cling for dear life and whose loss to the insane is the cracking of their minds and hearts. ‘When that begins to go, when you ean (or, rather, need) no longer point to thal body ef yours with absolute pro. prietary assurance, thon “you” are be. ginning to be where “K. D. Laing” has heen sporting and reeonnoitering. for some years. And what's more. if you want to (whieh is a very hard question for most of us), you can get there, dehind your own’ private imperial pa- rade of thoughts, feelings and sensa- Uons—evervehing. Iu fact, you always assumed was familiar old ezole you— dy procedures reailly available even to eommon, zarden-variety humans like us Not, mind you, that you and all your Daxaze will simply up end disappear. These procedures are avi magical—no szimmicks, no potions, no fancy ineanta- tions or “shazams." Nor is it their ob- ject to make your sensations go away or to rid you of a self you don't happen to like. Indeed, to talk this way is to forget that what we are really consid- ‘ering is no less a matter than the path- ‘ways to salnthood and divinity. Te is true, of course, that any one of us is competent, But sainthoods are no easier to come by now than they used to be, and the fact is for most of us the question will just never arise, Rat say for the moment that it does, that, hav: ing the makings of a saint, you are pre. pared to act on it, It is more like equa nimity, what you will be after—a kind of peaceful coexistence or free associa tion with your thoughts and sensations, neither clinging to them nor alienated from them, but simply watching them arise, abide and pass away. And for ‘this all you will need to do, ultimately, is to risk everything . . . whoever you may be, y this time had talked to more than ‘ovo dozen inhabitants of successive ly more inner eireles of Laing’s onion, and all of them had kept nudging me fon toward the same theoretical center of all these goings-on—that hypotheti- al place where three of my letters had disappeared without trace and where the phone went unanswered except once when some lady, who said she was a friend of Laing’s, and just happened to be in his ofie, suid she thought he prob- ably wasn’t seeing anybody, ever. Still ‘undeterred, one day I eall up Leon Red- ler, one of Laing’s colleagues, who prom- {geo to mention me when he’seos Laing the next day or so. As an after- thought I mention that maybe Laing ‘will be interested to know that he'd mat ime once before: “Tell him I was the kay with the bush jacket in the shoo tore last spring.” Later the same after- noon a lady calle up claiming to be Laing’s secretary: “Dr. Laing will see you tomorrow morning at eleven. Oh, fand Dr, Redler sid to tell you that the bush jacket helped.” [tbsd been sn unenectadty sunny day ‘on the King’s Road in Cholsoa, pa- trolled, aa in the custom of a Saturday. fn Inte spring, with dense swarms of bejeweled hippies, bermused onlookers, 1 fow doddoring veterans of ¥ pros and the Marna from the nearby Royal Hos pital in bright-red soldier pensioners rogalia, at « stroet corner some Seien= tologists touting leaflets, fastening. innoeont passersby with knowing, perse- eutory looks. In 2 men's shop ¥ recog= nized him from the spooky cover Dhotosraph of The Self and Others deep.set, shadowy, X-ray eyes beneath a high angled brow. We boi bought trousers: he got_green velvet, T got Dlack corduroy. ‘Then, a few minutes Tater, it was in a shoo store to whieh Twas returning a pair of “fine Talian footwear” that had fallen apast in a ‘week. I was waiting, and R. D. Laing, slumped in a chair aerove from me, was being admirably pationt with a sallow £4004) long-haired salesman who fow tin imaginable reasons was being ory Te. Iuetant about fetching him the sandals he wanted, Por the second time the salesman had sauntered desultorily back to the storeroom, when suddenly Laing smiled, bunched his shoulders and, walle- ing over, stooped toward me and burred in a cantering Scottish brogue, “I hope you don’t mind my asking like this, but 1 was wondering where you got ‘that bush jacket you're wearing. It’s just the sort of thing T could use, lots of pock- ts." He gestured at my many pockets ‘A little startled, I may say, at being thus precipitately ousted trom my ba- bitual stato of trance, and stifling a rather odd, momentary’ impulse to Dre sent him with my favorite article of clothing from off my back then and there, I falteringly explained that the Jacket came from Africa. Laing nodded amiably, pushed his hands into. the pockets of his new velvet trousers and returned to being patient with the sales- ‘man who just then reappeared with yet another pair of the wrong sandals. Laing sighed. . . . “I suppose,” he be- gan refectively, hesitated and bexan again, “I suppose I