False doctrine
Leo Abse
The Facts of Life R D Laing (Allen Lane 0.25) Our guru Laing, we now discover in this Painfully personal work, was born cursed. His mother, immediately after his birth, Shamed by such evidence of her sexuality, went into a decline. The father, too, experienced the arrival of his son as incriminatory, for he was bound in a compact With his sisters and brother never to commit the crime of sexual intercourse. For days the father refused to admit his son's existence. Then, to obliterate their guilt, the Scottish Presbyterian parents' response was Madness: they denied sex and refused to acknowledge responsibility for the birth. The wretched child was rejected, left to the caprices of a drunken sot, and later brought up in a neurotic domain where the parents desperately strove to ensure the total exPulsion of sexuality from the loveless household. Thus traumatised, the hapless Child now pleads with us to believe that although, or because, he lived in South Glasgow and went to a local grammar school, he did not know, until he was sixteen, how babies were conceived.
Within this early environment, where tenderness and sensuality were banished, communication knew only one route, violence. The grandfather, after a brutal Oedipal struggle with Laing's father, was hurled out of the house accused of having killed off the grandmother. Laing's father and uncle then settled down to a ritualised regime in which periodic fratricidal battles took place in a dining room carefully converted into a boxing booth by the colluding Mother who, when the uncle was knocked unconscious, would solicitously revive him vv. ith cups of tea. Meantime, predictably, little Laing, even before he was three, from time to time was beaten by his father within an inch of his life.
Even the most hesitant and inexperienced of social workers would have concluded that this child should have been taken into care out of such a brutalised environment : but that is not the verdict of the victim. With an astonishing insouciance, or feigned innocence, that imperfectly masks his continued emotional refusal to accept his rear ing as idiosyncratic, Laing urges upon us a tranic „ 6 , but fortunately spurious, statistic: the normal destiny of a child is to be unwanted. Abortion, not childbirth, is the yearning of the normal woman. This crazed Ilb.el may bring a fitful comfort to the alienated but it is false doctrine. Overwhelmingly women regard children as a blessing not a curse: fatherhood is generally enjoyed, not endured. Christmas is happily still a
feast day, not a fast : and infanticide is rare.
Within the experience of parenthood there must, of course, be ambivalences. but Laing and his disciples are not content to illuminate them : rather, for years, they have mocked at those who wished to buttress the modern family. They refuse to acknowledge how today the family is founded on the basis of free personal choice by parents of equal status who are held together in affection. not legal bondage: it is a family system within which responsible planned parenthood replaces casual procreation. The Laing school, apparently, as this book reveals, are prevented by their own appalling familial upbringing from tolerating the reality that, within most families today, children enjoy a high status and increasing parental and social concern. Jealousy seems to prevent them from accepting that, in the contemporary democratic family, dogmatic parental authority increasingly yields, when decisions are made, to reciprocal discussion and sensitivity to the needs of all its members. The old compulsory dependence and constraint are being replaced by a chosen degree of involvement. There are too many broken families to idealise the present, and too many erosive forces, material, or ideological like Laing's doctrine, for any complacency: but it is a cruel distortion to affect that the only gift the modern family proffers to the young is schizophrenia. But Laing's fidelity to the insane world of his parents has, so far, remained unshakable: and so for years he has elegantly poeticised an ant inomian reversal of accepted values and declared ambiguous all received realities. Madness is health, liberation and authenticity. True sanity entails the dissolution of the ego. Psychosis is a process of therapy, not a disease, but an effort to cure disease: and in the psychosis we can gain transcendental experience. of heuristic value, and liberation from the Imprisoning falsehoods of alienated social reality. He has, in short, heralded the retreat from reason with trumpet calls and has shown himself to be, hitherto, a true and faithful son of his father.
Yet now, after a silence of five years, doubt has crept in: the confident validation of madness as truth has vanished. There is a compulsive desire to escape out of the trap, to be born again, this time into a welcoming world, into a facilitating environment. And he is so desperate in his quest that the caution of scientific method, and the tentativeness of psychiatry, must be brushed aside in the impatient magical pursuit. Now Laing advertises 'birthing sessions at his London clinic: like the old time revivalists, with the patient writhing and twisting on the floor, the erstwhile psychiatrist plays midwife, the primal birth scene is re-enacted, and the patient re-born, no longer frantic.
Even, however, when presenting such short-cut techniques to help undothe terrible past, there is no certitude in Laing's prevailing mood. He is now possessed with a gloomy determinism If, by magic, we erase our parents, and the world's original hostility to our birth, and overcome too, our birth trauma, still we may be doomed: birth, he affirms, is implantation in reverse and the reception one receives from the postnatal world generates a sympathetic resonance in us of our first adoption by our prenatal world. Worse, even before our eventual definitive implantation, there may be many grim adventures. We are irrevocably formed, the guru preaches, not only in our mother's arms, not only in birth, not only in the womb, but also in the twinkle in our father's eye.
Until this work, Laing's assaults have been primarily impassioned inculpations of the family and society: in his insistence that the infant's maturation must be self-determined, he has refused assent to any form of rearing, education or socialisation in which prescriptive influence has a part. His raillery has fallen on the parents, the paediatricians, the teachers and the legislators, and, with deliberation he has sought, with some degree of success, to undermine what he regards as the duress of society's moral authority. Now, in this regressive, psycho-biological statement, he subverts the very dignity of man. None but the manic would dispute that we are shaped by our genes and early environment : but to fail to wrestle with our destiny is to betray our humanity.
The implicit pietism and submissiveness of his work will relieve all those readers who cannot bear the weight of personal responsi
bility, and it may provide an articulate justifying weltanschauting for the depressives
and the defeated. But it will make the task a little harder for the stoical, aware of the lure of the womb and oblivion, who nevertheless refuse to yield to the awful ebb tide threatening to drown mankind.
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