Outside of a Dog (17 page)

Though this extreme phenomenology still seems to me wrong, her position was appealing, and useful, in two distinct ways. First, it succeeded in crediting the inward world of the schizophrenic,
and hence welcomed such people back into the world of potential discourse. They were not to be regarded as mad, or deluded, or wrong. They weren’t allowed their own reality, which would be
patronizing, they simply had it.

Laing makes the point explicitly, and strikingly, in
The Divided Self
, when he remarks that understanding a patient’s ‘existential position’ is not a purely intellectual
process: ‘For “understanding” one might say love,’ and that such love is impossible without crediting the way in which the patient experiences himself and the world. Though
deviant inward realities can be resistant to conventional forms of therapeutic intervention, individuals could be helped to accommodate that reality to the competing claims of the world.

And secondly, of course, it was a period in which wayward and extreme acts of imagination – some of them prompted by drugs of various types and potencies – had entered as close to
the mainstream of middle-class culture as had ever been the case. Formerly the prerogative of bards, poets and seers to seek the extremes of vision, now swathes of middle-class kids were doing
their heads in, taking trips, challenging the boundaries of what could be said, and seen, and thought, and felt, and experienced. Taking the Acid Test. Schizophrenics were mad? Mad was out there,
mad was cool.

In his 1965 Preface to the paperback edition of
The Divided Self
, Laing observes that psychiatry does not have to be repressive, it need not deny the validity of unusual acts of
perception or deviant lines of thought: it can be ‘and some psychiatrists are, on the side of transcendence, of genuine freedom, and of true human growth . . . Thus I would wish to emphasise
that our normal “adjusted” state is too often the abdication of ecstasy, the betrayal of our true potentialities, that many of us are only too successful in acquiring a false self to
adjust to false realities.’

So he was no mere relativist, Laing, arguing for seeing the other chap’s point of view, however loopy it might seem. No, there is constant iteration distinguishing the ‘true’
or ‘genuine’ from the ‘false’. What is radical here is the change of criteria by which the one is distinguished from the other: criteria which involve existential notions of
authenticity and good faith, and which credit the individual’s will towards self-expression and the search for transcendence and delight.

It took some time to get an appointment with Laing, but when we met in his consulting rooms in Belsize Park, he made it abundantly clear that I had his full attention. He sat me in a comfortable
chair only a couple of feet in front of his, because he sat next to his desk, not behind it.

‘Tell me about yourself,’ he said.

I had done so, formally, in my letter of application to the Philadelphia Association, which I could see on his desk. I was anxious that I wouldn’t interest him. His business was with
psychotics, whereas I was a pure-bred neurotic, and afraid that my symptoms – writer’s block, uncertain relations with women, failure to commit to work – would be uninteresting to
someone usually engaged with the seriously mad. I had resolved – I was very excited at the prospect of meeting him – that I would be as honest and as accurate as possible in talking
about myself. No bullshit, nothing
academic
: that was, after all, what I was trying to escape.

‘I’m not sure I know what I’m doing,’ I said. ‘I’ve made a lot of bad choices. Dubious ones anyway...’

He raised his eyebrows, his unblinking eyes (can they really have been black?) never leaving mine, preternaturally calm, unwaveringly attentive. He had the quiet dignity and demeanour of a wise
man.

He was publicly candid about himself: he had learned a new way of being, taught himself how to breathe properly, meditated, rebirthed, taken every imaginable prohibited substance, sought new
models. The result was impressive: I had rarely encountered such a compelling self-contained stillness, though I had the feeling, too, that it was designed, a little, to impress. That he
wasn’t merely seeking some inward wisdom, he wanted to lead. He wanted you to believe in him. (His son Adrian referred to him, ironically, as the Guru from Glasgow, though his view mellowed,
and he was later to say that he got on with his father much better once he had died.)

‘. . . I shouldn’t have done a PhD, shouldn’t have finished it. If I’d had more strength I would have given it up. Maybe gone back to the States? And Barbara – my
wife. It isn’t working.’

‘Why?’

‘I’m jealous of her analyst, and want to take over his place. I want to be everything for her: therapist, protector, mentor, lover. Yet the more I try to support and love her the
less it works.’

