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LSD, hypnosis and electroshock. . . . As I said of Grey Walter in the previous
chapter, Ashby was hardly one of Deleuze and Guattari's disruptive nomads
within the world of professional psychiatry, and we can no doubt understand
that along similar lines. But this horrendous image of “Blitz-therapy”—what a
combination of words!—does help to bring to the fore a characteristic feature
of British psychiatry in the 1950s which is worth emphasizing for future refer-
ence, namely its utter social asymmetry . In Ashby's world, it went without say-
ing that the only genuine agents in the mental hospital were the doctors. The
patients were literally that, subject to the will of the psychiatrist, whose role
was to apply whatever shocks might jolt the mentally ill into a homeostat-like
change of state. In this world, Blitz-therapy and the association between psy-
chiatry and war made perfect sense, psychiatrically and cybernetically. In the
next chapter we can explore the form of psychiatry that took the other fork
in the road, on the model of symmetric and reciprocal adaptation between
patient and psychiatrist. 47
One can see Ashby's military musings as a drift toward a more general social
elaboration of his cybernetics. War, as Ashby thought of it, following Clause-
witz, was an extreme form that the relations between adaptive systems might
take on, but it was not the only form. I have been quoting from Ashby's notes
on DAMS, psychiatry, and warfare from early September 1951, and right in the
middle of them is an entry dated 12 September, which begins, “On arranging
a society” (pp. 3460-62): “Here is an objection raised by Mrs Bassett, which
will probably be raised by others. May it not happen for instance that the plan-
ner will assume that full mobility of labour is available, when in fact people
don't always like moving: they may have friends in the district, they may like
the countryside, they may have been born and bred there, or they may dislike
change. What is to stop the planner riding rough-shod over these 'uneco-
nomic' but very important feelings?” Mrs. Bassett was, I believe, a researcher
at the Burden Neurological Institute with whom Ashby later published a pa-
per on drug treatment for schizophrenia (Ashby, Collins, and Bassett 1960).
She was evidently also an early spokeswoman for the Big Brother critique of
cybernetics, and her argument drove Ashby to think about real everyday social
relations:
The answer, of course, is that one sees to it that feedback loops pass through the
people so that they are fully able to feel their conditions and to express opin-
ions and take actions on them. One of the most important class of “essential
 
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