could go barefoot. But Vm a doctor, you see, and there are some people who might think it a bit odd” 6, on an undecidedly grey Wednes- Gay, carrying my transistorized Tapanese tape recorder, a notebook, the bush Jacket (it Is too cold to be wearing it, so T ean only suppose am bringing it/as a talisman to insure that Laing ‘will materialize in the same form as be- fore) and three mental pages of time Polished! questions, I walk past the cor nor of Queen Anno Streot (where Laing ‘worked for thrae yours, between 1062 and 1065, a8 director of the Langham Clinie under its founder, Evie Graham Howe, an imposing and reverend Jun- gion-qua-Buddhist analyst who fell out ‘with Laing over the issue of drugs), past mumbor 18 (the office of Charles F. Ryerott, Laing’s former analyst), fond ring tho bell beside the brass name plate, faintly lettered through much rubbing, on tho door of 21 Wimpole Street, London W1, England, Tt is a de ‘muro and handsome terrace house in row of early Vietorian burgher dwelle ‘ings—n goodly ery trom Gandhi in Joineloth gambling tor the future of In~ din from his tiny room in Kingsley Hall, ‘A round, cheerful little woman ushers. me into a large, empty, ground-floor waitin room, once undoubtedly a well- todo family’s sitting room, with high, straight-backed chairs, a Breplace in disuse, and on a tall, sturdy table an. unedifyine array of newspapers and magazines. A few minutes later Laing lappears, erab-fashion, half-turned to go back out the door, helding a bunch of nial, He is emailer and slighter than T recall, gaunt, dramatically lined and boned face and mussed, dark, curly hair going grey at the onde and thin on top. Under a brown suede jacket he is ‘wearing a green work shirt buttoned ‘up to the nocke and partly hanging: out of his unmatehing greon velvet trot sors. ‘There Ix a sly disorder his elothes and bearing that T find lmme- Ajately attractive. “I remember,” he says smiling before I can brandish the signifying bush jacket at im. In his expression there is a young man's sort of unassuming wispishness and a mer~ eurial eireamspeetion, like an old squir~ rel's. You hardly ever catch him looking. ft you straight on for long, perhaps the habit of many years as an analyst be- hhind the couch. Ax we climb the stairs to his consulting room, he shows me a free-form coramie tile ho received by the morning post—some eopper-colored Dlotches on a green background—with a scrawled letter: “Dear Dr. Laing, I sur book, The Divided Self, =» 2" T get some very odd things jn the mail,” he says. ‘aing’s ofice is large and Faust painted a forest green, It is deep in shadow and furnished” ascetically with a dask-grained, scholarly austerity. ‘A desk is by the windows facing onto some backyards and chimneys, the couch unobtrusively against one wall, book- shelves along the other, and two large, comfortable armchairs, each with an end table, facing each’ other at a dis tance of about ten feet. I take the one facing the windows, while Laing sits, lege erossed, in the other, shielding his eyes with one hand from [-know-not- what light and watching me at a skew angle. He says nothing, waiting for me to begin, and in a way that lets me know he'd be quite content to go right ‘on saying: nothing for as long as T cared to be watched. “Who are you, Dr Laing?” Now T ESQUIRE: JANUARY 163know I have other questions, but at the time, and after three months of rooting: around, they all seem to have rubbed, Tike the lettering on the brass name plate on his door, into one, His answer is instantaneous, ‘a little bored, second- nature, confirming the most nagging of ‘my fears about interviewing a psyeho- analyst, so much of whose own busi ness fs ‘that bland and skiliful evasion that puts the whole onus on you. “What you're really asking,” he burrs, “when you ask me who I am, where im at, is who are you.” Uh-oh, This, T eon- fess, is a thorny question and I mumble something to the effect that anything fone asks about anything is in. some respects a question about oneself, But now that I am a little nervous I begin talking faster, telling about myself ‘while he betray’ not one confirming sign of messaye-received for me to stop on. Finally he makes a sweeping motion with his hand: “I've done nothing orig- inal, nothing that hasn't been done be- fore, that people don’t already know.” He is beginning to twiteh about the mouth and roll up his eyes, signs, I'd been forewarned, either of impatience or of hard concentration. I cannot think that it is the latter. Just, please, let me not give him asthma. T hear that some people bring on his asthma, but I can’t think T'm up to that either, not yet “Maybe people don't know they know?” [ suggest. Finally, agreement. Also, ‘ond game. Fighting a rising heartbun Task if T ean turn on the tape now. " don’t think #0, Pd rather you didn’t,” Laing says vacantly. “I can't exactly explain why, but it's just that what- ever is going to happen between us isn’t going to happen there.” He is looking away, apparently fidgeting with some lint on his trouser log. I begin to un- derstand why some people have found him a difficult man, Prom his point of ‘view most likely, my discomfort, which he has undoubiedly obecrved, is come thing I bring with mo, for me to work ‘out aa Iwish or may, nol for him vo in tovfere with. Thogin again. 