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people who were having a bad trip. “I felt great all of a sudden and I didn't give
a shit about Sarah any more. Ronnie was looking after her. The Man. I'd taken
her to the Man. I went and lay on the bed and in the end it was the greatest
trip I ever took.” Syd Barrett, the leader of the early Pink Floyd, was progres-
sively wiped out by acid, and his friends took him to see Laing, though without
much effect. In 1964, Laing visited the acid guru of the U.S. East Coast, Timo-
thy Leary, who returned the compliment some years later, remarking, “You
will not find on this planet a more fascinating man than Ronald Laing.”
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Beyond Laing's individual connections to the sixties, Kingsley Hall was a
key institutional site for the counterculture. Experimental artists and com-
posers would go there and perform, including Cornelius Cardew and Allen
Ginsberg, and here some circles begin to close. We have already met Ginsberg
taking acid for the first time in a flicker-feedback setup when we examined
the connections between Walter's cybernetics and the Beats.
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Cardew gets a
mention in the next chapter, as assimilated to the cybernetic musical canon
by Brian Eno, himself much influenced by Stafford Beer. One begins to grasp
a significant intertwining of cybernetic and countercultural networks in the
sixties, though it would be another project to map this out properly. Kingsley
Hall also figures prominently as a countercultural meeting place in
Bomb Cul-
ture
, Jeff Nuttall's classic 1968 description and analysis of the British under-
ground. Going in the opposite direction, the Kingsley Hall community would
issue forth en masse to countercultural events, including the famous 1965
poetry reading at the Albert Hall, one of the formative events of the British
underground scene. “Ronnie Laing decanted Kingsley Hall patients for the
night, thought they'd have a good evening out. Real schizophrenics running
around the flat bit in the middle. . . . All the nutcases ran jibbering round,” was
one rather uncharitable description (Sue Miles, quoted in J. Green 1988, 72).
Kingsley Hall was also for a while a blueprint for another institutional
future. In 1967 Laing left the Tavistock Institute and he and David Cooper,
Joseph Berke, and Leon Redler founded the Institute of Phenomenological
Studies (Howarth-Williams 1977, 5), which in turn sponsored the establish-
ment of the Anti-University of London with an interest-free loan.
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The Anti-
University opened its doors on 12 February 1968 (Howarth-Williams 1977,
71): “Again [at the Anti-University] we find a concern to break down internal
role structures. Foremost amongst its aims . . . was 'a change in social rela-
tions among people.' Primary amongst these relations was, of course, that of
staff/student. Although there were lecturers (who were only paid for the first
term), the emphasis was on active participation by all. . . . There were, of
course, no exams, and fees were minimal (£8 a quarter plus 10s per course
