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consists of extracts from Laing's tape recordings of his friend Jesse Watkins's
recollections of a strange episode that he had lived through twenty-seven
years earlier.
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Watkins's experiences were certainly strange (Laing 1967, 148,
149, 153-54, 156, 158):
I suddenly felt as if time was going back. . . . I had the—had the feeling that . . .
I had died. . . . I actually seemed to be wandering in a kind of landscape with—
um—desert landscape. . . . I felt as if I were a kind of rhinoceros . . . and emit-
ting sounds like a rhinoceros. . . . I felt very compassionate about him [another
patient in the hospital to which Watkins was taken for observation], and I used
to sit on my bed and make him lie down by looking at him and thinking about
it, and he used to lie down. . . . I was also aware of a—um—a higher sphere, as it
were . . . another layer of existence lying above the—not only the antechamber
but the present. . . . I had feelings of—er—of gods, not only God but gods as it
were, of beings which are far above us capable of—er—dealing with the situ-
ation that I was incapable of dealing with, that were in charge and were run-
ning things and—um—at the end of it, everybody had to take on the job at the
top. . . . At the time I felt that . . . God himself was a madman.
It is clear that for Laing, Watkins's voyage was a paradigm for the uninter-
rupted psychotic experience, a trip to another world from that of mundane
reality, both wonderful and horrifying, even encompassing the acquisition
of new and strange powers in the everyday world—Watkins's new-found
ability to control his fellows by just looking and thinking. And if we want to
understand the appeal of such writing to the sixties, we have only to think of
the sixties' determined interest in “explorations of consciousness,” and of
The
Politics of Experience
as an extended meditation on that theme, with chapter
7 as an empirical example of where they might lead. Perhaps the best way to
appreciate the wider signiicance of the topic beyond psychiatry proper is to
situate it as a major contribution to the countercultural canon, in which Al-
dous Huxley's glowing description of the mescaline experience in
The Doors
of Perception
(1954) was a key landmark from the 1950s, shortly to be followed
by Carlos Castaneda's otherworldly explorations in
The Teachings of Don Juan
(1968) and John Lilly's descriptions of his transcendental experiences in sen-
sory deprivation tanks in
The Center of the Cyclone: An Autobiography of Inner
Space
(1972).
At another and entirely nonliterary extreme, Laing's interest in LSD cou-
pled with his psychiatric expertise gave him an important place in the London
drug scene of the sixties. Laing's home, for example, figured as a place to take