1 tell him T want to got 2 sonse of how he eama to be whoever he is, of tho materials he'd cither in- heritéd or chosen to make himsolt of. “Look,” he says, the eye rolling fipping into 4 higher gear, “in a sense 1 am ‘whoever people observe me to be. I alk with a Seots aceent, I wear these clothes, Lwork here—” yesturing at the eouch— “V'm a householder in Belsize Park Gar dens with my wife and two children ‘And also there's my presence—vwhatever Teommanicate to people physically.” ‘Aha! Sudenly 1 see my opening and jurch for it, reminding him of what 1 overheard him telling the shoe szlese man. You sec, there is a chapter in The Self and Others about pretendine—in particular, @ passage taken from 8a tro Being and Nothingness about. waiter in # café who is play a waiter in a café; and two pages about how a little boy will pretend now that hhe-is an explorer, now a lion, now a seo captain and now “simply himself, just a litile boy,” and some years later that he is a growiup man, and st Tater that he is an old man, when sud- 164 ESQUIRE: JANUARY denly he remembers that it had all been ‘a game of pretend from the start—little oy, big man, old man, Laing’s point is that in our culture we are taught to pretend that we are not pretending, and then to forget that we are only pretend- ing that we are not pretending. So I suggest to Laing that in a sense he, too, is pretending—to he a doctor, a householder, a Scotsman, the lot. "So who,” Task, helding my breath, “is do- ing ‘the pretending? And where is he pretending: from? "The hand drops away from the eyes which stop rolling, and Laing flashes me a very catching smile. “Your diag- nosis of my metaphysical disease is very astute,” he laughs. Texhale, and Laing walks over to the end table by my ehair to piek up a fat book with a grey, coyer—the Brahma Sitra-Bhasya of Sri Sankaraearya, one of the sacred Sanskrit texts that, to- gether with the Upanishads and’ the Bhagavadgita, makes up the triple canon of the Spiritual tradition of In- dia, “I'l read you something that will tell you exactly where I am,” he says. He pauses, then begins to read, slowly, using his right hand to deploy the words, in the air. (The translation from the Sanskrit is rather rough, so I have put in brackets some brief alternatives that Tfind to be a help.) “It being an established fact that the object and the subject, that are fit to be the contents of the concepts ‘you’ and ‘we’ (respectively) [i.e. other and self, ‘or matter and consciousness}, and are by nature as contradictory a8 light and darkness, cannot logically have any identity ie. are categorically not the same as cach other], it follows that their attributes can have it still less. Accordingly, the superimposition of the object, referable through the concept ‘yous! and its attributes on the subject that is conscious by nature and i ferable through the concent ‘we! be impossible), and. contrariwise the superimposition of the subject and its ‘attributes on the object should be im poasible (ie. logically, one cannot eu Derimpose the qualities of other on self, or, viee versa, of consciousness on mat” tar]. Nevorthéless, owing to an absence fof diserimination ‘hetween these att ‘utes, af algo between substaneos, whieh aro absolutely disparate, there eontinuos ‘2 natural human behavior baved on sett Identifeation in the form of “I am this or “This is mine’ [.e. “Tam this body” ‘or “This body is mine, is me"). This bo- havior has for its material eause an ‘unreal neseience and man resorts to it by mixing up reality with unveality as a result of superimposinye the things themselves or their attriutes on each other,” Laing looks up_ sympathetically and starts to explain: “An example of what it means by the superimposition of the unreal on the real, or vice versa, is the paradigm of the rope and the snake you see a rope that conjures to your imagination a snake, and so you erro neously take the rope to be a suake, or the snake to be a rope. You see, you ‘must become detached from identifying the self with Its objective attributes ‘That's what I'm doing. It's a renuncia- tion—a ridding yourself of attachments until you are maintaining yourself in a minimal fashion: you eat