The Tom
Shepherd World Educational Foundation
The Politics of Experience by R. D.
Laing.
The studies of the families of
schizophrenics conducted at Palo Atlo, California, Yale University, the
Pennsylvania Psychiatric Institute and the National Institute of Mental Health,
among other places, have all shown that the person who gets diagnosed is part
of a wider network of extremely disturbed and disturbing patterns of
communications. In all these places, to the best of my knowledge, no
schizophrenic has been studied whose disturbed pattern of communication has not
been shown to be a reflection of, and a reaction to, the disturbed and
disturbing pattern characterizing his or her family of origin. This is
matched in our own researches.
In over 100 cases where we studied the
actual circumstances around the social event when one person came to be
regarded as schizophrenic, it seems to us that without exception the experience
and behavior that gets labeled schizophrenic is a special strategy that a
person invents in order to live in an unlivable situation. In his situation
the person has come to feel he is in an untenable position. He cannot make a
move, or make no move, without being beset by contradictory and paradoxical
pressures and demands, pushes and pulls, both internally from himself, and
externally from those around him. He is, as it were, in a position of
checkmate.
This state of affairs may not be
perceived as such by any of the people in it. The man at the bottom of the heap
may be being crushed and suffocated to death without anyone noticing, much less
intending it. The situation here described is impossible to see by studying the
different people in it singly. The social system, not single individuals
extrapolated from it, must be the object of study.
We know that the biochemistry of the
person is highly sensitive to social circumstance. That a checkmate situation
occasions a biochemical response, which, in turn, facilitates or inhibits
certain types of experience and behavior is plausible a priori.
The behavior of the diagnosed patient is
part of a much larger network of disturbed behavior. The contradictions and
confusions “internalized” by the individual must be looked at in their larger
social contexts.
Something
is wrong somewhere, but it can no longer be seen exclusively or even primarily
“in” the diagnosed patient.
The Politics of Experience by R. D. Laing.