Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
echoes of Huxley's
The Doors of Perception
: the space of the nonmodern self as
experientially a place of wonder and terror, “the living fount of all religions”
(131), schizophrenia as an unexpected and unguided plunge into “the infi-
nite reaches of inner space” (126-27), the need for a “guide” to inner space—
Laing's colleague David Cooper was the first to invoke the figure of the
shaman in print, I think (Cooper 1967)—modernity as a denial of the non-
modern self and nonmodern experience which leaves the voyager at a loss:
modernity as, in this sense, itself a form of madness.
O N T H E R A P Y
dr. laIng, I am told that you allow your schIzophrenIc patIents to
talk to you.
a CHieF PsyCHiatriC soCial worker,
quoted In laIng,
WiSdom, madneSS and foLLy
(1985, 142)
This quick sketch of Laing's thought and writing is enough to establish that
his understanding of madnesss and therapy was in very much the same cyber-
netic space as Bateson's. Now I want to see what this approach looked like in
practice. I can first sketch the basic problematic in general terms and then we
can look at a series of implementations.
My quotation from Bateson included the idea that psychotic inner voyages
have their own endogenous dynamics. This is integral to the idea of psychosis
as an adaptive mechanism. But the example of the Zen master and Laing's idea
of “the guide” both entail the notion that one can somehow participate in that
dynamics from the outside, even if one cannot control it (which is, again, the
sense of the word “steersman,” from which Wiener derived the word “cyber-
netics”). The question for Laing and his fellows was, then, how to latch on, as
it were, to schizophrenics—how to get in touch with them, how to adapt to
them—when schizophrenia was more or less defined by the disruption of con-
ventional patterns of communication. The only answer to that question that I
can see is trial-and-error experimentation with behavior patterns to see what
works. One thus arrives at the symmetric image of sufferers and psychiatrists
as assemblages of homeostats running through sequences of configurations in
pursuit of a joint equilibrium, with this difference: Ashby's homeostats were
hard wired to be sensitive to specific variables, whereas the psychiatric experi-
ment necessarily included a search for the relevant variables. In Ashby's terms
(though he himself did not think of psychiatry in this way), the psychiatrists
