The British Anti-Psychiatrists

From Institutional Psychiatry to the Counter-Culture, 1960-1971

Oisín Wall

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138048560
• eBook ISBN: 9781351690966
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

The British anti-psychiatric group, which formed around R.D. Laing, David Cooper, and Aaron Esterson in the 1960s, burned bright, but briefly, and has left a long legacy. This book follows their practical, social, and theoretical trajectory away from the structured world of institutional psychiatry and into the social chaos of the counter-culture. It explores the rapidly changing landscape of British psychiatry in the mid-Twentieth Century and the apparently structureless organisation of the part of the counter-culture that clustered around the anti-psychiatrists, including the informal power structures that it produced.

The book also problematizes this trajectory, examining how the anti-psychiatrists distanced themselves from institutional psychiatry while building links with some of the most important people in post-war psychiatry and psychoanalysis. The anti-psychiatrists bridged the gap between psychiatry and the counter-culture, and briefly became legitimate voices in both. Wall argues that their synthesis of disparate discourses was one of their strengths, but also contributed to the group's collapse.

The British Anti-Psychiatrists offers original historical expositions of the Villa 21 experiment and the Anti-University. Finally, it proposes a new reading of anti-psychiatric theory, displacing Laing from his central position and looking at their work as an unfolding conversation within a social network.

1 Introduction

“A Vista of Broken Clocks”

1.1 Introduction

In August 1967 a South African psychiatrist addressed an excited audience in a disused Victorian engine-shed in North London. He told them:

During the Paris Commune, before they started shooting at people, the communards shot at the clocks, at all the clocks in Paris, and they broke them. And they did this because they were putting an end to the time of the Others, the time of their rulers, and they were going to invent their own time.

As I look around me now I see a vista beyond your sea of faces, going way out there I see a vista of broken clocks. And I think, it is our time!¹

With these words David Cooper summed up the optimism and revolutionary fervour of the day. His message, delivered at the International Congress on the Dialectics of Liberation, was that a new time had arrived, one which would be shaped by the youth and by those ‘turned-on’ to the counter-culture. The time of the great lumbering institutions was over. He called on the audience to seize their chance to shape this time, and for a brief moment it must have seemed to him that he was right and that people had listened.² The grey days of post-war rationing and austerity were over, and things were rapidly changing in Europe. New ideas were emerging and gathering force, the great social institutions—schools, universities, hospitals, armies—were being questioned and even taken apart. Within seven months of Cooper’s speech the entire continent would be in the grip of a wave of youth revolt—streets barricaded, universities and factories occupied, and the French government ousted. But how did this well-dressed, portly, sweating, balding psychiatrist come to be standing beside heroes of the international counter-culture—Stokely Carmichael, Allen Ginsberg, and Emmet Grogan—prophesying a counter-cultural revolution?³

This book concerns itself primarily with the anti-psychiatric group in Britain, a group which included David Cooper and, more famously, R. D. Laing. The group argued in the 1960s for a revolution in psychiatry and more broadly in British culture. The book traces the trajectory that the group followed from institutional psychiatry into the counter-culture: from their careers working in large conventional psychiatric hospitals, through disenchantment with the overly structured world of the hospital into the frenetic and chaotic world of the counter-culture. The book follows them through a series of psychiatric and cultural experiments and theoretical shifts as they move further and further from institutional psychiatry. It explores the development of their anti-institutional politics beyond the borders of the psychiatric world and into the counter-culture.

While this book explores the anti-psychiatric trajectory out of institutional psychiatry, it simultaneously complicates any simple sense of movement away from psychiatry in general. Theirs was a journey away from the psychiatric hospital, but not necessarily away from psychiatry itself. The world of psychiatry in the 1950s and 1960s was more complex than the hospital- based institutional psychiatry that the anti-psychiatrists so fervently rejected. The mainstream psychiatric milieu of the post-war era was one of therapeutic communities, psychodynamic therapy, social psychiatry, and institutional reform. By the beginning of the 1960s a great many psychiatrists had begun questioning the authoritarian role of the doctor and were talking about what would become known as ‘deinstitutionalisation’—the closure of the great psychiatric hospitals. Throughout the 1960s the anti-psychiatrists maintained strong links with the world of mainstream psychiatry, developing both friendships and professional collaborations with many of its most admired leaders. This book is an exploration of how the group emerged from contemporary psychiatric theory and practice associated with the therapeutic community movement and social psychiatry; how it synthesised a wide range of theories and practices from psychiatry, psychoanalysis, philosophy, mysticism, literature, and far-left politics; how the anti-psychiatrists were distinguished as a theoretical and practical movement, not so much by any specific novelty in their work, but rather by their ability to draw together these disparate discourses; how their theory and practice cannot be separated from their political convictions and their analysis of social institutions; how they formed part of a complex network of political, social, and medical relationships; and how, as a group, they are inseparable from this milieu. In the process the book will argue that the scene at the Congress on the Dialectics of Liberation in 1967 was far from being out of the ordinary. Much of the counter-culture was built on similar collusions or collaborations between the long-haired, kaftan-wearing radicals who inhabit the 1960s of the contemporary popular imagination and people who, at another time, would have been the epitome of bourgeoisie stability.

