R.D. Laing,the idea of 'withness' and PIP assessment, the idea of 'againstness'.

     The following is an extract from my Journal for Wednesday, May 22nd, 1997. It offers my brief reflection on the Scottish psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, R.D.'Ronnie' Laing (1927-1989) who was something of a cult figure in psychotherapeutic and wider circles in the 1960s and 1970s. A controversial figure he was sometimes described as being part of an 'anti-psychiatry' movement. I believe I may have made this entry because I had just read a biography of Laing by John Clay, R.D.Laing: a Divided Self: a Biography. 

1997

"I want (or as our former prime minister, John Major was wont to say  'I wunt') to read more of, and about, R.D. Laing and his works. I have some sympathy for his approach which promotes the idea that we must be empathic and live 'with' the  emotional disorders of others and not manage them antagonistically by locking people away in either a physical or drug induced sense. 
     In 1965, to fulfil his ideas, Laing established Kingsley Hall in the East End of London as a therapeutic community for troubled adults. The drawback to this  -  in my opinion  -  right approach to mental health, is that it can take too heavy a toll of some carers. It draws enormously on a carer's emotional resources. How are these replenished? This was achieved with the support every member of the community gave to each other.  Not everyone survived the process and in Laing’s own personal case, in some measure he buried the emotional difficulties he faced in alcohol, drugs, and sex. 

     A word which Laing and his followers often used to describe their approach to helping people overwhelmed by emotional problems is 'with'.  They would say that it was important to be 'with' the person being helped - empathising, recognising and accepting the other’s personal construct of the world and the feelings this induces in them.  

     My view is that Laing’s work has been marginalised because an empiric world wants a more detailed analysis of how this 'withness' is measured.  I do not know if Laing or anyone else has explained the state of  'withness' in specific terms, though it seems to me the methodology for making such a measurement might prove difficult because "withness" is an active inter-personal process and each relationship has a unique symbiosis. 

     To the sceptic 'withness' is a notion which lies somewhere between dubious and spurious.  'Withness' is considered a vague, hippie notion without a valid place in the field of psychiatry. For the latter only science can offer true answers. Nevertheless the sense of togetherness that 'withness' implies is surely something to which we aspire. 

     Laing and his followers may have been marginalised for other reasons. The whole psychiatry lobby, backed as it is by the institution of mainstream medicine, together with the drugs manufacturers who enjoy their profits so much, is a powerful one, and unlikely to allow drugless interpersonal therapy to hold sway in the field of mental health."


2019

     In the main my thoughts about Laing and his works are the same today as they were then.My observations about his personal life though true, may unfairly mask a life of achievement and, in commenting on his declivities, I should also record that he was a talented pianist, an enthusiastic tennis player, but most of all he was an original thinker and author exemplified best by his classic text The Divided Self.

     My own observation is that Laing's concept of  'withness' is one which we as a human community would wish to adhere to in wider aspects of our daily lives. We want to secure a good education and health for all: for those who are doing just about well enough and particularly for those who are struggling.
    It is then, a strange paradox to find we have voted for a government which, though we are a wealthy country, is stripping our public services while replacing and diminishing them with private profit making provision that is not up to the task.                      In my view our government seems to act in a spirit of  'againstness' rather than 'withness.' This is exemplified by its attack - made in our name -  upon our most vulnerable fellow citizens, those with various kinds of disability. Our government, through the Department of Work and Pensions,  hires private companies to deny needy people essential financial support. The companies, who operate what is called the Personal Independence Payment (PIP) assessment process, increase their profits every time they make an assessment that someone should be stripped of his or her PIP. The latter is not only left impoverished but to feel that she or he is a liar and somehow a fraud. 
     Though the United Kingdom is a wealthy community, offering financial support to vulnerable people takes its toll on everyone who pays taxes, but the altruism in giving this support shows a 'withness' to which we, as UK citizens aspire. We have no wish to be cruel to others. We want to help each other. Don't we?
     On December 12th, 2019, if that is when our next General Election is to be, we must vote for a government of 'withness' and not one of 'againstness.'

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Only in Totnes....

A few Sundays ago I walked along the River Dart from the Dartington Estate towards Totnes. 

The River Dart flows gently by the Dartington Estate

When I reached the Totnes Bridge I climbed the steps up to street level and walked to the nearby Morrisons supermarket to fetch a copy of our Sunday paper The Observer. Before walking home on the steep ascent of Fore Street and the High Street, I called in for refreshment at the Royal Seven Stars Hotel . Once my thirst had been quenched I began to scale the East Face of Totnes. For an ageing and not particularly fit person like myself, it's a stiff climb so when I reached the East Gate I had to stop for a breather before continuing my sojourn. Some minutes later and almost home now, I reached the summit at the Happy Apple store where momentarily I imagined I was experiencing an altitudinal illusion, for there, at the opening of Apple Lane,  a pony and a dog, both tethered to a cart were illegally parked. 

