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whIch the person wIll be guIded wIth full socIal encouragement and
sanctIon Into Inner space and tIme, by people who have been there
and back agaIn. psychIatrIcally, thIs would appear as ex-patIents
helpIng future patIents to go mad.
r. D. lainG,
the poLiticS of experience
(1967, 127-28)
An asymmetry remains in my account of Kingsley Hall and Archway. I have
written as if they existed solely for the benefit of the mad and with the object
of returning them to a predefined normality. But to leave it at that would be
to miss an important point. Laing's idea was that in modernity, the apparently
sane are themselves mad, precisely in the sense of having lost any access to the
realms of the nonmodern self that go unrecognized in modernity. Hence the
sense in the above quotation of having dramatically lost touch with a natural
healing process. And hence the idea that the Philadelphia communities might
be a place of
reciprocal
transformation for the mad and sane alike: “This would
appear as ex-patients helping future patients to go mad.” Clearly, the sort of
variety expansion I talked about above was, to some degree, a transformative
experience for the nurses in the rumpus room, for example, or Laing on LSD,
or Berke playing biting games with a middle-aged woman—and all of these
can stand as examples of what is at stake here. But to dramatize the point, I
can mention the one example recorded by Burns of a transformative inner
voyage undertaken by one of the “normal” residents at Archway.
Burns (2002, 56) talks about John, who joined the community as one of the
sane, a student. He had not been in a mental hospital before or diagnosed as
a schizophrenic. But at Archway he, too, took advantage of twenty-four-hour
attention and embarked on an inner voyage:
He had moved into his emotional center and he had moved into the space in
the common room and accepted the attention and care of guardians who sat
with him day and night. He had taken off his clothes. He had shaved his head.
He had listened into himself. He had become silent and private, undergoing the
inner journey as had the others. . . . Under the attention of those who gathered
John experienced a change. To be paranoid means that one feels hostile or ma-
licious feelings directed at one. . . . But it is a different matter to be in a room
with a group who are gathered with the expressed purpose of letting one be at
the center and to accept their mindfulness. . . . The trembling and insecurity
of one's consciousness need not be so intense. One need not fear the unknown
other . . . . John found that he need not fear them, that he could trust them,
