The female malady women madness and engl 242

The Female Malady

230
ery which

is

only completed by his return to the normal world, to

which he comes back with

who

itants

At

however, Laing's only contact with

this point,

journey was

insights different from those of the inhab-

never embarked on such a voyage. 29

a schizophrenic

Watkins's account of a psychotic episode

his friend Jesse

he had twenty-seven years before. Watkins recounted
regressed in time to a primitive stage of animal

and

a higher religious sphere,

life,

how

he had

then awakened in

normalcy when

finally willed a return to

became unbearable. Laing imposed
death and rebirth on Watkins's narra-

the intensity of his mystical visions
his

own

tive,

terminology of

and added

priest"

his

spiritual

own

interpretation of the role of the "physician-

who accompanies

pist "in a truly

The proper

the patient.

sane society," he maintained,

is

function of the therato act as the patient's

guide in a metanoiac, or transforming, journey that

heroic,

is

archetypally epic,

and masculine, a psychic pilgrimage more exotic and perilous

than the voyages of Ulysses or Kurtz.

We

do not regard

as pathologically deviant to explore a jungle or

it

We

to climb

Mount

mistaken

in his construction

the

New

Everest.

World.

.

.

.

We

climber, the space man.

— indeed
our time —
explore
project

feel that

of what he discovered

respect
It

makes

as a desperately

to

The metaphors of

Columbus was

the
far

be

entitled to

when he came

voyager,

the

more sense

to

explorer,

me

to

the

as a valid

and urgently required project

the inner space and time of consciousness.

for

30

heroic adventure and conquest so prominent in

Laing's writing of the mid-1960s were put into practice in the com-

munal world he created with other members of the Philadelphia Association (a group dedicated to reforming the treatment of mental illness).
The group included David Cooper, Aaron Esterson, and Clancy Sigal,
an American writer

and

who became

who had come

to

England

to escape the blacklist,

Laing's patient, friend, and enthusiastic co-worker. In

1965, the Philadelphia Association established a therapeutic
at

Kingsley Hall

into practice,

and to

might be healed
factory for

in

if,

East

London

community

to put the theories of antipsychiatry

test the belief that

people

who were

lost

and "mad"

instead of going to a mental hospital, "a re-servicing

human breakdown,"

encouragement and sanction

they could "be guided with

into inner space

full social

and time." 31 The high