This book will examine how, although the anti-psychiatric group vociferously abandoned institutional psychiatry, they attempted to build a practical, social, and theoretical bridge between other parts of the mainstream psychiatric milieu and the counter-culture. However, it will also argue that this bridge relied on tenuous connections, held together by the energy and friendships of the anti-psychiatric group which eventually gave way, scattering the network and leaving much of their work open to attack. Ultimately this book argues that it was their attempt to span the social and ideological gap between these disparate worlds that was both the source of their popularity and the cause of their downfall.

Much of this book is concerned with structureless groups and social networks, and as such it is timely. Structureless organisation has, once again, become a mainstay of street-level political organisation. In everything from the anti-austerity protests to Labour’s Momentum movement, to America’s late ‘astroturf grassroots’ Tea Party movement there is a seductive rhetoric of horizontal organisation, direct democracy, and decentring which is facilitated by a techno-fetishist discourse of social networking. This book explores the informal power relations which underlie, and are hidden by, an instance of the supposed ‘structurelessness’ of social network–based organisation, drawing on the model of structurelessness outlined by Jo Freeman and the models of social and cultural networks described by Gregory Bateson. Moreover it examines the effect that the fundamental instability of this mode of organisation can have on the participants as individuals, on the development of the group socially, and on the theoretical and practical programme of the group.

1.2 Britain in the 1960s

The 1960s is popularly remembered as a decade of revolutions. Anti-colonial and post-colonial rebellions flared up across the world from the Naxalites in India, to the renewed ‘troubles’ in Northern Ireland, to the Rhodesian Bush War. The West was shaken by waves of protest from civil rights marches in the United States, to anti–Vietnam War demonstrations across Europe, to the May Days in France. Culturally Britain saw a ‘peacock revolution’ in fashion,⁴ a psychedelic revolution, and a sexual revolution, inter alia. However, we should not forget that the second best-selling album in Britain in the 1960s was the soundtrack to The Sound of Music.⁵

The counter-culture, upon which this book will focus, was only ever a narrow fringe of British society in the 1960s. The often-repeated epithet that ‘if you remember the 1960s, you really weren’t there’⁶ belies the fact that the vast majority of British workers were in skilled or semi-skilled manual jobs⁷; to attend the church on Sundays⁸ and the pub on Fridays.⁹ The 1960s was a period of rapid change in British culture, but relatively little of this change was effected by communards planning a long-haired cultural revolution. It happened in classrooms; on factory floors; at union meetings, in Westminster backrooms; in shops; on the television, radio, newspapers, cinema screens; and behind lace-curtained windows across the country.

These changes and the social and cultural conflicts that emerged through them formed more than a backdrop to the counter-culture; they were integral to its emergence, success, and failure. At different moments this book will look at aspects of British culture that were constitutive of British anti-psychiatry and the counter-culture in general—the psychiatric system, the legacy of the Second World War, the Cold War, and atomic politics, for instance. This section will briefly introduce some of the other features on the British cultural landscape around which the counter-culture took shape.

The 1960s in Britain was a period of conscious decolonisation. During the 1950s, after decades of resistance and sporadic violence, Britain finally began to acknowledge the end of the age of Empire. In the late 1950s the first African states, Sudan (1956) and Gold Coast (1957), successfully gained independence from Britain, and the 1960s opened with Harold McMillan’s ‘Winds of Change’ speech:

One of the constant facts of political life in Europe has been the emergence of independent nations (…) Fifteen years ago this movement spread through Asia. Many countries there, of different races and civilization, pressed their claim to an independent national life. Today the same thing is happening in Africa (…) The wind of change is blowing through the continent (…) Whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact. We must all accept it as a fact.¹⁰

The vast majority of British decolonisation in Africa was done under McMillan’s government so that when Harold Wilson came to power in 1964, promising ‘an end to colonialism,’¹¹ there were only four African states left to gain independence: Gambia (1965) and the High Commission Territories— Bechuanaland (renamed the Republic of Botswana, 1966), Basutoland (renamed the Kingdom of Lesotho, 1966), and Swaziland (1968). Decolonisation became an integral part of the post-war consensus, and was, in different ways, popular in Britain. Some saw the economic necessity of shedding the cost of colonial garrisons; others saw the commercial possibilities of exploiting the old colonies on a free market; stil...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: “A Vista of Broken Clocks”
• 2 ‘Psychiatry’s Third Revolution’: The Therapeutic Community, Community Care, and Deinstitutionalisation
• 3 The Anti-Hospital and the Therapeutic Community: Two Anti-Psychiatric Communities
• 4 “With Co-operation We Could All Actually Win”: Three Anti-Psychiatric Events
• 5 “Society is a Concentration Camp”: Existential Reality and Liberation
• 6 “A Depersonalized, Dehumanized World”: The Politics of the Family
• 7 Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index