(3)All of Laing’s subjects had mothers of the extreme “feminine” variety: psychologically insecure, sexually repressed, poorly educated, and economically dependent—prisoners and guards of The Home, in an era when The Home is devalued. From whom could their daughters learn to be both female and human? Mrs. Blair, according to Laing, “sees herself as the subject of a forty-year-long persecution by her husband.” She says she hasn’t left him because the world outside is just as persecutory, if not more so … the only solution is to accept one’s helplessness in the persecuted position; there is nothing to be done.
While the presence of so deformed a spirit as Mrs. Blair’s tempts us (and Laing) to consider her as “mentally ill” also, let us pause for a moment: Mrs. Blair’s analysis of things is essentially correct. She has chosen the evil of persecution within the family, rather than the evil of persecution in a mental asylum, or in the “outside” world. Finally, despite paternal tyranny, most of the daughters typically preferred their fathers—at least at some time—to their mothers. The only act of near violence reported, in fact, took place when one of the daughters, Maya Abbott, took a knife to her mother.
If most of Laing’s subject-families are typical in their treatment of women, the question still remains: Why are these eleven daughters hospitalized and/or “schizophrenic”? It may be argued that what exists in most families exists in an extreme form in the schizophrenogenic one. Perhaps madness is just “more of the same.” It may also be argued that perhaps the mothers are as “hospitalized” within their marriages as their daughters are within the asylums. It may also be argued that sooner or later most women become, are perceived as, or think they are mad. If Laing had used “normal” (non-hospitalized) control groups he would find the same patterns. If he followed his “normal” control groups over time, he might even have found that the “normal” control “daughters” eventually embarked on careers as psychiatric patients.
In general, Laing is correct in placing the schizophrenic process within its social setting; correct in “making sense” out of what our society has stubbornly insisted is the essence of senselessness. Ideally; this is what all psychiatrists are supposed to do. However, his standards of “mental health” are as obscure or absent as were Freud’s; his occasional and increasing equation of madness with mass political revolution or art forms is confused and inaccurate.
While madness and art may both be protests against and escapes from forms of oppression, and while both experiences involve pain and being discriminated against, I suppose I still “discriminate” between the totally personal and invisible modes of madness and the potentially public and tangible modes of art.
Laing is his own best critic. In his most recent introduction to Sanity, Madness and the Family, he says that the concept of “family pathology” is a “confused” one.
It extends the unintelligibility of individual behaviour to the unintelligibility of the group. It is the biological analogy applied now, not just to one person, but to a multiplicity of persons … [it is a form of] “pan-clinicism” … in which all of society is seen in need of psychological “curing.”
The danger of such pan-clinicism is its fearful optimism. Thomas Szasz calls this “psychiatric imperialism.” While society may indeed be in need of “curing,” the traditional psychoanalytic method, with or without insight, and based on the illusion of individual freedom, cannot do such “curing”; especially if the major social institutions remain “uncured”; and if the “patient” has had to suffer their socializations for many, many years.
David Cooper
[paranoia is a] poetic protest against the invasion by one’s family and by others … the poetry is unappreciated by society and gets treated by psychiatry if spoken too loud … (paranoia) is not a resolvable fantasy … we must use and not resolve our persecution anxieties.
David Cooper
David Cooper, in his book, The Death of the Family, presents a poetic summary of much of Reich’s and Laing’s condemnation of the nuclear family, sexual repression, and society’s misunderstanding and brutalization of madness.41 He makes some good statements about female socialization such as
A little girl, before she can be her own baby is plied with object-babies [the more “perfect” dolls being the most expensive], so that she can learn to forget her experiences of birth and childhood and become not her own child but childlike; so that if later in life, she wants to return to this area, she can become childish, [regressed, hysterical, etc.] … she was educated to be a mother like her mother, like all other mothers who are educated not to be themselves but to be “like mothers.”
However with even this much of a feminist consciousness, Cooper still systematically refers to his idealized “non-leader” leaders and therapist-prophets as “he” rather than “she.” He begins using the pronoun “she” as often as “he” only when he refers to patients or children. He is still more linguistically and therefore psychologically advanced than other theoreticians, to be sure. Also, while he doesn’t blame mothers for the evils of family-influences, he talks more about the mother-child relationship than the father-child relationship—which, to me, connotes his acceptance or romanticization of the female as the exclusive maternal agent in civilization.
Cooper often writes as if he were the Pied Piper of psychiatry: he is a sleight-of-phrase clown, a self-proclaimed Holy Idiot, a prophet for the sexual and cultural indulgences of (white) men. Telling men to withdraw from deep or monogamous commitments is not very revolutionary: few men are committed to the ethic of love or sexual monogamy. The majority of women cannot “withdraw” from these ethics and practices as long as marriage and prostitution remains their primary mode of psychological and economic survival, and as long as they do not control the means of reproduction. Telling white men to “ready” themselves culturally for the structural revolution that the brown, black, and yellow people of the world will accomplish for them (with their blood and bodies) is hardly “revolutionary.” Cooper also contradicts himself here: he admires the tyrants and mass murderers Mao and Castro as “embodiments” of the “leadership principle”—but these are two men who put their bodies where their principles were and, unlike mad people and Holy Idiots, “won” their battles—in their lifetime and in the flesh.
