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-- he has apparently little sympathy with the notion that what binds
people to one another has to do with associations sunk so deep that
frequently they are not much available to scrutiny. Fidelity is not often
a product of scrupulous analysis, after all. When institutions fail us we
inevitably demand a demystification of their characteristic operations,
but those of us who get along reasonably well in these institutions will
not compulsively make such demands in the interests of some abstract
clarity or authenticity as cold as it is finally disappointing.
The book by Joseph Berke and Mary Barnes is the account of a by
now famous therapeutic relationship in which a schizophrenic middle–
aged woman was permitted to regress to a stage of almost total infan–
tilism in order to be reborn again. The most interesting aspect of the
book is the alternation between two points of view reflecting on the
same events and experiences. Like other works coming out of the Laing
circle, the book has a good deal to say about the way families work, but
inevitably in what we are shown they work terribly or not at all. To be
compelled to the idea that "psychosis was our culture's means of arche–
typal renewal of the inner self," after all, would indicate a rather dire
view of what the culture's remaining viable institution, the family, has
done to most of us. In this view, those of us who cope, who learn to
"invest" and get by, do so most often at the expense of our inner selves .
It
is a familiar argument in a time when the educated classes walk about
with a perpetual bad conscience. But I am not so concerned with that
argument as with another more prominently considered in the book -–
namely, that it is illegitimate to manage or to handle people, as though
to do so were inevitably a denial of their freedom and a reduction of
such people to the status of objects. Now I don't know that management
isn't an aspect of every human relation that endures, and I am certain
that it is intrinsic to the therapeutic relation. Why this should be so hard
for the Laingian therapist to acknowledge puzzles me. Always lurking in
these works is the suggestion that because families sometimes manipulate
their members intolerably, and because manipulation is so much a part
of contemporary political systems, those of us who know better will
surely refrain from "handling" of any kind. Thus, a psychiatrist who
finds a patient potentially disruptive at a session involving many people
and who has her removed is roundly condemned as a blind and anxious
tyrant who might be seen, with only slight adjustment of the con–
ventional perspective, as more severely disturbed than the patient.
Similarly, attempts to break down rigid staff-patient relationships are
mocked as deceitful and inadequate in most mental hospitals. "Patients
were supposed to talk honestly about their feelings, and were often
