I remember an old black and white photograph of a boy who appears to be about eight years-old. He is wearing a cloth cap, a thin jacket and his hands are in the air. There is a look of shock, fear and confusion on his face. Snow seems to drift down lazily from a gray sky, other people, men and women as well as other children, are walking or standing near him in a similar pose. They are wearing arm bands with a yellow Star of David. There are soldiers standing near him, wearing heavy coats, carrying weapons, holding large dogs and they seem to be laughing. I don’t remember exactly whether the background to this photo is the Warsaw ghetto or the Auschwitz concentration camp, but I think there may be more than one image of this boy out there, in collections of photos of the Holocaust. I think of this image as one of arrival rather than of departure.
I see the boy as arriving at a concentration camp.
I do not know this boy’s name. I cannot say for sure what happened to him. It is almost certain that he perished not long after this photo was taken. I find myself becoming emotional even as I type these words now. He probably died, along with many others, in a most horrible way, in that hideous factory of death. I came accross this photo in the seventh grade, when I was studying the Holocaust and purchased a book on the subject that was much too difficult for me then, “The War Against the Jews” by Lucy S. Dawidowicz. I still have a copy of that book – which I recently rediscovered, like an old friend, in a sidewalk bookstall in Manhattan. Incidentally, I recommend this book or any other on this topic to friends – as painful as the subject is to read about – in order to help children, especially, to discuss the Holocaust, something which must be a part of the education of every human being living in the aftermath of the horror. My child has studied this episode in human history and the civil rights movement too, and we have talked about what they mean. I hope that we will always do so.
In 1968, another eight year-old boy arrived at Newark airport, on a bitterly cold day in the month of January. He looked a lot like that young German-Jewish boy, decades earlier, arriving at Auschwitz. He also wore an inappropriately thin cloth jacket and a dazed expression. His father had been executed by a firing squad in his native Cuba. His mother had been detained and not permitted to leave the island. He was hungry and frightened. He had not one cent in the world. He was with relatives who may have seen him as an unwanted burden. He did not know the language spoken in this strange and very cold country. As he departed from his native land the previous day, he also had been laughed-at by soldiers in green military fatigues, carrying weapons, with a banner behind them that said in Spanish: “Revolution!”
I was the eight year-old boy who arrived in that airport in January of 1968. I did not understand then why people shoot and torture others because of their political beliefs, or for their religious beliefs, or – as I soon came to see on American television which, amazingly enough, was available in “living color” – because of their dark skin. I am not sure that I understand it very well even now. I doubt that anyone – especially those “experts” who claim that they do – really does understand this. I do know that witnessing such things injures people deeply, especially children, for generations to come. I know that these injuries done to children hurt them anew every day of their lives. I have come to accept, as well, that if it is true that we are all “trapped in history,” to use Tolstoy’s phrase, then it is also the case that we cannot escape the tragic and scarring choices that will arise between love and hate, between compassion and understanding in our own lives, ALL of our lives.
We will all have to decide now whether we wish to stand with those men holding the weapons and laughing or with those women, children and old people with their hands in the air, being marched to their undeserved enslavement and murder.
Many of us will be hurt as children. Many of us will make the wrong choices as a result of these injuries. Many of us will respond to victimization by victimizing others. Many of us will refuse to examine the ways in which we ourselves come to resemble the people who have frightened and hurt us. No one has taught me more about living with and understanding emotional pain and the nature of the choices forced upon us by great evil than the philosophers whose books I have devoured over the years. Among those thinkers, I include R.D. Laing.
R.D. Laing remains an important and controversial psychoanalyst and philosopher. His ideas are still provocative and powerful. They continue to irritate the psychiatric establishment. Nothing recommends a thinker better, to my mind, than the ability to irritate the professional and academic establishments years after his death. From my first encounter with Laing’s writings in the late eighties, as a university student, I knew that this was a thinker whose ideas I would come to know well.
I have now read most of Laing’s published works – there are things in small magazine and other materials that are difficult to find that I do not know – and I have read a great deal about him. I am certain that Laing’s work has saved lives. It has inspired a great deal of interpretative commentary and reaction. In my judgment, Laing’s philosophical contributions, apart from his work as a therapist, are significant and place him in the front rank of phenomenological thinkers. In what follows, I wish to say something about about Laing’s understaning of evil, of the harm that we do to one another and to ourselves, and of the unavoidable task of coming to terms with the capacity within each of us both to cause and to suffer as well as to overcome such harm.
