116
ROBERT BOYERS
describe bogeymen in the way nineteenth-century sufferers legitimately
could, but such descriptions will not address the situation to which most
of us respond.
Laing has described the tactic of enforced"debt, Schatzman the case
of the castrating and persecuting father. In the view of Laing and his col–
leagues, these are closely related phenomena: in both normal and dis–
turbed families, violations of individual freedom are the rule, not the
exception. In some inexplicable way, liberation has become for coun ter–
culture thinkers and analysts not an intention of man, but a function of
nature that is everywhere perversely denied. Thus, for Schatzman, a
significant corrective to earlier theories like the Oedipus complex is what
the
anthropolo~st
George Devereux has called the Laius complex, ac–
cording to which agency for disturbances like Schreber's is located
squarely in the bearer of authority. As developed in Schatzman's book,
the notion seems plausible enough, but one wonders how useful it can be
as a general explanatory principle for what goes on in families. Most
fathers do not in fact tremble at the affection they feel for their chil–
dren, do not need in fact to convert paternal love to hate nor perform
any of the other transformations we would describe as symptom forma–
tions. Why should Schatzman make so much of Devereux's idea, in–
teresting though it is? On the final page of his book he clearly indicates
that we all have much to learn from the Schreber case about persecutions
with which we are, presumably, at least intermittently familiar. To
speak, as Schatzman does, of "secret premises about 'normal' family life
that most people share" is to suggest that there is something dire to be
discovered in the dynamics of family interaction which the courageous
among us will find.
What J should like to suggest here, ever so briefly, is that liberation
is by no means an intention of nature, but a distinctly human intention
that exists alongside a good many others. We may not, I should think,
fear to encourage those reciprocities Laing indicts any more than we may
fear to encourage that authoritativeness that is a function of every bind–
ing institutional order. I have a terribly uneasy feeling when spokesmen
for the counterculture speak of authoritarian institutions, for they
appear to confuse with them such things as simple restraints and limita–
tions. Thus, for Laing, it is a violation of nature to suggest that families
may well have to train children to invest in one another if they are to
learn what relation customarily entails; for Schatzman, families interfere
with nature when, either deliberately or casually, they obscure the
nature of perception as moral choice, when they enable members to con–
ceal from themselves or one another the dynamics of their interaction
