R.
D. Laing
The
illumination grew brighter and brighter, the roaring
louder,
I experienced a rocking sensation and then felt
myself
slipping out of my body, entirely enveloped in a
halo
of light . . I felt the point of consciousness that was
myself
growing wider, surrounded by waves of light . . . I
was
now all consciousness, without any outline, without
any
idea of corporeal appendage, without any feeling or
sensation
coming from the senses, immersed in a sea of
light
. . . I was no longer myself, or to be more accurate, no
longer as I knew my self to be, a small point of awareness
confined in a body, but instead was a vast circle of
consciousness
in which the body was but a point, bathed
in
light and in a state of exaltation and happiness impossible
to describe.
Meditation
experience described by Gope Krishna in,
Kundalini:
The Evolutionary Energy in Man
The
idea that psychoses are mental diseases that can be adequately
understood
in medical terms and should be treated by biological
means,
although widespread and highly influential, is not unanimously
accepted. Many clinicians and theoreticians have offered important explanations of the
psychotic process that are purely
psychological
in nature and have developed non-medical treatment
strategies
Others
have suggested that the dominant role played by the medical
model in the approach to psychoses cannot be scientifically justified, since no specific biological causes have
been found for the
majority
of the conditions psychiatrists are treating. The current situation
thus does not reflect the "state of the art," but a variety of factors
of
a historical, political, legal, and economic nature. Thomas Szasz,
one
of the most outspoken representatives of this view, has gone so far
as
to speak and write about the "myth of mental illness."
In
his unique approach to psychosis, the Scottish psychiatrist
R.
D. Laing combines a penetrating critique of Western society with
an
innovative psychological understanding and treatment of this condition.
Probably the most radical and controversial figure in the field of
psychiatry, he is the author of a series of books that challenge the
very
roots of modern psychiatric thinking. Laing is usually seen as a
representative
of "antipsychiatry," a movement initiated by the South
African
physician and psychotherapist David Cooper, although he
himself
re fuses that label.
According
to Laing, psychoses cannot be understood in terms of abnormal
biological processes inside the human body, but are products
of disturbed
patterns of human communication. They reflect problems
in
important relationships with individuals, small groups such as the
family,
and society as a whole.
Laing's
ideas represent a radical and revolutionary departure
from
mainstream thinking. The "sane" are not really sane, and the
psychotics
are not as mad as they appear to be. Modern society is
founded
on denial of the self and of experience; it is dangerously
insane,
and the psychotics, finding its values and norms unbearable,
are
not able to adjust to them:
Psychotics
are individuals whose total life experience is divided,
because
they have an unsatisfactory connection with the world and
human
society, as well as a disruptive relation with the self. Their
withdrawal
into the world of fantasies provided by their unconscious is
an escape from the feality they find unacceptable. This results in an
incomplete
existence characterized by fear, despair, aloneness, and a
sense
of isolation.
Such
people feel unreal and disconnected from the common-sense
world,
as well as from their bodies — to such an extent that their
identity
and autonomy are always in question. Their fear of losing
themselves
is so consuming and overwhelming that it results in preoccupation
with self-preservation rather than self-satisfaction. Laing
calls
this "ontological insecurity."
According
to Laing, psychiatrists do not pay proper attention to
the
inner experiences of psychotics, because they see them as pathological
and incomprehensible. However, careful observation and study
show
that these experiences have profound meaning and that the psychotic
process can be healing. Laing believes that psychotics have in
many
respects more to teach psychiatrists than psychiatrists do their
patients.
The "psychiatric ceremony" of examination, diagnosis, and
treatment
invalidates the clients as human beings and interferes with
the healing potential of their process.
Laing's
strategy of psychotherapy replacing biological treatment
emphasizes
the importance of human interaction and relationship,
both
on a one-to-one basis and on the larger scale of an entire
therapeutic
team. The experiences emerging from the unconscious are
seen
as valid, important, and meaningful. Accepting and respecting
them
facilitates communication and is conducive to healing. According
to Laing, special places should be provided where people receive the
support
and sympathetic understanding that facilitate the healing
process.