My method is personal and subjective. It is not an attempt at value-neutrality, objectivity or statistical analysis. like Laing, I am a phenomenologist with an interest in the theory of interpretation or “hermeneutics.” According to the “Dictionary of Philosophy,” the word “hermeneutics” means “the theory of interpretation first of texts, and secondly of the whole social, historical and psychological world. The method is contrasted with objective scientific method by Weber and Dilthey.”
I begin with (and from) my own limited and partial perspective on things. I do not believe that I can step out of the human condition in order to examine it. I am certain that I participate in that which I seek to understand, in the “life-world” of human meanings and interactions, so that any serious effort to know another human being can only really succeed if there is an openning up to that other person’s experience or subjectivity. This is more difficult than it may seem, for this “openning up” must come from a perspective of shared humanity and genuine empathy.
There is no way that such communication, authentic communication or understanding, is even possible in the absence of a mutual willingness to accept vulnerability, to risk openning up to the “message” or “meaning” of the other:
“When two or more persons are in relation, the behavior of each towards the other is mediated by the experience by each of the other, and the experience of each is mediated by the behavior of each. There is no contiguity between the behavior of one person and that of the other. Much human behavior can be seen as a unilateral or bilateral attempt to eliminate experience. A person may treat another as though he were not a person [because this is always safer].”
Laing has said of the genuine effort to communicate with and understand any other human being:
“I think it is clear that by understanding I do not mean a purely intellectual process. For understanding one might say love. But no word has been more prostituted. What is necessary, though not enough, is a capacity to know how the other person is experiencing himself and the world, including oneself. If one cannot understand him, one is hardly in a position to begin to love him in any effective way.”
I shall begin with Laing’s recognition of the inherent capacity for evil within all of us and also for “mystification,” that is, the ways in which we mask the harms that we do to others as forms of “concern” for others, and the harms that are done to us within families and social groups as benefits received by us; then I note that Laing was particularly troubled that therapists not disguise their own imposition of power upon helpless patients, a process that is never innocent nor entirely un-political, as ways of “helping” or “loving” them. Finally, I say a little about Laing’s ideas concerning “transcendence” and “love.” Love is an ambiguous concept for Laing. He saw that it might be a mask for domination, but also realized that:
“The main fact of life for me is love or its absence. Whether life is worth living depends for me on whether there is love in life. Without a sense of it, or even the memory of an hallucination of it, I would lose heart completely. When one studies human biology, one will hardly ever come accross the term or the concept and very little evidence of it.”
I agree with Laing about the crucial importance of love and about the bond that results from genuine communication and that can arise even from a therapeutic relationship.
II.
For Laing, “normality” is a troublesome term. All societies deform and constrain the spiritual possiblities, the freedom and authenticity of persons by forcing them to conform to what is deemed a correct way of being. In other words, to accept a doubtful official “normality” that is actually a kind of madness and violence. This is merely the socially acceptable form of madness and violence – acceptable and useful to powerful elites and establishments anyway. Needless to say, some forms of imposed normality are preferable to others. One is much better off in the U.S. coping with social or commercial pressures to purchase a “pet rock,” say, than in the former Soviet Union or its former satellites, where one is more violently pressured to adore the worker’s paradise, even as it ships one off to the concentration camp.
To be sure, there must be standards of social behavior and cooperation among citizens if societies are to work. Yet the process of acculturation and socialization in most families and societies in the contemporary era, certainly in places like the United States and Great Britain, is much more ambitious and devastating (if also more subtle) than such mild phrases might suggest. This process, again, must not be compared to the brutal repressions routinely employed in totalitarian states, whether of the right or the left.
Advanced industrialized societies require a certain sort of individual, a “docile subject” (to use Foucault’s terminology), willing to perform the duties allotted to him without too many inconvenient qualms or hesitations, especially of the annoying moral sort that get in the way of what is advantageous for the collectivity as defined by a mysterious “they.” Thus, it becomes useful for oppressors to deny the reality of morality too.
Moral freedom may be a universal gift of the human subject, but it is a highly troublesome characteristic when your goal as a maximum leader or dictator is to get people to organize and work on the difficult task of moving, say, all those Jews into those trains and getting them off in a timely fashion to the concentration camps – which themselves need to be run efficiently, of course, by “true patriots.” The same goes for getting “comrades” to spend a little time serving as “volunteers” on the firing squads that execute dissident intellectuals in places like Castro’s Cuba.
If you want to get good American boys and girls to do the right thing in the fight against terrorism and not to ask too many questions at places like Abu Gharib, well, it is important to make sure that they have been “brought up right” and been “taught the right values.” Evidently, a few of them have been brought up in such a way that the events of Abu Gharib took place, without too many questions being asked – but they are being asked now, and by judges and prosecutors. In the U.S. and other free societies we cannot claim that our citizens are morally perfect, but only that the imperfections are discussed publicly, acknowledged when necessary, and the gulty are held accountable – after being accorded due process and only after that guilt is proven beyond a reasonable doubt.