The problem is that Cooper is unable to come to terms with biology, with the body. He certainly is not alone in this failing. For example, he (incorrectly) analogizes the spiritual hunger of the “First World” with the physical hunger of the “Third World”: he emphasizes the desirability of same-sex relationships but, like Reich, rather nervously and glibly insists that it is “immaterial” whether or not we make love—sexually—with members of our own sex. He displays his most dangerous misunderstanding of the body’s role, especially in relation to female oppression—and just where he is trying to be most sympathetic. Let me give two examples.
First: Cooper has a typically male voracious longing for the incorporation of experience in general, and for colonizing or, in his case, “embodying” the “female principle” in particular. Women are conditioned to shun “experience” or adventure as destructive to their non-self selves; men are conditioned to accumulate it in order to develop their non-self selves. He is, from a liberal point of view, commendably interested in “being” (which is “female”) as well as in “doing” (which is “male”). He proclaims that men must live out the reality of the “woman,” the “child,” and the “wise old woman-man.” However, men simply cannot live out the reality of women—who, by definition, cannot choose to live the female reality but are condemned to do so.
In order to live out the female principle, Cooper would have to give up the privileges and psychology of the male principle—which is impossible. Perhaps Cooper is able to desire or experiment with “femaleness” only because he already has “maleness” under his belt (literally). It is no accident that Cooper shies away from male homosexuality. Despite the fact that in one sense it is an extreme expression of miso
gyny, it is also the closest that some men come to experiencing the “female reality” in our culture, i.e., other men despise and brutalize them.
Cooper is interested in what he conceives to be the “spiritual” aspects of being female—more than in its reality. How different is what he is implying from what the countless myths of male maternity (Zeus as Athena’s mother, Adam as Eve’s mother, the Church as the mother of us all) have implied, namely, the devaluation or distortion of that very same activity in women?
Men can only be when women can do: perhaps both sexes can both be and do only after the way in which culture discriminates on the basis of biological differences between them is modified or eliminated. Further, the cultural revolution’s dictum that being is better than doing places women in a rather familiar (and disadvantaged) position: now, they are barefoot, pregnant, psychologically dependent, and abandoned on communes rather than in suburbs. As for the “wise old woman-man” principle: only when female biological aging is as valued and rewarded (by sexual and political power) as is some or (ideal) male aging, then, and only then, will what Cooper suggests here be meaningful.
When Cooper suggests that “we must learn to play with pain” and that “irony is the most revolutionary sentiment of all,” I am reminded of Chekov’s Dr. Ragin, in the story “Ward Six.” Dr. Ragin philosophizes about the “pain” involved in being a mental patient—until he becomes one himself. Then, behind bars, he is seized with terror, despair, rising anger, and complete impotence. After being beaten, he goes “mad” with very unphilosophical anger, and is dead by the next day.
Another example of how crucially Cooper misunderstands the role of the body in female oppression is his comparison of the traditional therapist (whom “one pays by the hour” to be “all things for anyone”) with the female prostitute. There is a very obvious and important difference between female prostitutes and male therapists. Prostitutes are degraded and punished by society; it is their humiliation through their bodies—as much as their bodies—which is being purchased. It is true that in a wage-labor and advanced capitalist society, people are encouraged or forced to “sell” most things, their time, skills, physical labor, etc. However, female prostitution may exist in a somewhat separate category from these other “sales” of self.
Psychotherapists are (at least in some circles) the priests of our society. Their patients do not pay for their humiliation. And even when therapists do have sexual relations with their female patients, the psychological dynamics never involve a reversal of sex-roles.
Cooper espouses many of Reich’s and what were the “counterculture’s” myths or, more realistically, hopes: (1) that, contrary to Freud’s pessimistic and, therefore, bourgeois concepts, we have unlimited energy at our disposal; (2) that we can “love” many people; (3) that spontaneous “groupings” of people are sufficiently better and different from the nuclear monogamous family, and that unlike every other social institution, they would not mirror it, or would not impose a family or state-like tyranny over individual liberty (4) that charismatic anti-leader leaders are not leaders, or conversely, that “leadership” is intrinsically evil; (5) that “madness” is somehow “revolutionary”—when in fact, in our culture, it is a cry of powerlessness and an illness which is mercilessly punished.
Thomas Szasz: Witches And Madness
Here he is, in his own words:
The fundamental conflicts in human life are not between competing ideas—one of which is true and the other false, but rather, between those that hold power and use it to oppress others, and those who are oppressed by power and seek to free themselves of it.
Witches and mentally ill patients are actually created through the social interaction of oppressors and oppressed. If the observer sympathizes with the oppressor, then the witches are “mad.” If the observer sympathizes with the victim, then the oppressor is “mad.” Both explanations bypass, conceal, excuse, and explain away the terrifyingly simple but all important fact of man’s inhumanity to man [and I add: to woman] … the image of the knight in armor, the symbol of mobility, and of the black witch as a symbol of depravity embodies the sexocidal hatred of women … [for the] knight is always male [and the] witch is always female in all the fairy tales and mythologies of (medieval and modern) times.
