Oisín Wall, The British Anti-psychiatrists: From Institutional Psychotherapy to the Counter-Culture, 1960-1971 (London: Routledge, 2018)
The Spring 1972 issue of the short-lived self-published journal Red Rat: The Journal of Abnormal Psychologists includes a review by Ruth Davies of Ken Loach’s film Family Life alongside the Yugoslavian director Dušan Makavejev’s W.R., Mysteries of the Organism.[ref]Ruth Davies, ‘Film Review: W.R. + Family Life’, Red Rat: The Journal of Abnormal Psychologists, 4, Spring 1972, pp. 28-29, p. 28. Issues of Red Rat are held in the archives at MayDay Rooms, London.[/ref] According to the reviewer both films were then showing simultaneously at the Academy Cinema on Oxford Street in London and in ‘both cases, the theme of the film is the work of a radical psychologist whose ideas have helped lay the foundations of alternative psychology; in the case of Family Life, the work of RD Laing, and in Mysteries of the Organism, Wilhelm Reich.’ Davies outlines the different approaches to psychology presented in the films: ‘Family Life is an account of the genesis of schizophrenia firmly in the Laing tradition,’ following a young woman whose diagnosis with schizophrenia is presented as deriving from her family situation, while W.R., Mysteries of the Organism combines documentary footage shot in America (interviewing people at Wilhelm Reich’s infamous Organon laboratory and following various artists around New York) with a heavily stylised narrative about sexual revolutionaries in Belgrade encountering a dashing Soviet figure skater who embodies Communism in its repressive and sexually repressed form. Though Davies is primarily concerned with the content of these two films, I was struck by how their wildly contrasting formal qualities–Loach’s drab naturalism (people wearing beige clothes drinking beige cups of tea in beige institutional rooms) versus Makavejev’s audacious experimentalism (people tearing off lurid clothes knocking down the walls of their bohemian rooms)–resembles a contrast at the heart of Oisín Wall’s new book, The British Anti-psychiatrists: From Institutional Psychotherapy to the Counter-Culture, 1960-1971. Wall demonstrates that British anti-psychiatry in the period immediately preceding the release of these films in Britain in 1971 was connected to the staid ‘square’ world of professional medicine, as well as being hugely influential within the ‘hip’ counter-culture, involving ‘collusions and collaborations between the long-haired kaftan wearing radicals who inhabit the 1960s of the contemporary popular imagination and people who, at another time, would have been the epitome of bourgeoisie [sic] stability’ (p. 2). As such, Wall’s narrative shuttles between beige institutional spaces and anarchic psychedelic communes, sees middle-aged doctors living alongside young hippies, and describes unlikely convergences of medical, spiritual, philosophical, and political discourses.
One of the most persuasive arguments Wall advances in The British Anti-Psychiatrists, and the book’s main intervention, is an insistence on the importance of acknowledging continuities and connections between the theories, practices and communities of the mainstream ‘psy’ disciplines and those of anti-psychiatry. As Wall explains, RD Laing arrived in London from Glasgow in 1956 with the intention of training as a psychoanalyst. Laing and Aaron Esterton’s work with people diagnosed with schizophrenia that forms the basis of Sanity, Madness and the Family (1964) was undertaken while Laing was involved with the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations. Laing began his analysis with Charles Rycroft, supervised by DW Winnicott and Marion Milner (prominent figures in the ‘Independent Group’ of British psychoanalysts), who were both subsequently listed in the training programme of the Philadelphia Association. Wall observes in a footnote that Winnicott invited Laing to deliver a paper at the British Psychoanalytic Association in 1966, of which Winnicott was then the president, and ‘practically begged’ Laing to join as a member (p. 181). Wall claims that even at the height of their counter-cultural notoriety when they were most vocal in their critiques of the medical establishment and of professional hierarchies, the British anti-psychiatrists continued to invoke their psychiatric credentials to gain legitimacy in certain contexts: ‘the anti-psychiatrists were not averse to using the authority of their professional status to prove a point or advance a position’ (p. 91).
A contextual chapter also places the radical therapeutic communities associated with anti-psychiatry in historical perspective, discussing their antecedents in mainstream psychiatry. Wall describes the therapeutic communities established at Northfields and Mill Hill during the Second World War and demonstrates that many principles that would go on to be central to anti-psychiatry–including an emphasis on the therapeutic benefits of group dynamics that challenged the centrality of the doctor-patient relationship–were commonplace in psychiatry by the 1950s (Wall mentions the example of a 1953 World Health Organisation report on The Community Mental Hospital, for instance). He also makes clear not only that critiques of traditional asylums were already being voiced by the time anti-psychiatry emerged but that mental hospital reform was well underway: ‘the Anti-Psychiatric movement’s antipathy to the hospital was well rooted in established psychiatric practrices and discourses’ (p. 50). Though Wall does still assert that it would be ‘naïve to suggest’ that anti-psychiatry’s ‘widespread cultural influence’ was completely unrelated to the eventual ‘deinstitutionalisation of the British asylums in the 1980s and 1990s’ (p. 8).
