PARTISAN REVIEW
111
dore Lidz, and Lyman Wynne had hit tentatively upon a number of con–
clusions regarding the relation between particular individuals labeled
schizophrenic and their families of origin. In the fifties and early sixties
Laing came to conclusions similar to theirs, and began to publish them in
a series of books whose popularity has made familiar even to lay people
the dynamics of psychosis and the rationale for family therapy. In a
book like
The Divided Self,
Laing worked scrupulously to locate and
understand the nexal dynamics of the schizophrenic family. His object
was not to assign blame or to discover new worlds but to understand the
sources of interpersonal mystification, and to see whether the fiercely
consistent perspective of psychotic patients might not have something to
teach the rest of us.
In his subsequent writings, though, Laing came more and more to
grow restive in the role of alien therapist and sensitive observer. The
writing became consequently more polemical and, in fact, insensitive. In
a 1962 article entitled "Series and Nexus in the Family," Laing wrote
satirically of a fictitious Peter and Paul, members of a nuclear family in
which the demand for reciprocity was seen by Laing as coercive and
intolerable:
If
Peter is prepared to make sacrifices for Paul: so Paul should be
prepared to' make sacrifices for Peter, or else he is selfish, ungrate–
ful, callous, ruthless, etc. "Sacrifice" under these circumstances
consists in Peter impoverishing himself to do something for Paul.
It
is the tactic of
enforced debt .
One way of putting this is that each person
invests in the other.
In his essay "Self, Symptom and Society," Peter Sedgwick responded to
the passage as follows:
The blindness of these passages is unbelievable. For, of course,
assumptions of a continuing reciprocity, along with anticipations of
a possible limit to the relationship in the event of a non-return of
affection or action, are very common indeed outside family ghettoes
and even outside families.
Further,
To "invest in" another being's anticipated response is seen as literally
capitalistic and hence disreputable: the "debt" of a relationship has
to be "enforced," a deliberate
tactic.
The converse might be ex–
pected to follow: that the sacrifice of one individual for another
ought to continue indefinitely even if it remains unacknowledged or
despised. But ought we to expect such saintly expenditure of
infinite pains in our families?
What we get in Laing, in other words, is a growing conviction that
