Anarchy 70/Libertarian Psychiatry: an introduction to existential analysis

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Libertarian Psychiatry:
an introduction to
existential analysis

PETER FORD

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This art­icle aims to draw at­ten­tion to the work of a group of British psy­chi­atrists of whom the best known are R. D. Laing and David Cooper. They have achieved some no­tori­ety in this country because of the ex­tent of their di­ver­gence, both in theory and prac­tice, from cur­rent psy­chi­atric ortho­doxy—and par­tic­u­larly as a con­sequence of their refer­ences to the pre­val­ent “treat­ment” of the men­tally ill as “viol­ence”. As a teacher, I am not qual­ified to at­tempt more than an out­line of their ideas as under­stood by me, after read­ing their books and art­icles and some related studies. But the im­plica­tions of the work of the British ex­ist­en­tial­ist group ex­tend beyond the limits of psy­chi­atry—and the very gener­ality of their as­ser­tions in­vites a re­sponse from the layman. Writing of the pro­cess which in their view results in the ul­ti­mate in­val­id­a­tion of persons through the label­ling of them as “mad”, Laing asks: “… what func­tion does this pro­ced­ure serve for the civic order? These ques­tions are only begin­ning to be asked, much less answered. … So­cially, this work must now move to further under­stand­ing … of the mean­ing of all this within the larger con­text of the civic order of so­ciety—that is, of the polit­ical order, of the ways persons exer­cise control and power over one an­other.” (New Left Review, No. 28.) Anarch­ism is about just this, and any theory, from what­ever dis­cipline, which leads to a ques­tion­ing of the polit­ical order of so­ciety should have rel­ev­ance for us—and we should know some­thing about it.

  Dr. Laing has written that his main intel­lec­tual in­debt­ed­ness is to “the ex­ist­en­tial tradi­tion”—Kierke­gaard, Jaspers, Heideg­ger, Bins­wanger, Tillich and Sartre—and of these there is no doubt that Sartre’s in­flu­ence has been the great­est. The British ana­lysts have clearly worked out their own the­or­et­ical basis and in many in­stan­ces have de­veloped Sartre’s ideas rather than merely adopted them as they stand. I am not cer­tain, for ex­ample how com­pletely Laing and Cooper share Sartre’s total re­jec­tion of the con­cept of “the un­con­scious”. However, their book Reason and Viol­ence: A Decade of Sartre’s Philo­sophy 1950-1960 (Tavistock, 1964) opens with a com­pli­ment­ary pre­fat­ory note from the French philo­sopher—I believe this is an un­usual honour for a book about his ideas—and this im­prim­atur sug­gests that what­ever their diver­gen­cies, they can­not be basic.

  In anarchy 44 J.-P. Sartre is re­ferred to as “one of the fore­most anarch­ist moral­ists” (Ian Vine: “The Moral­ity of Anarch­ism”). This de­scrip­tion com­pares in­triguingly with an­other, made by the so­cial­ist Alasdair MacIntyre, re­view­ing Sartre’s book The Prob­lem of Method in Peace News. He re­fers to Sartre as a newly found “spokes­man of genius” for “ersatz bolshev­iks” and “im­it­a­tion anarch­ists”. Not know­ing MacIntyre’s idea of the genu­ine art­icle, this does not ex­actly rule the French­man out and I believe his work may well just­ify a place on an anarch­ist’s book list. Writing with par­tic­u­lar refer­ence to Sartre’s recent work, MacIntyre notes that Sartre can offer no bonds, other than re­cip­roc­ally threat­ened viol­ence and terror, of suf­fi­cient strength to main­tain the co­he­sion of human groups in a world of “im­pos­sibly indi­vidual­ist indi­viduals”. Per­haps a spokes­man for Stirner­ites? Never­the­less, the poten­ti­alit­ies of Sartre’s philo­sophy as a basis for anarch­ism are in­cid­ental to my pur­pose here.

  The first of four epis­odes of this essay are in­tended to create a set­ting against which ex­ist­en­tial ana­lysis may be viewed.

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EXISTENTIAL FREEDOM

  “Man can­not be some­times slave and some­times free; he is wholly and forever free, or he is not free at all.”

Sartre: Being and No­thing­ness