Although Wall challenges the novelty of the two most well-known British anti-psychiartic spaces, Villa 21 and Kingsley Hall, he nonetheless concludes that both ‘went farther’ than the therapeutic communities that preceded them ‘in the informality of staff-patient relationships, the democratic arrangement of the community and the de-stigmatization of mental illness’ (p. 78). Wall’s account of David Cooper’s experiments at Villa 21, a community established at Shenley Hospital in the early 1960s, is particularly illuminating, including perspectives from interviews conducted with two former patients, one of whom was much more cynical in his reflections than the other, indicating that the bombastic theoretical pronouncements made by British anti-psychiatrists in their best-selling published work often played out ambiguously in practice: ‘I don’t think anyone really understood why we were there or what we were trying to achieve, or what it was meant to achieve by us being there’ (p. 66).
Kingsley Hall in East London was the most infamous anti-psychiatric space, renowned for its raucous LSD-fuelled parties as much as for its innovative therapeutic methods. Wall emphasises the American psychiatrist Joe Berke’s role in providing links with the kinds of counter-cultural figures conventionally associated with the building, but he points out that visits from celebrities, artists, and hip international radical psychiatrists like Franco Basaglia and Félix Guattari were combined with those from ‘the world of ‘square’ psychiatry’ (p. 74). He also discusses tensions that emerged within the community that would have lasting implications for anti-psychiatry, particularly between Laing and Esterton; the former more anarchic and experimental, the latter more interested in retaining some conventional medical techniques and boundaries. Laing allegedly carried a Lenin book under his arm, while Esterton read Stalin.
Wall not only discusses anti-psychiatry’s psychiatric roots but also traces the ways it eventually grew entangled with the counter-culture, through a consideration of anti-psychiatrists’ links with Alexander Trocchi’s Project Sigma, their organisation of the Dialectics of Liberation Congress at the Roundhouse in London in 1967, and their involvement in establishing the Anti-University. As in other sections of the book, he highlights the forms of power still at play in these ostensibly non-hierarchical and informal networks of interpersonal relationships. Wall is at pains to show that there’s something counter-intuitive about the place these bourgeois medical professionals came to occupy among trendy young radicals, but also demonstrates how their ideas in this period of counter-cultural engagement broadened out from a critique of the psychiatric hospital to one of society at large, emphasising the numerous oppressive institutions of which society was comprised: ‘anti-psychiatry prescribed an apparently liberatory programme that demanded social, and not only psychiatric, change. This change, they argued, should be based on a fundamental reorganization of the interpersonal relations that bind society together’ (p. 79).
Overall, The British Anti-Psychiatrists is more interested in concrete contexts than abstract concepts, in practices more than theories (or at least in how theory was practically instantiated), and the book is more interesting for that focus. The closing chapters venture into more theoretical territory, however, containing discussions of Laing’s and Cooper’s key concepts and published works. Wall briefly outlines the influence of Sartrean existentialism on Laing and Cooper; the notion that ‘madness’ can be understood as resulting from discrepancies between a person’s individual existential reality and the social reality they inhabit.[ref]Despite Wall’s introductory statements bewailing the absence of women from the British anti-psychiatry movement (p. 16), he nonetheless seems not to have reflected on the implications of using male pronouns to refer to all people in some of these later sections.[/ref] He is clear to distinguish anti-psychiatric theory from caricatures of it, asserting that certain ideas commonly associated with Laing and Cooper, particularly a romantic characterisation of madness as a form of ‘break through’, were articulated by them only rarely. He also usefully contextualises their discussions of psychic ‘liberation’ in relation to contemporaneous discourses (Third World Liberation, on the one hand, and legacies of the Second World War, on the other). The book’s final chapter on theories of the family satisfyingly loops back from the counter-culture to reiterate the book’s core argument that the anti-psychiatrists’ ‘cultural revolutionary rhetoric emerged directly out of mainstream psychiatric discourse’ (p. 143).
I found myself occasionally infuriated by the vagueness of some of the ideas presented in the book, particularly Cooper’s and Laing’s insistence on the ‘necessity of mediating between the micro-social and the macro-political’ (p. 103), but having read their speeches from the Dialectics of Liberation Congress, I’m aware that this says more about my frustrations with Laing’s and Cooper’s ideas than it does about Wall’s glosses of them, though his impeccably even-handed tone is a little unrelenting for my tastes. Reading the book I found myself longing for smatterings of archness, humour, poeticism or polemic.
Again, these objections to the style of The British Anti-Psychiatrists are not really faults it would be fair to level at Wall individually or at this book in particular, but stem from more general frustrations about the limitations implicitly imposed by established conventions of genre and discipline (which are in turn connected to the demands and expectations of academic institutions and publishers), constraints I also feel acutely aware of when I write. Yet these frustrations seem worth thinking through when the historical material being presented is politically radical, formerly inventive or critical of existing structures. I might find some of Laing’s and Cooper’s arguments less persuasive than Wall seems to, but the sweeping analyses, rhetorical bombast and literary flourishes that characterise their publications couldn’t be further from the polite timidity of tone so pervasive in current academic history writing. Unlike in the main body of the text, The British Anti-Psychiatrist’s preface–in which Wall situates his project in dialogue with political struggles today, relates it to his own political commitments and talks about first encountering Laing’s enigmatic literary work Knots (1970) as a teenager–does significantly deviate from the unofficially mandated scholarly mode, giving a glimpse of themes and concerns which guided the book’s composition but remain latent or muffled in its final form. If, as Wall claims, ‘the issues that drove the radicalism of the 1960s are still very much alive and kicking’ (p. x) and concern for these issues partially motivated him to write the book in first place, would it not be possible to write this history in such a way that made the contemporary urgency of those issues manifest?
