Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
had to expand the variety of their performances in their attempts to latch
onto schizophrenia. Now we can look at some examples of what this meant
in practice.
1. An enduring thread in Laing's psychiatry was that it might help to treat
the mentally disturbed “simply as human beings” (Howarth-Williams 1977, 8).
This seems quite an obvious thing to do and hardly radical until one remem-
bers that that it was just what orthodox psychiatry did not do. Laing talked to
his patients, an activity strongly discouraged in orthodox psychiatric circles
as stimulating the “schizophrenic biochemical processes” that drugs were in-
tended to inhibit. 26 And it is worth noting that Laing undertook such interac-
tions, both verbal and nonverbal, in a performative spirit, as a way of getting
along with the patients, rather than a representational and diagnostic one
(Laing 1985, 143):
In a recent seminar that I gave to a group of psychoanalysts, my audience be-
came progressively aghast when I said that I might accept a cigarette from a pa-
tient without making an interpretation. I might even offer a patient a cigarette.
I might even give him or her a light.
“And what if a patient asked you for a glass of water?” one of them asked,
almost breathlessly.
“I would give him or her a glass of water and sit down in my chair again.”
“Would you not make an interpretation?”
“Very probably not.”
A lady exclaimed, “I'm totally lost.”
In this instance, then, latching onto schizophrenics involved just the same
tactics as one might deploy with the girl or boy next door. Hardly radical in
themselves, as I said, but utterly divergent from the mainstream psychiatry of
Laing's day. The expansion of the therapist's variety in performance, relative
to standard practice, is evident. As usual, we see that ontology (the symmetric
rather than the asymmetric version of cybernetics) makes a difference.
2. It once surprised to me to discover the enormous amount of serious
scientific, clinical, and philosophical attention that was generated by LSD
in the 1950s and 1960s (see, for example, Solomon 1964; and Geiger 2003).
In psychiatry, LSD figured in at least three ways. One was as a psychoto-
mimetic, capable of inducing psychotic symptoms in the subjects of laboratory
experiments. Another was as yet another weapon in the arsenal of psychic
shocks—as in Ashby's inclusion of LSD in his blitz therapy. But third, from the
other side, LSD also featured as a technology of the nonmodern self, a means
Search WWH ::




Custom Search