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it was really a fantasy but he was fascinated by the truth of this inner experi-
ence. He had had glimpses of peace and glory. But now he found that he could
inhabit these spaces that he passed through. Especially during the nights when
he could let go his defenses and drop his everyday persona he was swimming in
a sea of meaning and breathing an air that was more than a mixture of gases. . . .
He had been able to inhabit a land of ecstasy and intense feeling where effort
had value, where questions of the meaning of life became irrelevant. This was a
land to be explored, an adventure that held joys and terrors.
In Carl's case, then, which Burns thought was typical, a resident did go through
a voyage with the otherworldly quality that fascinated Laing. That said, one
should also recognize that after inhabiting a land of ecstasy and intense feel-
ing, Carl eventually found himself “cast out. Perhaps he was only living in
the everyday world once more but it seemed worse than he remembered it.
It seemed a place of filth and degradation and trivia. A place of confusion
and obsession. . . . If he had been 'schizophrenic' before and had been able
to learn from it and glory in it, then he was 'obsessive-compulsive-neurotic'
now” (Burns 2002, 70). The moral of his story for psychiatry, then, is hardly a
clear one, though Carl himself found some virtue in it. Carl “survived and he
told me that although he still did not understand why it had been necessary
he had learned some invaluable lessons from the experience. . . . He began to
learn to forgive. This came about because he had realized that he could never
know what someone else might be going through. He knew a depth of suffer-
ing he had not known before. More important, he told me, he began to learn
to forgive himself” (71-72).
There are two other aspects of the story that I should not leave hanging: what
happened to the Archway communities, and what happened to R. D. Laing?
The Archway communities closed down in 1980 (A. Laing 1994, 207). The
Philadelphia Association still exists and continues to run community houses.
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I have no detailed information on life there, but it is clear that the character
of the communities changed after Archway. “Along the years what we were
offering changed from a model, which valued the free expression of emotions
in whatever extreme form it might unleash, to one which prioritised contain-
ment and worked with respected concepts psychoanalysis was using widely,
such as transference, repression and repetition. . . . In the end we were funded
by local authorities, something Laing had always opposed. . . . One change we
