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also faced was that psychotic episodes were not welcomed by the community
but feared instead; the prospect of broken windows in the middle of winter,
sleepless nights and keeping constant vigil were no longer an activity the com-
munity or the PA at large regarded as desirable. These days florid psychosis
ends up controlled by psychiatric care” (Davenport 2005). As I said earlier,
life at places like Kingsley Hall and Archway was not a picnic. In the sixties
that was no deterrent; in the Thatcherite era it became insufferable.
As far as Laing himself is concerned, his life and work changed direction
after Kingsley Hall shut down in 1970. In July 1971 he left England for the
East, spending six months in a Buddhist monastery in Sri Lanka, where he was
reported to spend seventeen hours a day in meditation, followed by seven
months in India and a brief visit to Japan to study yoga and Zen (Howarth-
Williams 1977, 5, 97). Returning to Britain, he was less actively involved with
the Philadelphia Association, his writings lost their overtly social and political
edge, and he became less of a public figure: “With hindsight it is easy to realize
that by the late seventies Ronnie was becoming more and more marginalized”
(A. Laing 1994, 202).
46
He remained as radical as ever in psychiatry, but in
the early 1970s came to focus on “the politics of the birth process and the im-
portance of intrauterine life. Inspired by the work of American psychothera-
pist Elizabeth Fehr, [he began] to develop a team of 'rebirthing workshops' in
which one designated person chooses to re-experience the struggle of trying
to break out of the birth canal represented by the remaining members of the
group who surround him/her” (Ticktin n.d., 5). Laing's
The Facts of Life
(1976)
elaborates on this new perspective, including the story of his first meeting
with Fehr, in New York, on 11 November 1972, and emphasizing, for example,
the effects of cutting of the umbilical cord: “I have seen a global organismic
reaction occur the instant the cord is cut. It would appear to be neurologically
impossible. There are no nerves in the umbilical cord. But it
does
happen.
I've
seen
it happen” (1976, 73). Characteristically, however, the topic gives no
details of the practice of rebirthing.
What interests me about these shifts is that they parallel the moves at
Archway, away from language and toward performance, revealing, and tech-
nologies of the nonmodern self.
47
Meditation as a technology for exploring
the inner space of the therapist (echoing LSD ten years earlier), prelinguistic
experiences in the womb and at birth as the site of psychiatric problems in
later life (rather than communicative double binds), physical performance
as therapy—staging rebirths. As I said about Archway, the detour through
interpersonal communication also shrank to almost nothing in Laing's
