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by Michael Folker |
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The Politics of Experience is the book that placed Ronald Laing squarely in the media spotlight in the United States in the late 60s and early 70s. It is also one of the few genuinely popular books that described human relations from an existential and phenomenological point of view. The basic theme is that before we can comment on anyone's sanity or normality we must always observe a person's behavior (or conduct) in terms of that person's experience. Current publications in both the popular and scholarly presses eschew or lack any notion of this theme. Laing took Freud's original psychoanalytic view that we are but a shriveled, desiccated shell of what we could be and placed the responsibility for that on a society that is genuinely estranged from itself. From infancy, we learn that reality is what we are told it is, usually by loving and very well-meaning people, who have already become estranged from themselves. Much, if not all, of this estrangement is the product of society's capacity and desire to "reify" itself and all its affairs. We reify "certain fundamental structures of experience" as objective entities (love, hate, knowledge, ignorance, madness, normality). The motivational speaker can exist only because we accept these reified fundamental structures of experience. Even "society" is a reification: it is a hyperorganism to be studied by social scientists and critiqued by pundits as an amorphous blob. Only researchers and professional scholars can give it any definition, but they define it by reifications, which eventually filter down to bewildered, readily accepting, and only vaguely understanding public. The hyperactive child, the depressed housewife, and the career criminal are reified into things with maladies (which are likewise reified) to be cured or at least alleviated; what or how they experience themselves and others is of no concern. Human affairs are reified into a competitive event or series of events, with rewards and punishment meted out to the winners and losers, respectively. The researchers and scholars who investigate and represent culture and society are also reified. And so, in the United States, we have the AMA, the two APAs, NAMI, NASW, NEA, the AFT, and the NRA. They reify those that they propose to represent and are themselves reifications. Police officers and military officers are reified by their uniforms and by the honor traditionally accorded those uniforms. Only when one sees beyond these reifications can one begin to reveal madness (and even normality) as comprehensible. Laing's citations of observations of classroom activity by the sociologist Jules Henry are disquieting, all the more because little, if anything, that Henry published is available in print. Chapter Four of The Politics of Experience is a colloquial reiteration of Sartre's Critique of Dialectical Reason (CDR), a more complex form of which had been published earlier by Laing and colleague David Cooper in Reason and Violence. CDR influenced Laing's views of human relations and also those of the French psychiatrist Frantz Fanon, who in turn influenced Laing. (Fanon was an early proponent of the social origins of neuroses.) The social origins of the so-called mental illnesses have been pretty much ignored or steam-rolled over by the biology-is-destiny crowd, which views the origin of all objectionable or incomprehensible conduct as residing in the brain. Of course, this is the simple view and, once again, a reification: if we have already reified society into a hyperorganism, then we are unlikely to try to dismantle this reified organism to search for the origins of individual miseries. Laing wrote that our biochemistry is extremely sensitive to social circumstance. In the current hunt for the etiology of mental illness, it is only the biochemistry that is examined; the social circumstance is ignored or is left in the hands of underpaid and overworked social workers or in no hands at all. Laing wrote that psychiatrists have paid little attention to the experience of the patient: a schizophrenic's experiences are unreal or invalid. But this is once again a reification. The person is reified as patient, and as the patient, the person becomes a subject for observation and scientific inquiry. This is the real lasting legacy of Freud: human beings can be made the objects of scientific inquiry. Today, this inquiry is in full bloom, whereas Laing's legacy appears as a remote anomaly on the surface of the history of psychiatry. And yet, as Laing noted, the methods of scientific inquiry, which most of us do not understand and still accept unquestioningly, particularly in the social sciences, are themselves open to criticism. The data or the givens of the social scientist's field of study are not given but rather "taken out of a constantly elusive matrix of happenings." And even this matrix of happenings is not reality but the "expression of processing that we do on reality." The subjects of inquiry are selected in hospitals or in schools (social context) and are forced into a reciprocity that they have only in the experimental context. This experimental context is falsely observed and examined as the social context but now one in which the subjects have been reduced to things, systems of things, or patterns of things or events. The results and conclusions of contemporary social science research experiments are derived from activity long ago estranged from reality, the deliberate estrangement of which is integral to a social scientist's methodology but which is no longer even "part of true scientific method." In today's cultural milieu, mad is ill and sane is normal. The imposition of standard cultural values on this dichotomy is evident: only certain culturally endowed professionals are lawfully permitted to make the distinction. That we permit a priori the imposition of the cultural values by licensed medical psychiatrists onto what is ill and what is not is further evidence of our estrangement from reality. Fanon wrote that neurosis was (italics mine) the unreflected imposition of cultural values onto one's (or as one's) own persona. In Laing's terms, we deny that this unreflected imposition is occurring and even further estrange ourselves by denying that we are denying it. This situation, unfortunately, is the starting point for the diagnosis of so-called mental illness. The Politics of Experience was published in 1967. Thirty-three years later, the dichotomy between mad and sane and ill and well remains intact and, in the United States, is relentlessly reinforced by "official" accounts like the recent Surgeon General's report on mental illness. The existential and phenomenological examinations of cultural phenomena remain peripheral fields of inquiry. Even genuine advancements in the natural sciences have been reduced (with the attendant estrangement) to "issues" for public "debate:" treatment of mental illness, cloning, artificial insemination, and abortion. If we begin at alienation and estrangement, "our sanity is not 'true' sanity." It follows that "madness is not 'true' madness." The career mental patient (the phrase is Goffman's) stands as testimony to a century of efforts to treat a false illness. We might as well insist that tuning your car's engine will help you find your way home. The Politics of Experience remains one of the best compendia of the currents in social thought in the 1960s. The alienation and estrangement of which Laing so eloquently wrote are easily identifiable today: even our choice of metaphor (the "food chain") for the stratification of human endeavor readily attests to that. Laing's writing style, however polemical, attests to a literacy and knowledge of history and of the scientific method that is sorely lacking in today's social science material. The scholars and researchers remain satisfied to "translate 'subjective' events into 'objective' terms in order to be scientific. …The problem is sampling, and the error [remains] incautious extrapolation." |
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