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post-Kingsley Hall psychiatry. Like the residents at Archway, Laing's life and
work came to stage a relatively pure form of a performative ontology.
P S Y C H I A T R Y A N D T H E S I X T I E S
We can turn now to the social basis of Laingian psychiatry up to and includ-
ing Kingsley Hall and look at it from two angles—as psychiatry and as a part
of the sixties. The first is important but can be covered briefly, since we have
already gone over much of the ground. We have seen before in the cases of
Walter, Ashby, and Bateson that ontology and sociology hang together, with
practice as the linking term. All three men encountered mismatches with
both the substance and the institutional forms of the fields they crossed, and
in all three instances the response was to improvise some novel but transitory
social base, picking up support wherever it could be found and setting up
temporary communities transverse to the usual institutions, in dining clubs,
conference series, and societies. Laingian psychiatry illustrates this socio-
ontological mismatch starkly in the contrasting social forms of the Philadel-
phia Association communities and established mental hospitals, and in the
problems experienced in embedding one form within another (especially at
Cooper's Villa 21). Beyond that, though, these communities displayed a rather
different kind of accommodation to the social mismatch between cybernetics
and modernity. Instead of an opportunistic and ad hoc response, the Philadel-
phia Association paid serious attention to the social side of its work, and at-
tempted, at least, to create at Kingsley Hall and Archway an entirely new and
stable social basis where its form of psychiatry could sustain and reproduce
itself outside the established system. Like the Santa Fe Institute, Bios, and
Wolfram's NKS initiative in later years (chap. 4), Kingsley Hall, we could say,
sketched out another future at the social and institutional level as well as that
of substantive practice. Kingsley Hall was an instance of, and helped one to
imagine, a wider field of institutions existing as a sort of parallel world relative
to the mainstream of Western psychiatry and so on.
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We can continue this
thought below.
Now for the sixties. I have concentrated so far on the specifically psychiatric
aspects of Laing's (and Bateson's) work. But, of course, I might just as well
have been talking about the psychedelic sixties and the counterculture. Al-
tered states; technologies of the self; an idea of the self, social relations, and
the world as indefinitely explorable; a notion of symmetric and reciprocal
