The cause, of course,
was to exorcise the double bind from civilised life, and this meant
not only diagnosing its presence but breaking the habit in oneself.
There is no way to do this but in company, and so Kingsley Hall was
set up, that first household for those who either feared for their
sanity or looked for something better, while longing for
conviviality and meaning. It was run, as were its successors , on
two major principles. The first was: “It’s all up for grabs”; the
second, “Everything that is not forbidden is allowed, and everything
that is not allowed is forbidden”.
Axioms such as these
produced a great deal of animation, and if some of it was confusing
the general effect was all that a therapeutic household might
reasonably ask for. Indeed, it was much more, for Kingsley Hall was
one of the centres of sixties’ life; it attracted a wildly
interesting network of people who, once fallen under Laing’s spell,
gave life to the place and between them gave birth to other
ventures, such as the conference on the Dialectics of Liberation.
Ah, the dear dead days! It was then that I first met Laing, who
later invited me to join the Philadelphia Association. He did so
because of my interest as a social anthropologist in such things as
shamanism, which I had recently come into powerful contact with.
Laing, there is not doubt, had the shamanic temperament and
recognised the fact. This gift, which so often begins as a disorder,
is not recognised as such in western psychiatry, which therefore
cannot use its therapeutic advantages: a fact which, of course,
underlies so much of Laing’s writing on ‘anti-psychiatry’ which
surmounts to no less than what psychiatry should be doing if it
truly understood the facts of the case.
At any rate, this
gift of his was often difficult to live with both for himself and
for those around him. I once accused him of hitting below the belt
during a business meeting. At which he snarled that I should know by
now that there was no difference between above and below. He was a
master in this form of psychic aikido, as her termed it, and the
Chinese restaurant round the corner from his house saw many such an
encounter, as when he told a visiting bigwig that though he might
work with him, he didn’t see how he could ever be his friend. It
reminds me that some years ago we were talking of Californians and
he asked me whether I could really ever befriend such nice, normal,
eager, boring people. How he enjoyed making mischief in such
company, given less than half a chance, for what annoyed him in the
conventional was not only that it was boring, but that it was full
of lies.
As for real, thick,
black lies, they always roused his combativeness and his ire, and he
could hunt them down mercilessly. Lies destroy love, whether they be
in the family or in the institution: and as far as institutional
life is build on lies, it should be destroyed, was his constant
argument.
He was himself a
deeply loving man, if often rough, and one who fought his way
continually back to moral principles: I shall not easily forget the
time at the Ojai Foundation when he allowed himself to be made into
a scapegoat for the complaints of all and sundry at the conference,
suffered some grievous blows at the hands of a would be exorcist,
and brought understanding at the end through an extraordinary sermon
on unconditional love. He did many unconditional things in his life
but this was his finest and his saving grace.
Ronald David Laing,
born October 7, 1927; died August 23, 1989.
