Chaosophy - autonomous learning

should be appreciated. Either antipsychiatry will be taken up by a
mass practice which will profoundly modifY the attitudes and power
relations in daily practice, or it will remain what it still is, by force of
circumstance: a literary phenomenon, and as such, it has already
been "recuperated" to a large extent by the most reformist, even
retrograde currents, that never retreat before verbal concessions.
We have to admit that up until now there have been no lasting
experiments in antipsychiatry. All have been gallant last stands that
were then liquidated by the orthodox institutions. Until now, not
a single mass movement has pushed forward a true antipsychiatry
(Cooper's experiment in Wing 21 in London was not followed up,
no more than those of the House-hold, like Kingsley Hall, Basaglia
had to leave Gorizia, etc.)
Antipsychiatry lays itself particularly open to the reformists'
"recuperations" because on the doctrinal level it did not divest itself
of a humanistic and personalistic ideology. Laing's antipsychiatry
less than the others, but he is in a way the Left's voice in a line of
thought which one must recognize as being, frankly, situated on
the whole at a remove from the contributions of Marx and Freud
regarding the understanding of mental and social alienation.
Laing is divided within himself: a revolutionary when he breal{s
with psychiatric practice, his written work escapes him and despite
himself, it is used to ends that are foreign to his inspiration. It is
perhaps in this light that one can explain his present research in Asia.
When Laing writes that the most important new phenomena
is "the increasing discontent with which all theory or study of the
individual in isolation from his context is received" (The Self and
Others), it is the most traditional of family psychotherapy and
sectorial psychiatry that are held accountable for this. When he
holds society responsible for the genesis of psychosis, one only
remembers that, for him, the cure should come from a "sincere
confirmation between the parents." One feels relieved by such a