‘Does she love you?’

Curiously, I hadn’t thought much about that. She
needed
me, which was something different. But loved? She said she did, sometimes.

He stayed silent, and motionless.

‘I know, I know,’ I said. ‘It will lead to trouble. It already has. I can’t seem to learn anything about love.’

‘What are you reading?’ he asked.

‘Nothing that helps. The more I read things designed to help, or to explain, the worse it gets. I’m sick of serious reading. I hate wisdom. It makes me feel ill, and I can feel my
mind closing down. What am I reading? Agatha Christie, mostly. They’re badly written, but I really like Hercule Poirot.’

He smiled. ‘I like him too.’

‘My problem is that I need to find a way both to employ the little grey cells, and to give them a rest. I don’t know how to do it. Can I ask you a question?’

‘Of course.’

‘What does your training programme actually consists of? The literature isn’t clear about that. I would be uneasy about anything simply academic . . .’

‘That’s because there is no set programme. Everyone has to go to the weekly training seminars, but after that it depends on the individual – on who you are and what you need
– and that can range from deep analytic therapy to Chinese dancing . . .’

Chinese dancing? Me? I had a quick, harrowing image of myself in a mandarin’s gown, doing some sort of courtly, balletic movements in front of an emperor.

He paused for a moment. ‘If you decide to join us’ – such a lovely way to put it, that I hardly registered that I had just been accepted to train with the Association –
‘I think you can be seeing clients within six months.’

Six months! And after that, over the next few years I could begin to build a practice, cut down the teaching to part-time, and eventually make my escape from academic life. I left Laing grateful
and delighted, and began to attend the weekly seminars led by his colleagues Hugh Crawford and John Heaton.

I didn’t enjoy them much. I was an outsider joining an on-going process and group, and there was no social time to get to know people: we all struggled to fit the weekly seminar into
already crowded lives, and no one (including me) had time or the desire for a drink before or after the seminars. Or perhaps some of them went off and didn’t invite me?

But my unease wasn’t primarily social. I had walked into a group of people comfortably employing a language heavily dependent on the usual sources of Merleau-Ponty and Husserl, with which
I was familiar but which I didn’t speak, and which sounded unconvincing and clunky to my ears. But the deference paid by the group to these phenomenological mentors was as nothing compared to
the deference they paid to Laing. Not in person – he rarely attended the training seminars, being far too busy – but in absentia. He was quoted extensively and uncritically; it was
taken as a fact that any sentence beginning: ‘Ronnie says . . .’ was about to enumerate a truth. I suppose the early Freudians, too, acted like disciples. It is hard to imagine one of
them saying, ‘Herr Professor Freud believes this or that, but he is wrong.’ You can imagine the silence, the reports back to Freud, the potential ostracism.

After a few months, we had a seminar in which we discussed A.R. Luria’s
The Man with a Shattered World
, an account of a man with appalling brain damage suffered in the First World
War, trying to regain some sense of himself and the world.

‘I have a lot of trouble with this book,’ I said. ‘I think it is not about a man, but about his brain, and that it never makes the distinction clearly, if it can be made at all
. . .’

An earnest fellow-trainee, who was always keenly, and competitively, involved in our discussions, looked at me disapprovingly.

‘Ronnie says . . .’ he began.

‘I don’t give a fuck what Ronnie says,’ I replied irritably. ‘Why don’t you tell me what you say.’ I suspect Ronnie would have approved of this, but the group
didn’t. I decided to shut up. They were glad.

I couldn’t wait to get home, and fumed all the way up the motorway back to Warwickshire.

‘Fuck Ronnie,’ I mused, ‘but even more fuck the Ronnians! Who needs them?’

And at this point – could one say fortunately? – my mother died. She’d been ill with breast cancer, had a mastectomy, suffered grievously and demandingly, and within a couple
of years it had metastasized into her liver. Barbara and I went to Long Island to see her through her last weeks. Our only consolation during the period was six-month-old baby Anna, whom we volubly
and visibly and overweaningly adored. Mom said she looked like Winston Churchill, and didn’t mean anything flattering by the comparison.

My mother watched us cooing, cuddling and carrying on, looking both bemused and slightly disapproving.

