Chaosophy - autonomous learning

The British Antipsychiatric movement all started in 1965 with
Ronald Laing in Kingsley Hall in the London suburbs. The
attempt to abolish the boundaries and hierarchies between psychiatrists,
nurses, and patients happened in a place well known as part
of the history of the English labor movement. This project was
distinct from that of La Borde's, because what was at stake was not
a dismissal of the institution altogether, but rather a transformation
of it from the inside. Among their group of psychiatrists responsible
for the life of Kingsley Hall, besides Laing himself, were David
Cooper and Maxwell Jones. This experiment provoked such strong
reactions of rejection from the entourage that it occasionally turned
this "free territory" into a besieged fortress. To base his criticism,
Guattari examined the case of the most famous boarder of Kingsley
Hall, Mary Barnes, who wrote with her psychiatrist, Joseph Becke,
a book describing her experience. Guattari saw in this account the
"hidden side of Anglo-Saxon antipsychiatry,"32 a mixture of neobehaviorist
dogmatism, familialism, and the most traditional
Puritanism. Mary Barnes, a nurse herself, undertook the "journey"
of schizophrenia and began a freefall regression into childhood that
took her to the threshold of death. The familialism in which Mary
Barnes locked herself up led her to deny the surrounding social
reality. What was the contribution of antipsychiatry in this case
Instead of framing this familialist drift within the patient-psychiatrist
dual relation, it pushed it to the extreme, allowing the eventual
deployment of a collective and theatrical formation exacerbating all its
effects. According to Guattari, the cure was wrongly directed because
what Mary Barnes needed was not more family, but more society.
In 1974-75, Mony ElkaIm, whom Guattari met in the United
States, returned to Europe to practice psychiatry in a poor district
of Brussels. In 1975 he and Guattari decided to band together
alternative experiments, to gather all the dissident psychiatric
schools into an international network. At this time, ElkaIm occupied
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