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				QueryLily "...I would never have thought of asking How you'd got that peculiar name..."

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Reading R.D. Laing:

"Carl Rogers tells me that Martin Buber told him once that schizophrenics are not capable of an I-Thou relationship. That sums up the psychiatric position, and that is the position from which I dissent. It is simply not a generalization I can make to match my own personal experience of such people. Psychiatrists say I am kidding myself, or that I am one of them anyway, or that I am trying to make out that these people do not need treatment. They do indeed 'need treatment'. Whatever treatment they get, first and last, 'we' should not forget to treat 'them', however strange 'they' are to 'us' as 'simply human' like ourselves."

Again:

"Whatever else is disturbing about what is going on on the surface of our planet, we can all agree that relations between human beings, industrial, economic, international, racial, sexual relations, and between so-called sane and so-called insane, are riven by distrust and strife."

And, again:

"Can a psychiatric institution exist for 'really' psychotic people where there is communication within solidarity, community and communion, instead of the It-district, the no-man's-land between staff and patients?

This rent or rift in solidarity may be healed in a professional therapeutic relationship. A 'relationship', professional or otherwise, which does not heal this rent can hardly be called therapeutic since it seems to me that what is professionally called a 'therapeutic relationship' cannot exist without a primary human camaraderie being present and manifest. If it is not there to start with, therapy will have been successful if it is there before it ends."

All the quotes above are from Laing's Wisdom, Madness and Folly, first published in 1985. Reading Laing reminds me of the need to be vigilant, to not objectify others, the homeless person asking for change, the person talking to him-or-her-self in the corner of the room, the co-worker who gets on your nerves. I dip into Laing to be reminded of the possibilities, remembrance of the time, 18 or 19 years old, reading The Politics of Experience, reading, "if I could turn you on, if I could drive you from your wretched mind, if I could tell you - I would let you know" and feeling again that sense of the hairs on the back of my neck tingling.

"...solidarity, community and communion...", I feel the air around me grown electric.

[2 February 2002]

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