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tient; while for Walter, Ashby, and the psychiatric establishment, the process
was only one-way: therapy as ideally an adaptation of the patient but not of
the therapist. But as we have seen, this quantitative difference hung together
with a dramatic contrast in practices. If the paradigmatic therapy of conven-
tional psychiatry was ECT in the 1950s moving on to drugs in the sixties, the
paradigm of the Bateson-Laing line was that of symmetric, open-ended, and
reciprocal interaction.
We can phrase this in terms of
power
. The conventional mental hospital
staged a linear model of power in a hierarchical frame of social relations: doc-
tors, then nurses, then patients. The aim of Kingsley Hall was to set everyone
on a level plane without any fixed locus of control. Of course, neither of these
visions was perfectly instantiated. Formally hierarchical relations are always
embedded in informal and transverse social relations; on the other hand,
doctors, nurses and patients cannot easily escape from their traditional roles.
Nevertheless, I hope to have shown above that these different ontological vi-
sions did indeed hang together with distinctly different practices and institu-
tional forms. Ontology made a real difference here.
My last observation is that conceiving these differences in terms of a no-
tion of power is not really adequate. The contrast between Kingsley Hall and a
contemporary mental hospital did not lie simply in the fact that the “staff” of
the former thought that hierarchy was
bad
in the abstract, or that it would be
nice
in principle not to exercise control over the “patients.” Something more
substantial was at stake, which can be caught up in the Heideggerian contrast
between enframing and revealing. Conventional psychiatry, one could say,
already knows what people should be like, and it is the telos of this sort of
psychiatry to reengineer—to enframe—mental patients back into that im-
age. That is why a hierarchical system of social relations is appropriate. Power
relations and understandings of the self go together. The Bateson-Laing line,
of course, was that selves are endlessly complex and endlessly explorable, and
the antihierarchical approach of Kingsley Hall was deliberately intended to
facilitate such exploration in both the mad and the sane. This is the mode of
revealing, of finding out what the world has to offer us. We can, then, name
this contrast in social relations in terms of power and hierarchy, but that is
not enough. The sociological contrast echoed and elaborated a contrast in
ontological stances—enframing versus revealing—which is, I think, very hard
to grasp from the standpoint of modernity.
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