R.
D. Laing was born in 1927 in Glasgow, Scotland, and was
educated
at the University of Glasgow, where he received his medical
degree.
His introduction into the world of mental patients occurred
when
he served for two years as a psychiatrist in the British army.
From
1956 to 1962, he conducted clinical research at the Tavistock
Institute
of Human Relations in London.
Between
1962 and 1965, he was director of the Langham Clinic in
London;
it was at this time that he founded the Kingsley Hall Clinic,
where
he conducted a unique experiment in the treatment of psychotic
patients
without suppressive medication. He continued these activities
based
on his therapeutic philosophy in the Philadelphia Association, an
organization
dedicated to the problems of psychosis and focusing on
therapy,
as well as to the education of professionals and the public by
lectures
and publications. It deserves special note that in 1973, Laing
spent
a year in Ceylon studying Theravada Buddhism and Vipassana
meditation.
In the last decade, his professional time has been divided
between
writing, private practice, consulting work, and lecturing.
Laing
is the author of many articles in professional journals and
of
the books The Divided Self,
The Self and Others,
The Politics of
Experience, The Bird of Paradise,
Reason and Violence,
Knots, The
Facts
of Life, The Voice of Experience,
The Politics of the Family,
Do
You Love Me?, Sanity, Madness and the Family,
and the autobiographical Wisdom,
Madness, and
Folly.
In
the following paper, Laing goes beyond acknowledging the
psychological
importance of the unconscious content of psychotic experiences.
He explicitly recognizes and emphasizes the value of the transcendental
aspect of such experiences and the utmost importance of the
spiritual
dimension in human life. His discussion of the historical importance
of visionary experiences and of the urgent need to draw a
clear
distinction between pathology and mysticism is of great relevance
for
the problem of spiritual emergency.
We
must remember that we are living in an age in which the ground
is
shifting and the foundations are shaking. I cannot answer for other
times
and places. Perhaps it has always been so. We know it is true today.
In
these circumstances, we have all reason to be insecure. When
the
ultimate basis of our world is in question, we run to different holes
in the ground; we scurry into roles, statuses, identities, inter-personal
relations. We attempt to live in castles that can only be it
the
air, because there is no firm ground in the social cosmos on which to
build. Priest and physician are both witness to this state of affairs. Each
sometimes sees the same fragment of the whole situation differently;
often our concern is with different presentations of the original
catastrophe.
In
this paper I wish to relate the transcendental experiences that
sometimes
break through in psychosis to those experiences of the
divine
that are the Living Fount of all religion.
Elsewhere
I have outlined the way in which some psychiatrists
are
beginning to dissolve their clinical-medical categories of understanding
madness. I believe that if we can begin to understand sanity
and
madness in existential social terms, we, as priests and physicians,
will
be enabled to see more clearly the extent to which we confront
common
problems and share common dilemmas.
The
main clinical terms for madness, where no organic lesion
has
so far been found, are schizophrenia, manic-depressive psychosis,
and involutional depression. From a social point of view, they
characterize
different forms of behavior, regarded in our society as
deviant.
People behave in such ways because their experience of
themselves
is different. It is on the existential meaning of such unusual
experience that I wish to focus.
Experience
is mad when it steps beyond the horizons of our
common,
that is, our communal sense.
What
regions of experience does this lead to? It entails a loss of
the
usual foundations of the "sense" of the world that we share with
one
another. Old purposes no longer seem viable. Old meanings are
senseless;
the distinctions between imagination, dream, external perceptions
often seem no longer to apply in the old way. External
events
may seem magically conjured up. Dreams may seem direct
communications
from others: imagination may seem to be objective
reality.
But
most radically of all, the Very ontological foundations are
shaken.
