Two R. D. Laing Movies: "Wednesday's Child" and "Asylum"

Abstract

Laing is a maverick in psychiatry. Until very recently, it was common doctrine (based upon research now known to be statistically unsound) that schizophrenia was largely genetic. Laing has been challenging this view in 1972-1973 TV appearances and in lectures throughout America to the psychiatric profession. The risky attitude he has assumed about craziness, comparable to Ingmar Bergman's in such films as Persona, Hour of the Wolf, and Cries and Whispers, is probably one source of Laing's reverberation in the counter-culture, with its interest in drugs, transcendental meditation, and strange states generally. In his challenges to the Establishment, he is a kind of Nader-raider, going so far as to urge consumers to avoid man-made synthetic cloth and to prefer cotton and wool for their garments. Laingian ideas in film are evidently troubling to film censors. Under its original title Family Life, the Paris premiere of Wednesday's Child was postponed for one week and could be shown only with the following notice posted outside the movie house: It is specified that this movie is devoted to the movement of a young woman toward a very serious mental illness and, for this reason, may be disturbing to some moviegoers. By way of introduction to Laing, I shall present a brief biography and a brief review of his major ideas as preparation for a discussion of two films made in 1972 according to Laing's principles. Who is Laing? He was born into a poor Scottish family in 1927. In 1951, he took a medical degree at Glasgow University. Until 1956, he worked as psychiatrist for both the British army and Glasgow mental hospitals. While psychiatrist at the Tavistock Clinic in London, Laing published The Divided Self in 1957, his most influential book and, in part, the source of a TV play by David Mercer that became the script of Wednesday's Child. The Divided Self had two important consequences. In it, Laing stressed the idea that mental patients are persons whose loss of a sense of self, which he termed ontological insecurity, could be charted by intelligent listeners and analyzed like multiple-layered metaphysical poems; he thought of schizophrenia as an voyage and the decisions of so-called schizophrenics as attempts to avoid existential death. A second consequence of the publication of The Divided Self was the establishment, in 1965, of a therapeutic center along more humane lines than provided either in a mental hospital or in a patient's home. Inevitably Laing pursued the implications of his discoveries about schizophrenic patients into studies of the families that produced them. And just as unbearable family relationships can distort the mental development of a child, so can a schizogenic state block the autonomy of the citizen. Furthermore, Laing, always a student of existentialism, became interested in Eastern religions and in meditation. In 1967, The Politics of Experience summarized his sociological, political and transcendental pronouncements. Under the title Knots, a collection of poems, Laing reported his own experience with cosmic forces; as a set of contradictions, the poems also show that normal men and women share with schizoid patients dilemmas about the nature and maintenance of personality, particularly on the relation of the self and others. I I-I ---? -I