I received this from my friend Bob at
Citystrolls, and thought it worthy of re-posting. Here it is in full:
Best time of the year for me is not
that mad Christmas thing, or the witless drinking the bells have
become. It's those few days after New Year, just before folk go back
to work. After the pressure has ebbed and there seems to be a bit of
calmness in the air. You will recognise it when it happens. People
just seem to wander about, go for a walk in the park, unrushed. Its a
great wee part of human space and for thinking ahead and of communion
and camaraderie. Don't waste it, it only happens once a year. The
following always reminds me of it. All the best for 2014. There's
going to be plenty to think about :) B.
R. D. Laing from ‘Wisdom, Madness and
Folly’
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 rift or rent 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. There can be no solidarity if a basic,
primary, fellow human feeling of being together has been lost or is
absent. It is not easy to retain this feeling when you press the
button. Very seldom, when I pressed the button, could I feel I was
doing for this chap in terrible mental agony what I hoped he would do
for me if I had his mind and brains and he had mine.
This issue of
solidarity and camaraderie between me as a doctor and those
patients did not arise for me, it did not occur to me until I was in
the British Army, a psychiatrist and a lieutenant, sitting in padded
cells in my own ward with completely psychotic patients, doomed to
deep insulin and electric shocks in the middle of the night. For the
first time it dawned on me that it was almost impossible for a
patient to be a pal or for a patient to have a snowball’s chance in
hell of finding a comrade in me. It would be a mistake to suppose
that ‘mental’ institutions are It-districts. There may be a lot
of camaraderie between staff and staff, and patients and patients.
But there tends to be an It-district between staff and patients. Why
this should be so may not be immediately apparent. But when one looks
into it one sees that it can hardly be otherwise, under the
circumstances.
All communication occurs on the basis either of
strife, camaraderie or confusion. There can be communication without
communion. This is the norm. There is very little communion in many
human transactions. The greatest danger facing us, the human species,
is ourselves. We are not at peace with one another. We are at strife,
not in communion.
The New Year is the biggest celebration in
Scotland. It is marked by prolonged carousing on the part of the
alcoholic fraternity, but many teetotallers celebrate the spirit of
the New Year contentedly sober. There is no ‘religion’ about it.
There is a special spirit abroad – ‘Auld Lang Syne’, ‘A man’s
a man for a’ that.’ In Gartnavel, in the so-called ‘back
wards’, I have seen catatonic patients who hardly make a move, or
utter a word, or seem to notice or care about anyone or anything
around them year in and year out, smile, laugh, shake hands, wish
someone ‘A guid New Year’ and even dance…and then by the
afternoon or evening or next morning revert to their listless apathy.
The change, however fleeting, in some of the most chronically
withdrawn, ‘backward’ patients is amazing. If any drug had this
effect, for a few hours, even minutes, it would be world famous, and
would deserve to be celebrated as much as the Scottish New Year. The
intoxicant here however is not a drug, not even alcoholic spirits,
but the celebration of a spirit of fellowship.
There are interfaces
in the socio-economic-political structure of our society where
communion is impossible or almost impossible. We are ranged on
opposite sides. We are enemies, we are against each other before
we meet. We are so far apart as not to recognise the other even as a
human being or, if we do, only as one to be abolished immediately.
This rift or rent occurs between master and slave, the wealthy and
the poor, on the basis of such differences as class, race, sex,
age.
It crops up also across the sane-mad line. It occurred to me
that it might be a relevant factor in some of the misery and disorder
of certain psychotic processes; even sometimes, possibly, a salient
factor in aetiology, care, treatment, recovery or deterioration. This
rift or rent is healed through a relationship with anybody, but it
has to be somebody. Any ‘relationship’ through which this
fracture heals is ‘therapeutic’, whether it is what is called,
professionally, a ‘therapeutic relationship’ or not. The loss of
a sense of human solidarity and camaraderie and communion affects
people in different ways. Some people never seem to miss it.
Others can’t get on without it. It was not easy to retain this
feeling when I pressed the button to give someone an electric shock
if I could not feel I was doing to him what I hoped he would do for
me if I had his brains and he mine. I gave up ‘pressing the
button’.
From:
Workers City “The Real Glasgow Stands
Up”
Edited By Farquar McLay Clydeside Press