The being of phenomena shifts, and the phenomenon of
being
may no longer present itself to us as before. The person is
plunged
into a void of nonbeing in which he founders. There are no
supports,
nothing to cling to, except perhaps some fragments from
the
wreck, a few memories, names, sounds, one or two objects, that
retain
a link with a world long lost. This void may not be empty. It
may
be peopled by visions and voices, ghosts, strange shapes, and
apparitions.
No one who has not experienced how insubstantial the
pageant
of external reality can be, how it may fade, can fully realize
the
sublime and grotesque presences that can replace it, or exist
alongside
it.
When
a person goes mad, a profound transposition of his position
in relation to all domains of being occurs. His center of experience
moves from ego to Self. Mundane time becomes merely
anecdotal,
only the Eternal matters. The madman is, however, confused.
He muddles ego with self, inner with outer, natural and supernatural.
Nevertheless, he often can be to us, even through his
profound
wretchedness and disintegration, the hierophant of the sacred.
An exile from the scene of being as we know it, he is an alien, a
stranger,
signaling to us from the void in which he is foundering.
This
void may be peopled by presences that we do not even dream of.
They
used to be called demons and spirits, that were known and
named.
He has lost his sense of self, his feelings, his place in the
world
as we know it. He tells us he is dead. But we are distracted
from
our cozy security by this mad ghost that haunts us with his
visions
and voices that seem so senseless and of which we feel impelled
to rid him, cleanse him, cure him.
Madness
need not be all breakdown. It is also breakthrough. It is
potentially
liberation and renewal, as well as enslavement and existential
death.
There
are now a growing number of accounts by people who
have
been through the experience of madness. (See, for example, the
anthology The Inner World of Mental Illness: A Series of First-Person
Accounts
of What It Was Like, ed. Bert Kaplan [New York: Harper
and
Row, 1964].) I want to quote at some length from one of the
earlier
contemporary accounts, as recorded by Karl Jaspers in his
General
Psychopathology (Manchester University Press, 1962):
I
believe I caused the illness myself. In my attempt to penetrate
the
other world I met its natural guardians, the embodiment of my
own weaknesses and faults. I first thought these demons were lowly,
inhabitants of the other world who could play me like a ball because I
went into these regions unprepared and lost my way. Later I thought
they
were split-off parts of my own mind (passions) which existed
near
me in free space and thrived on my feelings. I believed everyone
else
had these too but did not perceive them, thanks to the protective
and
successful deceit of the feeling of personal existence. I thought the
latter
was an artifact of memory, thought-complexes, etc., a doll that
was
nice enough to look at from outside but nothing real inside it.
In
my case the personal self had grown porous because of my
dimmed
consciousness. Through it I wanted to bring myself closer to
the
higher sources of life. I should have prepared myself for this over a
long
period by invoking in me a higher, impersonal self, since "nectar"
is
not for mortal lips. It acted destructively on the animal-human self,
split
it up into its parts. These gradually disintegrated, the doll was
really
broken and the body damaged. I had forced untimely access
to
the "source of life," the curse of the "gods" descended on
me. I
recognized
too late that murky elements had taken a hand. I got to
know
them after they had already too much power. There was no way
back.
I now had the world of spirits I had wanted to see. The demons
came
up from the abyss, as guardian Cerberi, denying admission to
the
unauthorized. I decided to take up the life-and-death struggle.
This
meant for me in the end a decision to die, since I had to put aside
everything
that maintained the enemy, but this was also everything
that
maintained life. I wanted to enter death without going mad and
stood
before the Sphinx: either thou into the abyss or I!
Then
came illumination. I fasted and so penetrated into the true
nature
of my seducers. They were pimps and deceivers of my dear
personal
self which seemed as much a thing of naught as they. A larger
and
more comprehensive self emerged and I could abandon the previous
personality with its entire entourage. I saw this earlier personality
could never enter transcendental realms. I felt as a result a terrible
pain,
like an annihilating blow, but I was rescued, the demons
shriveled,
vanished, and perished. A new life began for me and from
now
on I felt different from other people. A self that consisted of
conventional
lies, shams, self-deceptions, memory-images, a self just
like
that of other people, grew in me again but behind and above it
stood
a greater and more comprehensive self which impressed me with
something
of what is eternal, unchanging, immortal, and inviolable
and
which ever since that time has been my protector and refuge. I
believe
it would be good for many if they were acquainted with such a
higher
self and that there are people who have attained this goal in fact
by
kinder means.
