Madness in English-Canadian Fiction - ub-dok - Universität Trier

themselves. In transferring the burden of inadequacy from the schizophrenic to society
or the family, in particular, Laing and his contemporaries announced a shift that had
historical significance.53 Laing, along with Foucault, Szasz and others claimed that all
chronic conditions - which constitute the essence of 'true schizophrenia' for many
adherents of traditional psychiatry - represent a 'social artifact'. In other words, an
acute psychosis is transformed into a chronic state mainly by social and psychological
influences in the patient's environment. The hospital is a total institution which
invalidates human beings. The very act of diagnosis and examination no less than the
impersonal processing of mental hospital admission were perceived as degradation
ceremonials performed on patients by doctors and nursing staff. Once in the hospital,
the patient hardly ever leaves, because he manifests more and more the behaviour for
which he was hospitalised. Traditional psychiatric practice is severely criticised, for
what is called 'treatment' is really getting the patient to abandon his subjective
experimental perspective for the therapist's objective ones. The patient's experiences
are interpreted away by the therapist, and said to mean something other than what the
patient says they mean.
In the mid-Sixties Laing went significantly further. By this time, he had come to
believe that schizophrenia was merely a sociological label applied to those who had
not adapted to a mad society by those who had, and that psychiatry was not merely
detached but pathological. More and more antipsychiatrists in general came to doubt
the objective reality of 'mental illness', suggesting that to a greater or lesser degree
mental illness is a repressive invention of society and psychiatry. According to
Scheflen schizophrenia is merely a convenient label used by society for coping with
troublesome deviants. In order to deal with this deviance, society uses a network of
institutions, all of which serve to limit and stabilise the deviance and to keep it under
control.54 Rather than being an illness, schizophrenia came to be regarded as a social
fact and a political event and the schizophrenic's experience as indictment of the
conventional world's standards of what is sane and insane. His or her confinement
and punishment in the mental hospital thus necessitated a critical appraisal of "the
larger context of the civic order of society - that is, of the political order, of the ways
persons exercise control and power over one another"55.
53Another theorist who consistently condemned the patriarchal family as primary institution of sexual and political
repression in general, and of female enslavement in particular, was Wilhelm Reich. Much like Freud, Reich found sexual
repression at the heart of every neurosis and psychosis. Its purpose was the ultimate and total submission of the
individual to the family, the state and work. David Cooper, in his book The Death of the Family, presents a poetic
summary of much of Reich's and Laing's condemnation of the nuclear family, the family or state-like tyranny over
individual liberty, sexual repression, and society's misunderstanding and brutalisation of madness.
54 cf. Scheflen, Albert: Levels of Schizophrenia.- New York: Brunner und Mazel, 1981.-
55 Laing, R. D.: The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness.- New York: Random House, 1960.- p. 107
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