The Politics of the Family

By Richard Stradling

In his 1968 CBC Massey Lectures R. D. Laing discusses how and why we value society's notions of family over our own.

Using concepts of schizophrenia, R.D. Laing demonstrates that we tend to invalidate the subjective and experiential and accept the proper societal view of what should occur within the family.

A psychoanalyst and psychiatrist, Laing worked at the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations. His books include The Self and Others and The Politics of Experience.

• Language: English
• Publisher: House of Anansi Press
• Release date: Sep 27, 1997
• ISBN: 9780887848896

Book preview

The Massey Lectures Series

The Massey Lectures are co-sponsored by Massey College, in the University of Toronto, and CBC Radio. The series was created in honour of the Right Honourable Vincent Massey, former governor general of Canada, and was inaugurated in 1961 to enable distinguished authorities to communicate the results of original study or research on important subjects of contemporary interest.

R. D. LAING

Ronald David Laing, born in 1927, was a native of Glasgow, Scotland, where he attended grammar school and, in 1951, obtained his degree in medicine from Glasgow University. He earned a Diploma in Psychiatric Medicine from the University of London, and received his psychoanalytical training between 1956 and 1960. Dr. Laing was a psychiatrist in the British Army from 1951 to 1953, then returned to Glasgow University to work in the Department of Psychological Medicine for three years. From 1956 to 1967 he worked at the Tavistock Clinic and the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations. In the latter part of that period he served as principal investigator of the Institute’s Schizophrenia and Family Research Unit and conducted research as a Fellow of the Foundations Fund for Research in Psychiatry. From 1962 to 1965 he was director of the Langham Clinic for Psychotherapy, London.

After 1965, Dr. Laing worked with the Philadelphia Association, London, and in private practice. He was also a visiting consultant at mental health centres in Bethesda, Md., and in Boston. His work with the Philadelphia Association, of which he was chairman and a founding member, was an attempt to develop, with a number of his colleagues, a new strategy in terms of the relation of psychotic breakdown to family and social networks. This included establishing places which are not hospitals, nursing homes, or hostels, but simply households where there is no treatment in any conventional sense. Rather, there is an attempt to create an environment in which people can work through inner involvements without drugs or other interventions.

Dr. Laing died in 1989. According to Anthony Clare, writing in the Guardian, his major achievement was that he dragged the isolated and neglected inner world of the severely psychotic individual out of the back ward of the large gloomy mental hospital and on to the front pages of influential newspapers, journals and literary magazines… Everyone in contemporary psychiatry owes something to R. D. Laing.

THE POLITICS OF THE FAMILY

ALSO BY. R. D. LAING

The Divided Self

Self and Others

Interpersonal Perception

(with H. Phillipson and A. R. Lee)

Reason and Violence

(with David Cooper)

Sanity, Madness and the Family

(with Aaron Esterson)

The Politics of Experience

Knots

The Facts of Life

Do You Love Me

Conversations with Children

Sonnets

The Voice of Experience

THE POLITICS OF THE FAMILY

R.D. LAING

Copyright © 1969 by R.D. Laing

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Published in 1993 by

House of Anansi Press Limited

1800 Steeles Avenue West

Concord, Ontario

L4K 2P3

[phone]

First published in 1969 by CBC Enterprises

CBC logo used by permission

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data

Laing, R. D. (Ronald David), 1927—

The politics of the family

(Massey lectures)

Text of 5 radio lectures broadcast during

Nov. and Dec. 1968.

ISBN 0-88784-546-0

1. Family.     I. Title.     II. Series.

HQ7284.35 1993     306.85    C 93-094910-2

Book design: Brant Cowie/ArtPlus Limited

Printed and bound in Canada

House of Anansi Press gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council, the Ontario Ministry of Culture, Tourism, and Recreation, Ontario Arts Council, and Ontario Publishing Centre in the development of writing and publishing in Canada.

CONTENTS

The Family, Invalidation, and the Clinical Conspiracy

Family Scenarios: Paradigms and Projection

The Family and the Sense of Reality

Beyond Repression: Rules and Metarules

Refractive Images: A World at Large

INTRODUCTION

In these talks I have sketched tentative outlines of some components of a prospective systematic theory that does not yet exist.

I have not presupposed in the listener or reader any knowledge of the work with families (therapy, research, theory) carried out, especially in the United States, in the last 25 years.

A list of the key people in this field, were it to include everyone, would be too long: and misleading, were I to mention the few who have especially influenced me. I have been influenced by some, primarily through their writings: others, by personal association and friendship: others indirectly, through their influences on others, etc. The reader new to this field, who wishes to follow through into the background of family studies of the kind from which these talks derive, can do so by looking up the footnoted references which, containing extensive bibliographies, are gate openers to the whole field.

I hope that my fellow professionals will find something to interest them here. The theory of sets and mappings is being applied to great effect in linguistics, kinship systems, mythology, and other areas of social science. Can we apply this way of thinking to the psychosocial interior of families in our own society? Definitely yes. But what will it yield? Will it be fruitful, will it enable us to discover more, see more clearly, understand better, provide useful and effective guidelines for therapy, help to get our research designs into sharper outline? We do not yet know. This might be a treacherous cul-de-sac. But I think the risk is worth taking. It may be a way out of the cul-de-sac in which, especially, some of the most technically best research in this field can get stuck. Just because it is careful, and meticulous, such research sometimes leads to a type of analysis of familial

Reviews for The Politics of the Family

[neil_luvs_books · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Although this series of lectures was delivered some time ago (1968), the insights offered on the nature of families is still remarkably salient.