just enough, breathe just enough, to stay alive, to continue. The only ‘guidelines for be- havior are not to hurt anyone, meaning not to cause harm to any part of the cosmos, and not to lie. Which you recog nize is'@ very, very subtle thing. I don’t think Tie or do anyone any harm.” He is watching me again. Hesitantly 1 ask him where all this is taking him. “T have had only glimpses,” he replies. “I don’t know where they will lead me. 1 don’t anticipate. According to the texts, though, there is a, progression from a state of ignorance. The Buddha, remember, said that ignorance is char” acteristic ' only of mind—only mind doesn't know, has this odd eapacity. But first, as T understand it, there is mind— true’knowledge of what you take to be the self, its attributes. ‘Then there is mindfulness, a state from which you Took at mind much as mind looks at body. Beyond that is release from mind~ fulness. And beyond release is nirvana, which a3 T understand it is some kind bliss, beyond life and of perpetual death.” He is so matter-of-fact, 1 am feeling frotfal. Who is this, anyway? A man transmogrified by an idea, or anyway in such serious relation to’ it that it is neck and neck with his actual life. I shall never know what he eats for breakfast or what toothpaste he uses. From scattered other sources I have learned that he is paring down his needs and activities to a functional minimam —that he sleeps very little, is vege- tarian, eats no dinner, gets up early for two hours of yoga with friends starting at seven a.m. is a practiced player of the clavichord, But is he erazy, or does Ihe know? And what are the other alter= natives? “Do you plan, then.” T ask him, “to ive all this up, the pretense? To cease being @ doctor and all? Because, if you Know that all these distinetions axe il- Tusory, why go on maintaining them?” For good measure I invoke the example of Dr Richard Alpert-Baba Ram Dans. “Docs Alpert claim to have found it?” he sake "No, as far as I know ho still con. sider iimeelf an initiate.” Laing nada. "The experience of i. Iumination is not sudden. It's a grad ‘unl praeoas of hava worke and discipline Anyone ean start from anywhere with Just the need to, ‘Thore’x no ncad to ‘change your position or put on one I: ff faney dvesa in exehange far another. ‘Tho toxts say, “Thore is only the one Rvahman and pot a second.” Av to what you choose to do, insofar as they are all shadows, whieh ‘attachments you maine tain are a matter of indifference, znd so long a8 you're indifferent to Lem, it doesirt matter. T am neutral. Anj= way, it's really very easy for me 10 carry on, Mest of what people take me to be—n psychoanalyst. who wrote this or that hook—T established quite a long time ago, and it has a momentum of its own. In a way, Thardly need to be there for do anything. Who I 2m in that sense‘most carries on without me—tike & | n the past he'd foun | hs ia suit of elothes, harder to maintain, Laing smiles, and the ey rolling starts up once ag 9 with ding Pluto then for the first time and realized that this love of ‘knowledge ould be a means of liberating the Teuess at the time it took the f ora x Neoplatonie Christianity Then T went to university, which T found to be largely a waste of time Most teachers seemed 1 lou hat someone sh tell me to write, of eve ter and who wa armid T got to know ren less attached to than 1 was—and \¢ most of my time studying neun atry, hypnosis, neurophyslolozy— ike that, vou know. Bat then 7 id to become aware that T wast’t fo Interested in what ne seemed to be all about—odjects of conscious hess. You see, Twas taught that you watch whatever organic objects entered you jousmess and hovr they inter- sete ‘ould then 1. how future objects of consel Interact in the future. P was the first lifting of the etachment from the objec seiousness in order to ess_itself “Everything you're saying,” I p out, “seems retty radical hav peri nse.” Laing frowns. “I suppose when people thine of me aa political they're thinking mainly of the Dialectics Liberation Congress.” (This was a mar thon symposium, organized by Laing’s ° Leon’ Redler and Joseph Berke, which wai in Suly, 19 along th’ Mareuse, Gi sateson, Lucien Goldmann Allen Ginsberg i ly Carmichael and ethers in Ks of discussion and political analysis.) * guess I identified myself with the Left by being there, but even at the time I made it clear that 1 really had no idea de of ouch an extraoe- ameration of peopl T think I'm neu ¢ in no strietly political action: in the sense of following the Now Movies without movie lights. Reece RCs) movie film and anew kind of movie camera that let you shoot color movies just by the light you live in. Even by the light of the candles on a birthday ‘The new film is Kodak Ektachrome 160 movie