‘I never loved you that much,’ she said to me.

I don’t know, and didn’t ask, whether she regretted this. She was in no mood for final truths and tearful Dickensian leave-takings. Occasionally her spirits would rally, and she
would ask what we were wearing to her funeral, and suggested that we bury her in that famous paupers’ cemetery, Potter’s Field. But she was unreconciled to her coming death, furious,
beyond consolation.

I couldn’t bear it. Sat with her for a few minutes, fidgeted, couldn’t find the right thing to say or the right tone, got up, sat down, found an excuse to leave, came back, left
again. I was numb with horror and, though she palpably needed me to be there, I simply could not sit and stay. I remember thinking to myself that I had no experience of death, didn’t know how
to do it: canvassed my reading for succour, solace, even wisdom – tried to Joan Didionize – and found nothing to help me. The Bible, Shakespeare, Donne, Keats, Dickens? Nothing. Nothing
but the desire to run away.

Literature didn’t help me. Indeed, it was literature that was disabling. (Or perhaps people who are already emotionally disabled manifest this in their love of the secondary enhancements
of literature?) When I encountered intense emotion in books, I could empathize and shed the odd tear, laugh and exult occasionally, close the covers and walk away when I chose, feeling morally
enhanced. It was no training for sitting at your mother’s bedside as she wasted, wept and died. My Mayzie, gone for ever, aged fifty-seven.

Would F.R. Leavis or T.S. Eliot have done better than I did? Worse, I suspect, even worse. Think of
The Waste Land
. I began to feel that too much reading and writing unfits one for the
trials of real emotional life, makes one constrained, mental, constipated, lost in words and fictions, selfish, distracted. It’s no wonder that the novel is usually a chronicle of human
unhappiness. Is an intense immersion in the literary good for you? Does it help you to deal with your emotional trials? Don’t ask the practitioners, ask their wives, their children, their
parents. Ask my mother.

Barbara, on the other hand, with as little experience of death as I, but less professional reading, found reserves of peaceful energy, and sat chatting with my mother for long periods. What
about? Just the normal things: baby Anna, clothes, shopping, what we were doing in the house, who was coming that day, what mom might be willing to eat for supper, whether she’d like a cup of
tea.

‘She’s still your mum,’ Barbara said to me gently, ‘there’s no need to be so frightened. She’s frightened enough, and we have to help her.’

She had one dying wish, which was that Ruthie, then aged twenty-five, should marry her boyfriend the medical student: marry him immediately, in our house,
right now
! And Ruthie, who found
it almost impossible to resist my mother – she’d been ‘guided’ into becoming a social worker, against her own disposition – said no, and stuck to it. Various friends
and relatives, goaded by my mother, urged her to capitulate.
It would make her so happy! He’s such a nice boy! He’s going to be a doctor!
No! It was to make the triumphs of her
later life possible, this final denial of my mother’s will.

When the end came I was sitting downstairs, having spent a few final moments with my mother as she drifted in and out of consciousness. Her final assessment of her time on earth was
uncompromising.

‘Life is shit,’ she said. Within a couple of hours she died, clenched and impassable, her head turned away from us.

After which, I found I had no desire to recommence my training as a therapist, Laingian or not-Laingian. It was, inexplicably, over. I didn’t have reasons – in my experience major
life changes never occur rationally, in response to reasons and arguments, but unconsciously. I couldn’t give an adequate account of what had happened, and why this major change of direction
and focus had imposed itself upon me. My description of my change of direction – ‘If I have to choose between sitting in a chair and listening to people kvetch, or lying on a couch
doing the kvetching, I prefer the latter’ – was evasive, but it was the best I could do. Now, with my mother dead and having become a parent myself, the internal planes shifted.

They did for Ruthie as well, we were both released by it. A couple of years later she married a Hortonishly good man, also a social worker, Roy Greenberg. A few months after the wedding he was
diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis. He was visited, over the twenty years before he died, by a constellation of symptoms of Biblical cruelty, any one of which would have ruined the life of a normal
person. He declined into a pitiable state, but he squeezed the available joy from it, never complained, adored Ruthie and his sons Matthew and Jesse, pronounced himself happy.