Jaspers
comments: "Such self-interpretations are obviously made
under
the influence of delusion-like tendencies and deep psychic forces.
They originate from profound experiences and the wealth of
such
schizophrenic experience calls on the observer as well as on the
reflective
patient not to take all this merely as a chaotic jumble of
contents.
Mind and spirit are present in the morbid psychic life as
well
as in the healthy. But interpretations of this sort must be divested
of any causal importance. All the/can do is to throw light on
content
and bring it into some sort of context."
I
would rather say that this patient has described with a lucidity
I
could not improve upon, a Quest, with its pitfalls and dangers,
which
he eventually appears to have transcended. Even Jaspers still
speaks
of this experience as morbid, and discounts the patient's own
construction.
Both the experience and construction seem to me valid
in
their own terms.
I
should make it clear that I am speaking of certain transcendental
experiences that seem to me to be the original wellspring of all
religions.
Some psychotic people have transcendental experiences.
Often
(to the best of their recollection) they have never had such
experiences
before, and frequently they will never have them again. I
am
not saying, however, that psychotic experience necessarily contains
this element more manifestly than sane experience.
The
person who is transported into such domains is likely to act
curiously.
In other places, I have described in some detail the circumstances
that seem to occasion this transportation, at least in certain
instances,
and the gross mystification that the language and thinking
of
the medical clinic perpetrates when it is brought to bear on the
phenomena
of madness, both as a social fact and as an existential
experience.
The
schizophrenic may indeed be mad. He is mad. He is not ill.
I
have been told by people who have been through the mad
experience
how what was then revealed to them was veritable manna
from
Heaven. The person's whole life may be changed, but it is
difficult
not to doubt the validity of such vision. Also, not everyone
comes
back to us again.
Are
these experiences simply the effulgence of a pathological
process,
or of a particular alienation? I do not think they are.
When
all has been said against the different schools of psychoanalysis
and depth psychology, one of their great merits is that
they
recognize explicitly the crucial relevance of each person's experience
to his or her outward behavior, especially
the so-called
"unconscious."
There
is a view, still current, that there is some correlation
between
being sane and being unconscious, or at least not too conscious
of the "unconscious," and that some forms of psychosis are
the
behavioral disruption caused by being overwhelmed by the
"unconscious."
What
both Freud and Jung called "the unconscious" is simply
what
we, in our historically conditioned estrangement, are unconscious
of. It is not necessarily or essentially unconscious.
I
am not merely spinning senseless paradoxes when I say that
we,
the sane ones, are out of our minds. The mind is what the ego is
unconscious
of. We are unconscious of our minds. Our minds are not
unconscious.
Our minds are conscious of us. Ask yourself who and
what
it is that dreams our dreams. Our unconscious minds? The
Dreamer
who dreams our dreams knows far more of us than we
know
of it. It is only from a remarkable position of alienation that
the
source of life, the Fountain of Life, is experienced as the It. The
mind
of which we are unaware is aware of us. It is we who are out of
our
minds. We need not be unaware of the inner world.
We
do not realize its existence most of the time.
But
many people enter it — unfortunately without guides, confusing
outer with inner realities, and inner with outer — and generally
lose
their capacity to function competently in ordinary relations.
This
need not be so. The process of entering into the other world
from
this world, and returning to this world from the other world, is
as
"natural" as death and childbirth or being born. But in our present
world,
that is both so terrified and so unconscious of the other
world,
it is not surprising that, when "reality," the fabric of this
world,
bursts, and a person enters the other world, he is completely
lost
and terrified, and meets only incomprehension in others.