film. It four times as fast as Kodachrome I Dee aL fees as a super fast f/1.2 Ektar lens and a Moe mw cms at eee more light. ee UE Cerne Mos rene Num eNom eCard and is battery-powered. ‘The X33 camera (not shown) is less than $120. The XL55 (above), with power zoom, range. finder, and sports-type viewfinder is less than $200. Look into either one. You'll see a whole Poca Renate e Kodak makes your pictures count. Kodak XL movie camera/ Ektachrome 160 movie film. Kodak eee es ESQUIRE: JANUARY 165“As for Kingsley Hall, 1 undertook that with many reservations, almost against my better judgment. I'm not sorry about it at all, but if T were to do it again, it would be something quite different.” ‘As he talks, somehow absently, the way one might about things that’ had lost their urgency, I recall someone tell- ing me that Laing had seemed rather put off by the violence of some of the hetoric at the Congress—apparently Stokely Carmichael’s, in particular. It does seem to have been something of a turning point for him. Indeed, I later heard him say of revolution, “Of course T'm in favor of a revolution, One must be, But I don't consider it a revolution when Tweedledum takes over. from ‘Tweedledee, under whatever name he happens to’go.” We tum to the subject of drugs “You're generally considered to be an advoeate of LSD and the other halla- cinogens. Does that have anything to do with the experience of illumination?” I have made no public statements about drugs—except that I said once that I'd rather see my children smoking pot or hashish than drinking or using Cigarettes. That still stands, But the experience of illumination you're talk ing about is not the same thing as some- body taking a trip on acid—going up and coming down and seeing, what do you know, it’s the same world as before, ‘only maybe with new eyes. Anyone whe thinks it's even of the same order is making mistake. And kids certainly ‘won't find out about it just from read ing a bunch of paperbacks.” ‘And yet I still have this curiosity to know more exactly what he's got in mind—whether this ix really good-bye to all that, or whether, in some eranny ‘of his mind, he is reeerving an option to return, like a Bodhisattva, a being who finds Enlightenment but who postpones his entrance into nirvana in order ta further by his example and teaching the illumination of others. So Task Knowing that in a sense it is a silly question, “One's only task is to realize ‘oneself, When it is Lime for me to cease to bo a householder, I shall, As a mat~ ter of fact, I'm not planning to stay here much longer, L expect to be Ieaving London quite soon and gving to the country—mot necessarily thie country— fand got on with it.” He hesitates; thes “T understand that there are enlight- ened people who can return and eecupy any hody of experience they want, but Teo nover mot one. Or if T have, I didn't recognize him. And anyway, it's Still the shadows on the wall of the feave, Thay ean bo very interesting, of course, but in the end they distract you from the sonreo of illumination. The Buddha, by the way, said that it was along way, with many things to under. go, between being a Bodhisattva and ecoming the Buddha. But the question Is too remote. It ean be of no interest to talk of such things when one is still s0 far from Enlightenment,” Laing glances at his watch and sug- gests we make an end, He seems tired, his forchead deeply creased and heavy jow! lines running down beside his nose 166 ESQUIRE: JANUARY to either corner of his mouth. He is, I gather, a solitary, and up close his eyes, which ‘are impish, keep switching un- predictably from examining you remote ly to embracing you almost rapturously to locking in on their own interior vi- ions—transitions, you feel, whether rightly or wrongly, that are more mas- terminded than fortuitous. In sum, a truly remarkable face—I could not guess his age if I didn’t already know t—that seems oceasionally to reveal, somewhere quite near the surface, a curious, capricious boy whom the forty- four-year-old man is wont to visit now and then, T ask if he'd be willing to talk again sometime. Besides, I remind him, if the only guides to behavior are not to lie fand not to hurt anybody, what harm, could there be in his telling me more about himself? He smiles, “IVs of no Use or interest to me in terms of what P'm doing now .. . and I don't really think f€ will harm you not to have that kind of information, do you?” Before I 0, he tries on the bush jacket for size ts a loose fit, and we say good-bye. home some day’ later, attacking my ‘own fat grey copy of the Brahm Sutra with a blitz of my best efforts, get a curious letter from Laing’s ch merical secretary in reply to my many forgotten requests for an interview she's sorry, but