Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
of destabilizing the everyday self of the
therapist
and thus helping him or her
to gain some sort of access to the experiential space of his or her patients.
27
Laing never wrote about this, as far as I can ascertain, but it is clear from vari-
ous sources that he was indeed heavily involved with LSD in the early 1960s.
Martin Howarth-Williams (1977, 5) records that in 1961 Laing was “experi-
menting with the (legal) use of hallucinogens such as LSD” and that by 1965
he was “reputedly taking (still legal) LSD very frequently.” In what appears
to be a thinly disguised account of the period, Clancy Sigal's novel
Zone of the
Interior
(1976) has the narrator doing fabulous amounts of acid supplied by a
therapist who sounds remarkably like Laing, and often wrestling naked with
him while tripping.
28
Here, then, we find the cybernetic concern with altered states in a new
and performative guise, with LSD as a means to put the therapist into a new
position from which possibly to latch onto the patient. We are back to what I
just called the gymnastics of the soul, and the contrast with orthodox psychi-
atric therapy is stark. Likewise, LSD exemplifies nicely the idea of expanding
the variety of the therapist as a way of coming alongside the sufferer—en-
try into an altered state. We could also notice that while I described verbal
communication earlier as a detour away from and back to performance, here
LSD features as a dramatic contraction of the detour—a nonverbal tactic for
getting alongside the sufferer as a base for not necessarily verbal interaction
(wrestling!). This theme of curtailing the detour will reappear below.
29
3. The two examples so far have been about microsocial interactions be-
tween therapist and patient. Now we can move toward more macrosocial
and institutional instantiations. Laing's first publication (Cameron, Laing,
and McGhie 1955) reported a yearlong experiment at Glasgow Royal Mental
Hospital in which eleven of the most socially isolated chronic schizophrenics
spent part of each day in a room with two nurses. The nurses had no direct in-
structions on how to perform, and Laing and his coauthors regarded this proj-
ect simply as an experiment in which the patients and nurses had a chance “to
develop more or less enduring relations with one another” (Cameron, Laing,
and McGhie 1955, 1384). This “rumpus room” experiment, as it has been
called, was Laing's tactic of relating to patients as human beings writ large and
carried through by nurses instead of Laing himself. Over a year, the nurses and
patients were left to adjust and adapt to one another, without any prescrip-
tion how that should be accomplished. And, first, we can note that this tactic
worked. The patients changed for the better in many ways (Cameron, Laing,
and McGhie 1955, 1386): “They were no longer isolates. Their conduct be-
came more social, and they undertook tasks which were of value in their small