Nothing excuses the actions at Abu Gharib, which are attributable to the individuals who committed them; and not to political leaders, like President Bush or Secretary Rumsfeld, who – far from ordering them – understood that they might be held accountable for such actions in the court of public opinion. The U.S. does not, as a matter of policy, resort to such tactics. It does not have to do so.
As always, Shakespeare is way ahead of us on this, reminding us in Henry V that: “Each man’s duty is the king’s … but his soul is his own.” The actions of the torturers were their actions, not the president’s nor the nation’s, because they were not a matter of systematic policy or governmental directive.
Laing defines normality, as I say, in terms of a “state of complicity in social fantasy systems” that lead to a surrender of what is most authentically individual and creative in the “normalized” person. Perhaps the utterly banal Adolf Eichman, as described by Hannah Arendt, who is without an iota of rebellion but thoroughly at the service of the society in which he was reared, is the best example of Laing’s fully normal person. In a mood of palpable exasperation at the so-called “normality” of the architects of the Holocausts and Gulags, of the UMAP concentration camps in Cuba that housed “sexual deviants,” at the planners of the deliberate destruction of villages in order to “save” them, Laing states: “What we call normal is the product of repression, denial, splitting, projection, introjection and other forms of destructive action on experience … It is radically estranged from the structure of being.”
Laing believed that this proces of turning persons into “normal” citizens or “docile subjects” might best be described as a brutal violation of people, coupled with the myth that they were really being loved or educated. Some people in extreme cases found it necessary to cope with such violation, with such a discontinuity between description and reality in their lives, by encouraging madness as a survival mechanism in order to avoid the total destruction of their spirits.
Madness might then be seen as a kind of journey inward, or “metanoia” of the spirit, aimed at putting together the pieces of the psyche and regaining the strength to continue a life’s journey in a more integrated and spiritually renewed fashion that allows for proper affect and relatedness to others. For some people, and this seems to include quite a few philosophers, such a journey might become essential to survival, so that even well-intentioned obstructions by psychiatrists or other willing agents of conformity or “adjustment” to some arbitrary standard of normality might prove disastrous.
“Madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be breakthrough. It is potentially liberation and renewal as well as enslavement and existential death.”
Again:
“I shall attempt to develop a little further the concept of transformation of a potentially liberatory kind. I suggested the term ‘metanoia.’ It is a traditional term. it is the Greek New Testament term, translated in English as ‘rependance,’ in French as ‘conversion.’ Literally, it means a change of mind.”
Such a journey, as I shall suggest below, may require some honesty about what it is that one is doing in putting those people on those trains to Auschwitz, for example, or to Stalin’s Gulags in Siberia, or (to a much lesser degree) in guarding prisoners at Abu Gharib. Ironically, it is the people who formulate policies of mass extermination who are rarely seen as crazy themselves – and this, as Laing suggests, may be the craziest thing of all. But that sort of honesty in a public setting is impossible in anything but what Popper describes as the “open” societies of the Western and free world generally, where absolute power and authority as well as responsibility, rests EXCLUSIVELY with the people.
Most of the world’s people do not enjoy such liberties. They have no hope for the sort of personal freedom that makes self-realization possible.
III.
How is this transformation to be effected? What is the mechanism by which the therapeutic relation can help to bring about the successful completion of this journey? Laing speaks of “transcendence and love,” but also of “transcendence THROUGH love.” Here, once again, the parallels to gnosticism and kaballistic mysticism are obvious and fruitful.
Laing recognized the importance of genuine love as a healing and redemptive power in human life. The love that accepts the “being” of the other, that is respectful of the autonomy and independence of the other. Laing defines authentic love as “that which lets the other be.” One is reminded of Augustine’s famous sentence, “I hope that you will be.” The essence of this love is a total recognition and even a celebration of the other’s freedom, autonomy, independence, otherness. It is the opposite of incarcerating dissidents and sexual deviants.
All human being is “being-with,” that is, for phenomenologists and existentialists, identity “is” in terms of one’s relations with others – and this very much includes the therapeutic relation – so that the possiblities of “being with,” of the development of one’s full potentialities in a true loving relation and relatedness to others, are incalculable and unlimited; whereas in our normally alienated and false relatedness to others and the world, in which we are (as Heidegger would express it) “forgetful of being,” yet totally “adjusted” ego-selves, we can only live a falsehood. Each of us must decide at a crucial stage in our lives whether to live our own truths or a falsehood, but the path to salvation is only open to those who choose their truth, who choose “themselves” in Nietzsche’s terms.