Aside from these slightly churlish or at least tangential reservations about form and style, I would also love to have read more about the two communities that succeeded Kingsley Hall: the Archway Community and Sid’s Place, the former of which is the subject of Peter Robinson’s extraordinarily intimate 1972 documentary Asylum. Wall only mentions these spaces briefly, which makes it difficult to make full sense of his claim that they represented a ‘significant shift’ in their move away from ‘politics and counter-cultural fervour’ (p. 76). I wondered if there might not be ways to think about those experiments laterally, in relation to the flourishing of squatting and communal living experiments in London at that time, which could frame them as differently rather than simply less political. Luke Fowler’s Turner Prize nominated 2011 film All Divided Selves, though focused on Laing, gestures towards such connections through its inclusion of footage relating to squats, activist-run Day Centres and the radical group COPE (Community Organisation for Psychiatric Emergencies[ref]For a brief discussion of COPE (which underwent several name changes) see, Nick Crossley, Contesting Psychiatry: Social Movements in Mental Health (London: Routledge, 2006) pp. 172-173. [/ref]). This lingering question links to a reservation I had with Wall’s conclusion that by the early 1970s (when Laing went off to meditate in Ceylon and Cooper sought out militancy in Argentina) anti-psychiatric ideas had lost their significance (p. 177). Although in his introduction he claims that anti-psychiatry ‘paved the way for the birth of the Service User’s Movement’ (p. 8), I would make a stronger case than this book does that the trenchant critiques of mainstream psychiatric diagnoses and treatments articulated by people active in the Women’s Liberation Movement and Gay Liberation Movement and the proliferation of self-organised non-professional therapy groups, not to mention the emergence of the psychiatric survivors movement and radical groups of psychiatrists critical of the medical establishment (like those involved with the journal Red Rat), indicate the influence and extension of anti-psychiatric ideas well into the 1970s. While I think Wall is right to insist on the specificities of the British anti-psychiatrists’ approach, contra much of the existing scholarship on anti-psychiatry which often places them alongside contemporaneous American, French, German or Italian figures and movements (p. 21), there is also something about the extent of the British anti-psychiatrists’ fame and the wide and diffuse percolation of their ideas that undermines this approach, as Wall notes: ‘it is impossible to quantify the influence’ (p. 8).
One of Peter Sedgwick’s main intentions in his anti-anti-psychiatry diatribe Psycho Politics (1982) was to distinguish Laing’s actual theories and practices from caricatured versions of them in popular circulation (his ire was often not primarily directed at Laing himself but at those on the left who mistook Laing for a Marxist), but I would contend that caricatured, over-simplified, wishfully politicised or deliberately partial readings of Laing’s work also form part of the history and legacy of anti-psychiatry in Britain.[ref]I wrote about Peter Sedgwick’s work on Laing at length here: https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/article/lost-minds. [/ref] Sedgwick may not have approved either way, but Laing’s work inspired activists regardless of Laing’s own political evasiveness and increasing spiritualism. The fact that some people may have misread Laing or chosen to discard aspects of his work does little to undermine the things they were inspired to do as a result. The unquantifiable influence of anti-psychiatry that Wall identifies also had a historical reality, which, though its elusiveness by definition poses difficulties for the historian, it nonetheless seems worth attempting to capture.
The archival material of TV interviews and documentaries in Luke Fowler’s All Divided Selves is interspersed with 16mm footage shot by the filmmaker – a glimpse of blue sky streaked with clouds, long grass in sunlight brushing against a wire fence, sheep grazing placidly in a bracken-filled field, murky landscapes seemingly shot at dusk. The connection of these images to the film’s content is oblique, but their presence participates in conjuring an atmosphere that seems appropriate to the psychic states anti-psychiatry explored, just as in W.R., Mysteries of the Organism the orangey kaleidoscopic opening shots of sexual abandon helped convey the Reichian pronouncements that accompany them through a voiceover. Historians are not artists and Laing’s Sonnets (1979) serve as a reminder that venturing beyond one’s discipline to embrace formal experimentation might not always be a particularly good idea, but perhaps historians of radicalism interested in producing radical modes of history writing appropriate to their subjects can still learn something from other genres or media when thinking about how to present radical pasts in ways that might challenge or inspire people in the oppressive present.
Hannah Proctor is a postdoctoral fellow affiliated with the ICI Berlin. She’s in the process of finishing her first monograph Psychologies in Revolution: Alexander Luria, Soviet Subjectivities and Cultural History and is embarking on a second book project on the psychic aftermaths of left-wing political movements. She is a member of the editorial collective of Radical Philosophy.