There can be no abuses in institutional psychiatry because institutional psychiatry, by definition, is an abuse.
Social oppression in any form, and its manifestations are varied, among them being … poverty … racial, religious, or sexual discrimination … must therefore be regarded as prime determinants of direct communication of all kinds (e.g. hysteria).
Thomas Szasz
Thomas Szasz has been concerned with the extent to which “politics” produces medical and ethical consequences which are psychiatrically “incurable.” In The Myth of Mental Illness, he analyzes the psychology of (female) “hysteria” as a “slave state,” and criticizes Freud’s patriarchal and authoritarian theories and practices. In Law, Liberty and Psychiatry, he condemns the violation of the legal and constitutional rights of the “mentally ill”; the cruel irony of the humanely intended insanity defense; and the pervasive correlation between poverty and psychiatric incarceration. In The Manufacture of Madness, he develops Elizabeth Packard’s analogy between institutional psychiatry and the Inquisition: he labels the persecution of witches as “sexocidal,” and compares their treatment to that of mental patients.42
Our knowledge of witches is at best conjectural. Their case histories were kept by their more socially powerful male persecutors—just as hospital records are kept by psychiatrists and psychologists, and not by the mental patients themselves. Were witches really cultural and political revolutionaries, matriarchs, and Amazons come back to do battle with the Church? Were they wealthy and powerful women whose property was coveted? Were they beautiful women whose sexuality was both feared and desired? Perhaps all of these things—perhaps none. Jules Michelet in Satanism and Witchcraft: A Study in Medieval Superstition,43 suggests that many witches were midwives and healers, whose knowledge of painkillers, abortion, and herbal or “faith healing” threatened the Church’s anti-scientific, anti-sexual, and anti-female doctrines.* Szasz suggests that, “by aiding the weak, the white witch tended to undermine the established hierarchy of dominance—of priest over penitent, lord over peasant, man over woman—and herein lay the principal threat of the witch and [is] why the Church set out to crush her.” The designation of witches as (good) “white” or (bad) “black” witches once more denotes Christian cultures’ deep racism—predating both slavery in America and industrialization.
Una Stannard, in an article entitled “The Male Maternal Instinct,” describes the Church’s successful attempt to both usurp the female power of childbirth (the Church, through baptism, really gives “birth” to children) and devalue this same function in women (Christ’s was a Virgin birth).44 Male “spirits” can enter “receptacle” women to plant their holy or devilish seeds. Thus, women could indeed be “possessed”—or, worse still, through contraception, could control whether and by whom they would be “possessed.”*
John Putnam Demos, Carol F. Karlsen, and others have suggested that witches were also women who lived alone and had property or wealth that was not under any man’s control and that the church coveted. Some historians have suggested that some accused witches were actually battered women.
Michelet also suggests that the combination of feudal poverty and Catholicism so brutalized women that some turned “strange”: they lived alone, or with each other, and were not subject to husbands. He suggests, further, that witches were persecuted for their presumed (or actual) ritualization of sexuality, including incest, lesbianism, homosexuality, and pagan group sex. In celebrating what the Church prohibited—and which occurred anyway—the witch cults constituted a strong opposition, or complementary religion. Szasz notes that
… the witch, like the involuntary mental patient, is cast into a degraded and deviant role against he
r will; is subjected to certain diagnostic procedures to establish whether or not she is a witch; finally is deprived of liberty and often of life, ostensibly for her own benefit.
Of course, many witches—and some female mental patients—no longer wish to suffer or lead lives as pariahs. Szasz quotes an English witch, who, when led to the stake, tells the crowd not to blame her judges:
I want to die. My family shunned me. My husband repudiated me. If I live I could only be a disgrace to my friends. I longed for death and I lied to gain my end.
The role of the witch—or the mental patient—is often, like suicide, the only resolution (the “cure”) for having been born female. Psychiatrists and inquisitors share certain views of women-witches: because they aren’t men, they are mysterious and therefore dangerous; they are really inferior beings—but with hidden powers; they are responsible for male sexual aggression because of their “sinfully” seductive natures. Women have “power” not because they are Satan’s agents but because the psychiatrist’s mother was a woman—and she had (and still has) “power” over him. Witch-hunters often considered masturbation as proof of “witchcraft”; nineteenth-century psychiatrists thought it caused “insanity” and sometimes cured it by performing clitoridectomies.
Szasz describes the inquisitors’ insatiable and psychiatric-like curiosity about their victims’ sexual fantasies and activities. Isolation, social ostracism, hydrotherapy, physical beatings, shock therapy—all psychiatric techniques—were first practiced by witch-hunters. Although the straitjacket, solitary confinement, brain surgery, and systematic physical violence were traditionally psychiatric “treatments,” they are now being replaced by tranquilizers, anti-depressants, and shock therapy. The Inquisition’s more obviously violent methods are no longer needed to attain a female’s submission and belief in her inferiority and sinfulness; however, we shouldn’t write off as non-violent the often serious negative effect involved in the long-term administration of standard psychiatric drugs.
Women and Madness Page 18