Illegally parked

On spotting their owner, a young man, a carter in his early thirties I would say, I immediately informed him of his misdemeanour and he laughed. Mockingly the two homeless men sitting on the pavement just outside Happy Apple alleyway warned of the terrible fate that would befall me if I were to grass the carter up.  As is said around these parts, "Only in Totnes....."

Life in the Afternoon: a Francis-Barnett and Brinklow '62

      A few weeks ago I was in The Bay Horse Inn at Totnes musing over motor bikes with AR, a friend who is a keen biker and whose late departed and fondly missed father, DR - once an illustrious habitué of the soon to be re-opened Bull Inn at Totnes - had also been a daring race rider in the infamously dangerous Isle of Man TT races. AR explained to me that over the years many racers at the Isle of Man circuit had been fatally injured after losing control of their bikes and being thrown off at high speed. 

      I told AR that the only motor bike I had ridden - on a summer's afternoon in 1962 - was a 1955 Francis-Barnett Falcon 70 which had a two stroke 197cc Villiers engine. It had been manufactured in Coventry where I then lived. I can spume this froth because my best friend at the time, RH, provided it for me on a number of occasions before and after he purchased this motor cycle.

The Francis-Barnett Falcon 70 also lovingly known as a Franny Barnett

    
      RH left school at the age of 15 (as one could in 1962) to take up an apprenticeship at ‘The Dunlop’ where tyres were manufactured for cars and motor bikes but he gathered the money to buy his two wheeled steed by using what others might think were ghoulish methods. His wages as an apprentice were insufficient to allow him to save up for a motor bike but on weekday evenings he and I worked as part-time gravediggers and the money for that was good. I wasted my monetary substance on riotous living but RH was sensible and saved enough from his grave digging wages to purchase his Franny Barnett in the Spring of 1962. 

     One weekend at the height of summer that year we decided to go camping and used his motor bike as our means of gaining our destination. I rode pillion to him and we pitched our tent near the village of Brinklow, in deeper Warwickshire. 

      On Friday evening at the Raven Inn, Brinklow, RH, who looked 18 was served with a pint of shandy while I looked my age and was served with a lemonade. We listened to the bibulous patrons of the pub, informally, but in loud unison, sing, as was the custom in those days, all the old folk ballads, as well as the songs of Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly, Patsy Kline, Petula Clark The Everly Brothers, Cliff Richard, Adam Faith et al. 

     Next day my friend, cheered by the bonhomie of the previous evening, generously asked if I would like a shot at riding his motor bike. I was very nervous about it but enough of me wanted to go along with the idea that I agreed to it. For my trial we found an unmetalled track off a quiet lane between Brinklow and Stretton under Fosse. 

    Before I continue I should give you the warning that we were living in the pre-compulsory crash helmet era and I was helmet free as I mounted the bike and tentatively twisted the accelerator. I was relieved to find that though the motor bike felt bulkier, balance-wise at least, it was like riding a push bike. I had accelerated to a speed of about 15 to 20 mph when the bike seemed to take on a mind of its own and just at a point where the track turned right I found I could not follow it and rode straight on into a wooden five bar gate. The Franny came to an abrupt halt. I was thrown high into the air over the gate and while still in flight I did an involuntary somersault and miraculously landed standing on my feet facing the direction of my travel. Someone disinterestedly watching this might have thought it was an acrobat's circus stunt. It wasn’t. If I owned any wits, they I had now been well and truly scared out of me. For a moment while suspended in the air I had thought life was about to turn into death. I’ve never ridden on a motor bike since.                                                                                       
     I survived the incident unimpaired and apart from the need to make a few twists to the metal of the front mudguard the Franny Barnett was also largely undamaged. RH sportingly accepted responsibility for the accident saying he should have had "the sense not to allow an idiot" to ride his bike. The old gate was a little battered but still capable of its function to keep livestock secure in the meadow.

After my crash I would say the gate at Brinklow was in slightly better nick than this one above Princetown on Dartmoor

 I slept only fitfully on the night that followed my rocket-like launch into the afternoon Warwickshire sky, and in a fragmentary moment of sleep, no doubt haunted by my experience, I dreamt of the tragi-comic death of a young man  who, wearing no crash helmet, loses control of his motor bike at high speed and crashes into a farm gate and narrowly avoids - by exercising extraordinary agility -  landing on his head  upon a colossal boulder, which would have, had his head collided with it, broken his skull into smithereens. Like me, the young man in my dream lands on his feet. His is a magnificent, cinematic feat - the zenith of the career of any stuntman -  but regrettably, on landing, our acrobatic hero surprises and enrages a bull which is inconveniently positioned near to our hero’s landing point. Fearful and alarmed by what it fears is an attack from the skies, the bull charges towards him and gores him, thus causing his slow and bloody demise.

      OK, you may now have concerns about the darker reaches of my mind, but I was only 16 going on 17 at the time, had just survived a potentially fatal mishap and, in those days, I had been reading quite a bit of Hemingway.

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