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Kingsley Hall the mentally troubled and psychotherapists (and others) came
together symmetrically within a very different frame of power relations from
those of the conventional mental hospital. Except for the usual mundane con-
siderations of communal living, the therapists and the mad were on the same
plane.
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The therapists were not in charge, they did not make the rules, and
they did not deploy the standard psychotherapeutic techniques—they did not
prescribe drugs or ECT for the other residents, for example.
It is also worth noting right away that life at Kingsley Hall asked a lot of its
residents, including the psychiatrists. Conditions there, and later at Archway,
were often, by conventional standards of domesticity, hellish. The behavior of
schizophrenics is, almost by definition, often bizarre. It can take the form of
catatonic withdrawal, which is disturbing enough, but David Burns (2002)
mentions residents at Archway who would shout continually for days on end,
frequent trashings of the kitchen, a tendency to disrobe and stroll off to the
shops naked (with accompanying hassles with neighbors and police); the
ubiquity of potential violence; and a resident who stabbed a cat to death.
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At Kingsley Hall, psychotic behavior also included urinating and smearing
excrement all over the place (Barnes and Berke 1971). No picnic, and not sur-
prisingly therapists and others in residence tended to burn out from stress in
a period of weeks or months, typically moving out but continuing to visit the
community. Laing, in fact, lasted longer than most, staying at Kingsley Hall
for its first year, before establishing a smaller community in his own home.
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Staging a place where madness could be acted out carried a significant price;
conventional psychiatry looks like an easy way out in comparison with
antipsychiatry.
What did life at Kingsley Hall look like? There are accounts of Laing's role
as dinner-time raconteur and guru, dancing through the night and annoy-
ing the neighbors. Clancy Sigal (1976) portrays Laing as an evil genius and
claims to have gone mad there just to please him. To get much further, we
have to turn to Barnes and Berke's
Two Accounts of a Journey through Madness
(1971). Barnes was a mentally disturbed woman who found her way to Laing
and moved to Kingsley Hall when it opened, determined finally to live out
an inner voyage; Joe Berke was an American therapist at Kingsley Hall who
took much of the responsibility for looking after Mary. The topic interweaves
descriptions of Mary's journey written by both, and on these accounts Berke's
strategy in latching onto Barnes was a double one.
One prong was performative. “As soon as I got to Kingsley Hall, I realized
the best way to
learn
about psychosis would be for me to help Mary 'do her
