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safe to say, I think, that those who spent time at Kingsley Hall and Archway
were significantly marked by the experience. David Burns's manuscript is a
remarkably lucid and insightful piece of writing by someone who went to
Kingsley Hall in search of therapy, and he clearly felt that he benefited it from
it enormously. And this is perhaps the key point to grasp. No one made anyone
live in these communities (in contrast to involuntary confinement within the
British state system at the time). The residents chose to go there and remain
there, not necessarily in the expectation of dramatic cures, but in preference
to other places such as their family homes or mental hospitals.
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The Phila-
delphia communities offered them another kind of place to be, to live their
lives, however odd those lives might appear to others, and these communities
needed no other justification than this choice of its residents to be there.
Second, I should say something more about inner voyages. The visionary
aspect of these, at least in literary portrayals, had much to do with the grip
of Laing's psychiatry on the sixties imagination. One should not overempha-
size their importance in the life of the Philadelphia Association communities.
Mary Barnes's transformation at Kingsley Hall seems to have been entirely
free from visions or interesting hallucinations, and the
Asylum
documen-
tary depicts life at Archway at its most mundane. There is nothing specifi-
cally cybernetic at stake here, except as it concerns altered states and strange
performances more generally, but still one wonders whether such visionary
experience was ever forthcoming. According to Burns (2002, 64-67, 70),
A number of residents [at Archway] seemed to go through a similar experience
in its outward form and I learned that they shared to some degree an inner ex-
perience. I came to know Carl best of those who found their way to the center
through the tension, violence and turmoil they expressed and the terrible pain
and fear they felt. Carl told me his story. Sitting in his room Carl began to feel
that he had become transparent, that the barrier between his self and the out-
side world had faded. He felt that his thoughts were being perceived by others
and he heard voices responding to what he was thinking . . . . Carl felt that he
was the center of the universe, that he was the focus of loving energy. But it was
necessary to move into this other and alien dimension without reservation. . . .
This was the difference between heaven and hell. . . . One day . . . Carl felt that
a wise old man from China had decided many years ago to be reborn as himself
and to live his life with all its ignorance. . . . Everyone in the world except him
[Carl] had decided to take on animal form while retaining human conscious-
ness. This was an eminently sensible decision as they would have beauty and
resilience and freedom from the oppressions of human culture. . . . [Carl] knew