Dr. Laing just isn't giv ing interviews to anybody. True to form, the letter is anti-prophetic: very soon, and just as inadvertently, it seems, as Fad come by that first interview, T find myself meeting Laing quite fre- quently, casually and nol eo casually, ‘nee at’ his house, once at mine, every couple of weeks in a group of Network therapists and therapisto-in-training who get together to turn over with euch other the Nature of Reality, no less. Occasionally in the course of thee rambling eolloguia em birth end infancy and growing up and dying, on incarne: tion and reineanation, Laing slips into stories about his past~that earlier solf who may no longer be of much use or Interest to what he is doing now but that the raconteur in him still eannot resist quarrying for its rich lode of balous, iMlustrative incidents. In his view this trait is some kind of failing, fan attachment obstructing his progress. ‘To anyone in earshot, however, it is a fascination, and a fascination that has only partly to do with Laing's remark- able talent for telling a mean story with ‘expert timing and a perfect memory for the smallest’ detail, More remarkable still is the sheer wealth of his material, f@ richesse that must come of taking a Tot of chances. fing was born in Glaogow in 1927, the only child of lower-middlesinss, Lowland Presbyterian parents, at the edge of an infamous part of the elt called the Gorbals. The Gorbals isa dark, very tough, very depressed dis. trict featuring: early-industrial squalor and heavy unemployment, where on Sat- urday nights virtually anyone who ean do so gets ritually, aggressively drunk, A familiar story: sensitive, precocious boy stuck in a place where neither sensi- tivity nor precocity has much survival value. Such a boy, if he is sustained by nothing else, cements himself to th idea of tomeday getting out and wateh for his chances. Quite early on, after a quick survey of his talents and in- clinations, Laing saw his opening in a single-minded project to become af mous intellectual and immediately took it up with an indomitable tenacity. While his mother rocked and watched from a chair in their sitting room, Laing read (Darwin, Huxley, the Bible, Mill, Voltaire—the great documents of Victorian intellectual fashion, rather avaint reading even for Scotland in the Thirties), teased himself with such theological riddles as “who moved the stone? A man, one angel, or two?,” and practiced the piano at which he showed such promise that there was talk of his taking it up as a career. He went to a state-supported grammar school and then the University of Glasgow, from which he graduated in medicine in 1951 After six months of a neurosurgical in- ternship he was inducted into the Brit ish Army (on the oceasion of the Ko- rean War alert) and summarily i formed that he was now a practicin psychiatrist at the Army's Central Hos- pital “One of the first oceasions that I got into a prolonged relationship with some ‘one who was supposed to be completely ferazy was in a padded eell in the Eritish ‘Army. ... Tt was intolerable, there was rho one T could spenk to. The only one around that T could have an ordinary conversation with was the chap who was in the padded cell, And I would go and talk with this chap, and he would tell me how he saw it. mainly. 1 listened. ‘This was, Incidentally, revarded as tre mendous dedication to my Job, and I found that that. was one of the coolest ways to keep on playing it. This was a young man of eighteen whose father ‘was & colonel and whose mother was a prostitute, or had been. He had heen Brought up by hig father who wanted him to go to public school and then to get into the Army as an officer, And toming along to becoming an officer in the Army, he failed, I think he meant to havo siecoeded, but he just failed. At this point hie father eut him off com- pletely and said, "You're no son of mine” At this point, then, he had no world to ovientata’ himself in. He couldn't understand the eystem. He'd never eaught-up with it, and ha eoaldn’t fo anywhere within It, And what he ‘tid under thoee eiveumstancos was to ake 2 running jump, literally, xt a brick wall, And when ha recovered fom that he got up again and ran at the brick wall again. So ho ended up in a padded cell, where he was still running his head up against a briele wall. Now that’s rather like how we all feel ‘reat deal of the time, but he actually ddid that, There's then 6 long story about how, having been reduced to thie sort of impotence, he felt that just by snap ping his fingers, he could be anyone And he would snap his fingers, and he'd be Julius Caesar, He'd snap his fingers, and he could be Hamlet, which was oneof his things. And finally he became a ‘sort of saint-gangster. And by snapping