In
certain cases, a man blind from birth may have an operation
performed
which gives him his sight. The result: frequently misery,
confusion,
disorientation. The light that illumines the madman is an
unearthly
light, but I do not believe it is a projection, an emanation
from
his mundane ego. He is irradiated by a light that is more than
he.
It may burn him out.
This
"other" world is not essentially a battlefield wherein psychological
forces, derived or diverted, displaced or sublimated from
their
original object-cathexes, are engaged in an illusionary fight —
although
such forces may obscure these realities, just as they may
obscure
so-called external realities. When Ivan, in The Brothers
Karamazov,
says, "If God does not exist, everything is permissible,"
he
is not saying: "If my superego, in projected form, can be abolished,
I can do anything with a good conscience." He is saying:
"If
there is only my conscience, then there is no ultimate validity for
my
will."
The
proper task of the physician (psychotherapist, analyst)
should
be, in select instances, to educt the person from this world
and
induct him to the other. To guide him in it: and to lead him
back
again.
One
enters the other world by breaking a shell: or through a
door:
through a partition: the curtains part or rise: a veil is lifted. It
is
not the same as a dream. It is "real" in a different way from dream,
imagination,
perception, or fantasy. Seven veils: seven seals, seven
heavens.
The
"ego" is the instrument for living in this world. If "the
ego"
is
broken up, or destroyed (by the insurmountable contradictions of
certain
life situations, by toxins, chemical changes, etc.), then the
person
may be exposed to this other world.
The
world that one enters, one's capacity to experience it, seems
to
be partly conditional on the state of one's "ego."
Our
time has been distinguished, more than by anything else, by
a
mastery, a control, of the external world, and by an almost total
forgetfulness
of the internal world. If one estimates human evolution
from
the point of view of knowledge of the external world, then we
are
in many respects progressing.
If
our estimate is from the point of view of the internal world,
and
of oneness of internal and external, then the judgment must be
very
different.
Phenomenologically
the terms "internal" and "external" have
little
validity. But in this whole realm one is reduced to mere verbal
expedients — words
are simply the finger pointing to the moon. One
of
the difficulties of talking in the present day of these matters is that
the
very existence of inner realities is now called into question.
By
"inner" I mean all those realities that have usually no "external,"
"objective" presence — the realities of imagination, dreams,
fantasies,
trances, the realities of contemplative and meditative states: realities
that modern man, for the most part, has not the slightest
direct
awareness of.
Nowhere
in the Bible, for example, is there any argument about
the
existence of gods, demons, angels. People did not first "believe
in"
God: they experienced His Presence, as was true of other spiritual
agencies. The question was not
whether God existed, but
whether
this particular God was the greatest God of all, or the only
god;
and what was the relation of the various spiritual agencies to
each
other. Today, there is a public debate, not as to the trustworthiness
of God, the particular place in the spiritual hierarchy of different
spirits, etc., but whether God or such spirits even exist, or ever
have
existed.
Sanity
today appears to rest very largely on a capacity to adapt
to
the external world — the interpersonal world, and the realm of
human
collectivities.
As
this external human world is almost completely and totally
estranged
from the inner, any personal direct awareness of the inner
world
already entails grave risks.
But
since society, without knowing it, is starving for the inner,
the
demands on people to evoke its presence in a "safe" way, in a way
that
need not be taken seriously, is tremendous — while the ambivalence
is equally intense. Small wonder that the list of artists in,
say,
the last 150 years, who have become shipwrecked on these reefs is
so
long — Holderlin, John Clare, Rimbaud, Van Gogh, Nietzsche,
Antonin
Artaud, Strindberg, Munch, Bartok, Schumann, Buchner,
Ezra
Pound...
Those
who survived have had exceptional Qualities — a capacity
for
secrecy, slyness, cunning — a thoroughly realistic appraisal of the
risks
they run, not only from the spiritual realms that they frequent,
but
from the hatred of their fellows for anyone engaged in this pursuit.
