Chaosophy - autonomous learning

6
LAING
IVIDE
The clear-cut alternatives between good and evil, the normal and
the pathological, the healthy and the mad, are perhaps about to
undergo a profound reshuffling, anticipating the awareness we
may have of such a process. It became obvious that a number of
judgments, which yesterday seemed to be self-evident, are now
vacillating, that a number of roles no longer function according to
the norms of common sense. Deviance has acquired authority.
There is now a revolutionary front for homosexuals, an information
group for common law prisoners, "Journals for Madness," etc.
The importance of Ronald Laing, one of the initiators of English
antipsychiatry, is to be estimated in terms of this new context,
as Daniele Sabourin says, within the framework of this "counterculture
movement in which politics and the university come
together."! Laing is first and foremost a deviant psychiatrist. For us
he is first this disheveled and somewhat euphoric character whose
irruption with Cooper at the conference on Alienated Childhood,
organized in Paris in 1957 by Maud Mannoni and the journal
Recherches, had the effect of a bombshell.
The whole psychiatric community is talking about Laing's
antipsychiatry. But is Laing still speaking to the psychiatrists He is
already far away, very far away from their world and their concerns.
He has himself taken the "trip" which he advocated for schizophrenics,
he has abandoned his London activities and has gone to
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