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Figure 5.3.
kingsley hall, london. (photograph by gordon joly, used under creative
commons share alike 2.5 generic license.)
mixed. It included schizophrenics and psychiatrists—hence “therapeutic
community”—but, according to an American resident therapist, Joe Berke,
“the majority of the community, and visitors, were not medical or paramedi-
cal men and women. Many were artists, writers, actors or dancers” (Barnes
and Berke 1971, 260). Kingsley Hall thus offered a kind of support commu-
nity for the mentally ill; put very crudely, it was a place designed to help
people through the sorts of inner voyages that Bateson had first conjured up
in
Perceval's Narrative
, free from the interruptions of mainstream psychiatry.
Kingsley Hall was run as a commune—an association of adults who chose
to live together, all paying rent and free to come and go as they pleased (in-
cluding to work, if they had jobs). And the key point to grasp is thus that at