Let
us cure them. The poet who mistakes a real woman for his
Muse
and acts accordingly . . . The young man who sets off in a
yacht
in search of God.
The
outer divorced from any illumination from the inner is in a
state
of darkness. We are in an age of darkness. The state of outer
darkness
is a state of sin — i.e., alienation or estrangement from the
Inner
Light. Certain actions lead to greater estrangement; certain
others
help one not to be so far removed. The former are bad; the
latter
are good.
The
ways of losing one's way are legion. Madness is certainly
not
the least unambiguous. The counter-madness of Kraepelinian psychiatry
is the exact counterpart of "official" psychosis. Literally, and
absolutely
seriously, it is as mad, if by madness we mean any radical
estrangement
from the subjective or objective truth. Remember
Kierkegaard's
objective madness.
As
we experience the world, so we act. We conduct ourselves in
the
light of our view of what is the case and what is not the case.
That
is, each person is a more or less naive ontologist. Each person
has
views of what is, and what is not.
There
is no doubt, it seems to me, that there have been profound changes
in the experience of man in the last thousand years. In some
ways
this is more evident than changes in the patterns of his behavior. There
is everything to suggest that man experienced God. Faith was
never
a matter of believing He existed, but of trusting in the Presence
that
was experienced and known to exist as a self-validating datum. It
seems
likely that far more people in our time neither experience the Presence
of God, nor the Presence of His absence, but the absence of
His
Presence.
We
require a history of phenomena — not simply more phenomena
of history.
As
it is, the secular psychotherapist is often in the role of the
blind
leading the half-blind.
The
fountain has not played itself out, the Flame still shines, the
River
still flows, the Spring still bubbles forth, the Light has not
faded.
But between us and It, there is a veil which is more like fifty
feet
of solid concrete. Deus absconditus. Or we have absconded.
Already
everything in our time is directed to categorizing and
segregating
this reality from objective facts. This is precisely the
concrete
wall. Intellectually, emotionally, interpersonally, organizationally,
intuitively, theoretically, we have to blast our way through
the
solid wall, even if at the risk of chaos, madness, and death. For
from
this side of the wall, this is the risk. There are no assurances, no
guarantees.
Many
people are prepared to have faith in the sense of scientifically
indefensible belief in an untested hypothesis. Few have trust
enough
to test it. Many people make-believe what they experience.
Few
are made to believe by their experience. Paul of Tarsus was
picked
up by the scruff of the neck, thrown to the ground, and
blinded
for three days. This direct experience was self-validating.
We
live in a secular world. To adapt to this world the child
abdicates
its ecstacy. (L'enfant abdique son extase. — Mallarme.) Having
lost our experience of the Spirit, we are expected to have faith. But
this faith comes to be a belief in a reality which is not evident.
There
is a prophecy in Amos that there will be a time when there will
be
a famine in the land, "not a famine for bread, nor a thirst for
water,
but of hearing the words of the Lord." That time has now
come
to pass. It is the present age.
From
the alienated starting point of our pseudo-sanity, everything
is equivocal. Our sanity is not "true" sanity. Their madness is
not
"true" madness. The madness of our patients is an artifact of the
destruction
wreaked on them by us, and by them on themselves. Let
no
one suppose that we meet any more "true" madness than that we
are
truly sane. The madness that we encounter in "patients" is a
gross
travesty, a mockery, a grotesque caricature of what the natural
healing
of that estranged integration we call sanity might be. True
sanity
entails in one way or another the dissolution of the normal
ego,
that false self competently adjusted to our alienated social reality:
the emergence of the "inner" archetypal mediators of divine
power,
and through this death a rebirth, and the eventual reestablishment
of a new kind of ego-functioning, the ego now being the servant
of the Divine, no longer its betrayer.
Spiritual
Emergency:
When
Personal Transformation Becomes a Crises
Edited
by
Stanislav
Grof, M.D.
and
Christina Grof