our fingers we developed a project of blowing up the vaults in the Bank of England and making away with the gold. This was all contracted one night in the cell: snapping our fingers, we got to the Bank of England; snapping four fingers, we got to the vaults, found some dynamite, blew it up, and’ co on. And after that he began to come down. But the point of this, you could say, is ‘that by snapping his fingers and opting out in that way he’s doing what many people may be doing with LSD or hash- ish, I¥’s a snapping of fingers: you ean in a phony way use those drugs in or- der simply to confuse yourself further by not realizing, or forgetting for a while, not suffering and experiencing within its own terms, the constriction fand impotence which is imposed on us by the system that we are a part of, and, insofar as we remain part of it, that we perpetuate. On the other hand, LSD and other things like that needn't be used in that way. They ean be used to see through and into things further, ‘and they don’t necessarily lead to a ‘cessation of action. They tend to lead to a cessation of action from the exo «but that by no means implies that ‘you are not going to be doing anything.” ter two years in the Army, Lainse got a job at the Glasge ‘Mental Hospital, a place he' a medical student. “This was an annual affair,” he remarked on one o¢- easion, describing in great detail the eighteen months leading up to his de iding to write Phe Divided Self. “The whole hospital was alerted and prepared for it, There was a large assembly, remember, and we were addressed by the superintendent who sat on the stage all bent into knots—like | this—and twitching. He was a well-known ec centrie and coauthor of the standard poychiatric text in use at that time, Ap- parently in the old days he'd been knows lo ride his horse lo work) bold- ing a large umbrella over both of them. The boapital was a large, rambling, Vietorian complex in its aw grounds that had heen built originally asan aay nm. You should keep m mind that that's ‘what those hospitals were meant to do— give asylum from the eighteonth.con- tury type of madhouse where patients ‘wore chained and beaten. It wasn’t sueh had place in many ways—it was full ‘of eecontries, and the patients wore al- lowed to be far more eecentrie then than you'll find nowadays In modern hos. pitals, where they won't put up with i People developed relatively whole lives for themselves. inside it—mainly the wealthy ones, who were fee pavers and lived in what were called ‘Gentlemen's “West” and ‘Ladies’ West.” On the other side, for nonefee payers, were “Men's Bast’ and ‘Women’s East.’ which is where T worked. The fee payers had rooms coming off of 2 central dayroom fitted out like a Vietorlan conservatory, with: palms and aspidistra and. arm chairs. For the non-fee payers there was ‘no dayroom—it was erammed with beds ‘acked tightly together side by side, s0 168 ESQUIRE: JANUARY you had to climb over the end to get into ed. That's because at the time there ‘were so many people freaking out in Glasgow, and they had no placo else to put them. “The setup was like this: a receiving ward that you got to through locked Aoors—onee you were in, you couldn't get back out without a key; then an- other ward for patients whose symp- toms didn't remit shortly, and another ‘ward for old people; and then there was the ward for ‘intractable’ cases, and oyond that a few padded calls. This ‘was the hierarehy you walked into when you'd gone through those first locked @oors, and everybody knew perfectly well what they wore threatened with next if they didn’t behave or get better. On the intractable ward there were about sixty women. They were allowed no personal possessions of any kind — no underwear, no stockings, no cosmet~ ies, no boos. Anyway you couldn't have kept a book for long, one of the other patients would have’ torn it up. But some of them did manage somehow to collect few things—bits of lipstick or rouge or string, things like that. Each woman was allotted a cotton day dress and a nightdress. Baths were on order about once a week you'd be stripped, put in the bath, scrubbed very hard, ried, and pat hack in your dress, @ lean’ one if you were lucky. There ‘weren't enough chairs to go around, and you weren't allowed to be in bed during the day, so there were plenty of fights over chairs. And, of course, there was the usual shortage of staff, which ‘as always was used to excuse everything — maybe there'd be. two nurses and a siater who were rotated to ‘other wards quite often, c6 there was xno possibility of establishing anything ike personal relationships with the pa- tients, You hardly ever saw a doctor except for the six-month physical

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