The politics of the family
- Author:
Laing
Tavistock, ?1.50
Deja vu … plus pa change . . all the old cliches spring to mind as the familiar Laing aphorisms unroll yet again. So much so, that as one’s attention wanders from the material, one begins to look more closely at the style, the vehicle, the ‘package’ which wraps it up (to use a McLuhanism). If the message originally seemed to have dramatic impact did it derive in fact from his insight, or from the punchiness and idiosyncracy of the language used?
Laingisms abound (coinherence, nexifjed, postdictions, compossible), giving a general air of somewhat rakish scholarship heightened by a generous use of colloquialisms.
Suddenly all this gives way to numerical symbols, and a kind of minor mathematical fireworks display, largely derivative from the field theory work of Lewin in the 1940s.
One is also struck by the number of question marks he uses. In the chapter entitled ‘Intervention in Social Situations’ we have sixteen question marks. In a comparable writer (like Szasz) writing on a comparable subject three question marks occur. And whereas Szasz uses the three question marks to herald a logical exposition, Laing uses the question marks apparently to shock? nowhere are they followed up.
Finally, the mix, already mystify ing enough, is invigorated by considerable overtones of violence and physical force. The following two passages illustrate simultaneously his mysticism and paradoxical contradictions on the one hand, and the rather lyrical prose in which violence is uncovered on the other. ‘We are acting parts in a play that we have never seen, whose plot we don’t know, whose existence we can glimpse, but whose beginning and end are beyond our present imagination and conception.”
‘Families, schools and churches are the slaughterhouses of our children; colleges and other places are the kitchens. As adults in marriages and business we eat the products.’
Vet Laing, when he stops being the poseur, has some worthwhile ideas to contribute as a social critic; he is clearly aware of the significance of psychiatry in its social setting, as he said, perfectly simply and lucidly, in The Dialectics of Liberation. Elsewhere, however, and indeed most of the time, he seems to be preaching.
It is fashionable to describe Laing as an anti-psychiatrist. It might be more accurate to call him a moral philosopher. But what kind of a moral philosopher? He acknowledges Hegel here and there but nowhere does he even begin to work out a serious system of ethics. If Laing cared about his intellectual reputation then presumably he would join the debate with other conflict theorists of society, such as Coser or Dahrendorf, who have made serious and substantial contributions already in this field. His defence might well be that his message is too important to be heard only in some ivory tower.
To do him justice it has to be admitted that he is trying to say something he believes to be important. But he would be so much more convincing if he showed an awareness of serious scholarship. His chosen territory is the same territory staked out by the generation-gap protesters, the ‘young movement’, the ‘alternative society’.
We have enough emotion there already. Laing could be a powerful mediator. Unless he is determined to be a revolutionary he would do us all a great service by giving up his rhetoric in favour of a cooler brand of logic.
Robert Ferguson
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