It is all too easy to be filled with frustration and anger in the “absolutely normal” condition of the “true believer” typically found in fascist or Marxist societies, and ocasionally in Western societies too, alienated from his or her true self. In such a state, we shrivel up – and in a spiritual sense, we die, or at least some of us do. It is then possible for us to act seemingly without moral qualms, for example, by failing to attend to our responsiblities; or, much worse, in those “closed” societies where such a thing is possible for some very alienated people, by ushering neighbors into the crematoria or as agents of the state employed in the torture of witnesses.
In a less exlicit way than Jung, Laing gestures at the need for a gnostic encounter with the numinous, a re-connection with the self-validating mystical experience – so similar to the experience of the schizophrenic journey – underlying all religious symbols and archetypes.
Commenting on these notable affinities between jung and laing, Professor Daniel Burston says:
“Laing’s affinities with (and indebtedness to) Jung become even more obvious when he details the nature and extent of our collective alienation from the ‘inner’ world and condemns the ego as an agent of adaptation to ‘external’ reality, equating it with the ‘false self.’ Though he never said so succintly, the Freudian view of the ego evoked his contempt because of the premium it placed on adapting to reality, relinquishing fantasy, and so on; in this way, he felt, it devalued contact with the realms of reverie and contemplation that earlier civilizations had cultivated carefully. By Laing’s reckoning, our estrangement from phantasy and ‘inner’ experience is just as deterimental to our sanity, in the long run, as the psychotic’s estrangement from the external world around him.”
A balanced and centered reorientation towards others allowing equal importance to the inner and outer human realities might be described as the fulfillment of the schizophrenic journey. It can result from the reconnection to the archetypal images and spiritual sources within the self that allow us to open up to others, lovingly and peacefully. The freedom that belongs to us, then, is the freedom that comes from “owning one’s own life,” achieving individuation, being something more than a social role, a functionary, and instead a person in the full sense of the word.
This is the only salvation that may be available to us.
In the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus is quoted as saying:
“When you make the two into one, and when you make the inner like the outer and the outer like the inner, and the upper like the lower, and when you make the male and female into a single one, so that the male will not be male nor the female be female, when you make eyes in place of an eye, a hand in place of a hand, a foot in place of a foot, an image in place of an image, then you will enter [the Kingdom].”
The idea that knowledge of our own deepest nature, “therapy” in the full sense of the word, is also an intuition of the nature of the “divine” or, in secular terms, of the true nature of the universe all around us, is a prominent feature of both Christian and Hebrew mysticism; and it is also, fascinatingly, in keeping with some of the latest findings in science. For these early Christians understood that, “knowledge of ourselves is knowledge of God.”
IV.
I now close my eyes and conjure the image of that faded photograph of a frightened boy arriving at the gates of an earthly hell. I am always overcome with pity and anger when I contemplate this image. It still seems to me that this is the image of the twentieth century – and perhaps of the dark side of all centuries: laughter at the fear and suffering of an innocent child, whose offense is merely “to be.” This is what makes the Holocaust, the ‘shoa,’ so emblematic of all such horrors. The hatred directed at that child, the joy in the faces of those hideous creatures that resemble men as they contemplate his arrival in the death camp, together with their delight in what would become his fate, all speak of the depravities that might result from the brutalizations that make free human beings into willing and unquestioning servants of the state.
Yet this image contains a spark of hope as well. A few paces behind the boy a young woman is walking with her hands held high. There is a smile on her face for that boy. There is a strength in her bearing, along with a dignity and grace that I will never forget. She is poised, beautiful and, I sense, uncowed by those men. Her concern and charm are directed at the boy. She must have been a very brave and loving young woman. She reminds me of what human beings are capable of achieving, even in such circumstances.
I associate this image with the portraits of the Virgin Mary in Western art. Also, it brings to mind the depictions of the goddess in Mediterrenean culture that pre-date Christianity and which fascinated writers such as Robert graves, for example, but I think of it even when I consider the lives of major twentieth century moral figures who happen to be women, such as the Jewish-Christian Saint Edith Stein or Simon Weil.
This image of feminine compassion represents for me the possiblity of transcendence through love. Perhaps this single image that I have been describing might serve to illustrate the message of Laing’s life-work, which is simply the resourcefulness and genius of the human psyche in defending itself from, and in coping with, evil and pain through spiritual growth. That message is captured, as well, in the closing verse of W.H. Auden’s great poem, “September 1, 1939” – as Freud knew, the poets have always appreciated the wisdom of the unconscious:
Defenseless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.