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Laing's writings portray him as a scholar and an intellectual, drawing upon
works in Continental philosophy and current sociology to construct a “so-
cial phenomenology” that might inform our understanding of mental illness
and psychiatric practice (see Howarth-Williams 1977, on which I have drawn
extensively). Laing did not describe himself as a cybernetician, but his work
was certainly cybernetic, inasmuch as from 1958 onward he was strongly in-
fluenced by Gregory Bateson, which is why he bears attention here.
23
Laing's
second topic,
Self and Others
, for example, includes a long discussion of the
double bind, including the statement that “the work of the Palo Alto group
[Bateson et al.], along with Bethesda, Harvard, and other studies, has . . .
revolutionized
the concept of what is meant by 'environment' and has already
rendered obsolete most earlier discussions on the relevance of 'environment'
to the origins of schizophrenia” (Laing 1961, 129).
24
Laing was not uncritical of Bateson, however. Bateson had a fondness for
formal logic and wanted to understand the double bind on the model of a logi-
cal paradox—the Cretan who says “all Cretans are liars,” and so on. Laing put
something more empirically and phenomenologically satisfying in its place.
His 1966 topic
Interpersonal Perception
, for example (written with H. Phil-
lipson and A. Robin Lee), explores the levels and structures of interpretation
that go into the formation of “what he thinks she thinks he thinks,” and so
on. The end result is much the same as the double bind, though: pathologi-
cal reflections back and forth in communication, “whirling fantasy circles,”
Laing calls them, from which escape is difficult or impossible, and that are “as
destructive to relationships, individual (or international), as are hurricanes
to material reality” (Laing, Phillipson, and Lee 1966, 22). As it happens, this
is the context in which Laing came closest to explicitly cybernetic language.
When he remarked of these spirals that “the control is reciprocal . . . the cau-
sality is circular” (118), he was echoing the subtitle of the Macy conferences:
“Circular Causal and Feedback Mechanisms in Biological and Social Sciences.”
It is also worth noting that this strand of Laing's work fed straight back into
the mainstream of cybernetics: Gordon Pask made it the basis of his formal
theory of “conversation,” meaning any kind of performative interactions be-
tween men and machines.
25
But it was Bateson's notion of madness as an inner voyage that Laing really
seized upon, no doubt because it spoke to his own psychiatric experience, and
that contributed greatly to Laing's reputation and impact in the sixties. Two
talks that Laing gave in 1964, which were revised in 1967 as the key chapters
(5 and 6) of
The Politics of Experience
, take this idea very seriously (reproduc-
ing my Bateson quote in its entirety) and offer vivid elaborations, with strong
