Another voice
Thoughts on lunacy
Auberon Waugh
This is the time of year, I have observed, When many people go mad. My observation IS confirmed by employees of the local lunatic asylum, who tell me that a combination of Christmas with the full moon has meant extra work all round. It is no old wives' tale that the mad become restless under a full moon; it is simple, sober fact. But the former observation, that mental hospitals tend to fill up around Christmas time, might seem to confirm R. D. Laing's early thesis, that the human family is at the root of most neurosis; people are no longer able to adapt themselves to the differing roles which family life expects them to play, and at Christmas, where a woman may be required simultaneously to play the roles of wife, daughter, mother, sister, sister-in-law, daughter-in-law, hostess and friend to various drunks and spongers who turn up, the strain is too great; that, perhaps, and the social obligation to be joeular, convivial, ready to exert themselves in celebration of H1 event about which many people nowadays profess to entertain grave doubts. Certainly, I do not think it can be the food in mental hospitals which attracts so many visitors at this time of year.
I cannot remember having read R. D. Laing on the phases of the moon, but no doubt he has had sensible things to say on this subject in his time. As one with more family obligations than most, I find that the traditional device for keeping a large house-party sane at this difficult time of Year no longer works at all. Where once you simply sent them to church, you must now organise elaborate games of charades. It is only after they have acted the parts of Jeremy Thorpe and Norman Scott, Rod Stewart on a British Airways flight, Princess Anne and Captain Mark Philips deciding to name their son after Peter Rabbit, President Amin eating Dr David Owen etc that they can face up to the role of playing themselves in what must unfortunately be described as a family Christmas dinnereating situation.
do not know whether charades form Part of normal psychiatric therapy, but I doubt whether they would be much use in a Mental hospital. From my experience of the Mentally ill, the usefulness of such activities
IS better directed towards prevention rather than cure, and it is only in the field of pre
vention that I may have some contribution to make. In my experience, as I say, all talk of a hairline division between the sane and the insane is so much nonsense. There is an enormous gulf between the two, and one can generally recognise anyone who has actually gone round the twist at a glance, even before he (or, more often, she) has started talking. Once somebody has gone mad, one can only give them aspirins until the doctor arrives. He will know what to do.
But it is plain that there are many, many people in our society teetering on the edge of this plunge. A week of overwork, a little matrimonial stress, a random insult, even a severe cold or a full moon and they will be barking like sea-lions. Often a deep disturbance in their emotional equilibrium at this stage will manifest itself only in a professed aversion to Christmas, a refusal to play charades. When least we wish to play charades, then is our greatest need. Most other forms of pre-breakdown therapy — group discussions or, worst of all, deep analysis — are wrong because they tackle the problem from the wrong end. They serve to increase self-obsession and bring the patient closer to lunacy because they direct his attention inwards on himself rather than outwards on the society with which he must come to terms. The purpose of the Waugh therapy is to teach people to play their allotted roles with greater cunning and enjoyment rather than encourage them to discover some inner core of identity which almost certainly doesn't exist.
At the centre of my personal theory of mental health is the proposition that sanity is something which has to be imposed on an original state of chaos, rather than that insanity is something which occurs when a natural state of order is upset. Order, logic, charity and peace of mind are sustained by deliberate and continuing exercise of the Will. In other words, sanity should not be seen merely as a state from which insanity is absent: it should be seen as a measurement of mental stability, capable of endless gradations of which insanity is not so much the reverse measurement as the denial. It may follow that a vessel which is half full is also half empty, but once it is empty there can be no further measurements of the extent of its emptiness.
If perfect sanity is seen as an ideal condition to which we must all aspire, then our failure to achieve it should not be measured in units of insanity, which is something entirely different, so much as in units of subsanity or degrees under proof. The perfectly sane man, if such exists, will be secure in every role he is allotted, will be fulfilled in his work, however humble, and happy in his station; he will have come to terms with any vicious or anti-social promptings in his imperfect nature, with his sexual, acquisitive or competitive blemishes, he will be visited by no anxieties about his ultimate destiny or life's purpose sub specie aeternitatis.
I do not myself believe that any such peace of mind can be combined with a reasonable degree of intelligence unless it is sustained by some form of religious belief, or concern for reality beyond appearance. The great advantage of the more sophisticated religions (of which, I suppose, we must admit that Christianity is only one) is that they cannot be proved false by demonstration. Whether its main propositions are, in fact, false is another matter, but the sanest position, I should judge, would be to wait and see, accepting it as a pleasant bonus if they should turn out to be true. But the most worrying aspect of the great retreat from religion in recent years has been the growth in systems of belief which are demonstrably unstable and these, I feel sure, have contributed to a huge and general decline in sanity rating.
The largest and most obvious of these false idealisms, or demonstrably unstable systems of belief, is socialism. By the error of letting the wish be father to the thought — that man can lose his avarice, or laziness, or aggression in the right social conditions — whole continents have been plunged into such miseries of repression, muddle, mass murder and de-humanising regimentation as the world has seldom if ever seen before. The simple inference that mankind is not perfectible has been wilfully ignored.
Under the umbrella of this massive error, a whole crop of unstable beliefs is con stantly springing up like so many hallucinogenic mushrooms. The most pre valent in England at the moment is to sup pose that there need be no essential difference in social function between the male and female of the human species. As I watch these newly married young men creep up my stairs with sheepish, goody-goody smirks under their vasectomised Michael Parkinson hairstyles to change baby's nappy, it would be easy to fall in with the poet: `It's not their fault that they are mad They've tasted Hell.'
But they are not mad. Nor is Arnold Wesker, with his babyish socialist 'ide alism'. Nor is the Sunday Times with its instant philosophical void on every subject. Nor even is Michael Parkinson, for all his valiant attempt to recreate himself as the first self-originating human puppet. These people are not insane so much as sub standard in their sanity rating. We must all learn Once again how to refuse to help with the washing up.
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