Insanity Begins at Home: Madness in the Family in Timothy Findley's The Last of the Crazy People

university of toronto quarterly, volume 71, number 4, fall 2002 LISA SALEM-WISEMAN Insanity Begins at Home: Madness in the Family in Timothy Findley=s The Last of the Crazy People The schizophrenic psychosis of the patient is, in my opinion, a symptom manifestation of an active process that involves the entire family. Murray Bowen, >A Family Concept of Schizophrenia,= The Etiology of Schizophrenia, 346 Even the most casual reader of Timothy Findley=s novels, plays, and short stories cannot help but be struck not only by the proportionately high number of mentally ill characters, but also by the attention that Findley accords to the family environment of each of these characters. Each of these individuals= troubled states is inextricable from the family situation within which his or her identity was formed, and within which he or she must function. The list of Findley=s works with dysfunctional families includes, but is not limited to, The Last of the Crazy People=s Winslows, The Butterfly Plague=s Damarosches, The Wars= Rosses, Headhunter=s Wylies, and The Piano Man=s Daughter=s Wyatts.1 Although Findley does not explicitly acknowledge R.D. Laing and his contemporaries as influences, his portrayals of these families have undeniable resonances with the work of Laing and the anti-psychiatry movement, particularly with the tendency of the proponents of this movement to regard the patient, not as an individual, but as a product and member of a family environment; and his linking of the emotional state and social functioning of his characters to their family environments, combined with his apparent belief in the emancipatory potential of >madness,= suggests obvious affinities with this model. In this essay, I want to show how this model emerged as a framework in Findley=s first book, The Last of the Crazy People, a novel that was written at the height of the popularity of the anti-psychiatry movement and published in 1967, the same year as Laing=s The Politics of Experience.2 1 For a discussion of the Wyatt family in The Piano Man=s Daughter, see Salem-Wiseman. 2 Laing=s earlier work B particularly The Divided Self (1960) and Sanity, Madness and the Family (1964) B won him international fame among lay persons as well as those in the psychiatric profession. Thus, during the period in which Findley was developing the thematics that recur throughout his body of work, Laing=s ideas about madness were receiving a great deal of popular attention. 844 lisa salem-wiseman university of toronto quarterly, volume 71, number 4, fall 2002 The term >anti-psychiatry= was coined in 1967 by David Cooper B a South African-born psychiatrist who trained and practised in Britain B to refer to a strain of thinking within psychiatry that was highly critical of traditional psychiatric practices. Although some, including Laing, rejected the term, the psychiatrists associated with it B Laing, Cooper, Aaron Esterson, Joseph Berke, Leon Redler, and Morton Schatzman in England; and Thomas Szasz in the United States B were united in their questioning of not merely particular techniques of psychiatry but the very foundations of psychiatry itself, including its conception of madness as an illness that can B and must B be >cured= by the intervention of Western medicine. In contrast, the antipsychiatrists view institutional psychiatry as >an extensive system of violence= (Cooper, 55) directed against human beings, and in which individual psychiatrists participated. According to Cooper, madness is a universal, revolutionary force that is under attack by the institution of psychiatry, which has invented the idea of >mental illness= in order to justify the incarceration of those who do not fit within the boundaries of >normal= society. The proponents of the anti-psychiatry movement share the belief that schizophrenia was not a disease but merely >a label affixed by some people to others in situations where an interpersonal disjunction of a particular kind is occurring= (Laing, Politics, 43). In his 1967 work, Laing suggested that schizophrenia denoted >a successful attempt not to adapt to pseudo-social realities= (43; my emphasis), that is, an active resistance to the prevailing social environment and its concomitant values, standards, and roles. The individual diagnosed as schizophrenic has...