Antipsychiatry: Quackery Squared

4.The Trickster and the Tricked

86 4 The Trickster and the Tricked For the trickster, change is the game, confusion, the aim. Having spent some years studying and working with R. D. Laing . . . I think the term “trickster” provides an apt description of this Scotsman. —JO S E P H H . BE R K E , “Trick or Treat: The Divided Self of R. D. Laing” Joseph Berke, an expatriate American psychiatrist, was one of the founders of the so-called antipsychiatry movement in London, in 1967. He served as the guide for Mary Barnes, the woman who “went down” at Kingsley Hall, completed her “voyage through madness,” and “came back up”—“cured” or “saved.” After the dissolution of Kingsley Hall, Berke left Laing and went his own, more honest, way. He is now the director of the Arbours Association and the Arbours Crisis Centre in London and has a private practice as an individual and family therapist. Barnes was familiar with Laing’s ideas and looked upon him—even before she entered Kingsley Hall—as her savior. Recalling her previous hospitalization , Barnes writes, “I didn’t know then, I do now, that what I was trying to do was to get back inside my Mother, to be reborn, to come up again, straight, and clear of all the mess.” Thus, Barnes is to antipsychiatry what Anna O. is to psychoanalysis: each is the movement’s most famous “case,” evidence of its leader’s genius as medical healer and psychiatric theoretician . (Mary B. was not Laing’s patient, and Anna O. was not Freud’s patient.) In each case, the denominated patient is not ill and devises her own “treatment.” “Mary became a showpiece for Ronnie’s central theory of the potential healing function of extremely disturbed forms of behavior,” writes The Trickster and the Tricked | 87 Adrian Laing. “Almost incidentally, Kingsley Hall rapidly gained the reputation as part of an underground movement with allegiance to the New Left.”1 And with unmistakable sympathies with the Old Left. Barnes and Berke presented their account of antipsychiatry’s quack “cure” in Mary Barnes: Two Accounts of a Journey Through Madness (1971). As I noted in my critique of antipsychiatry in Schizophrenia (1976), I regard Mary Barnes’s “breakdown” and “recovery” as a drama, produced and directed by Laing, with Barnes and Berke as leading lady and leading man.2 Although Berke does not, in retrospect, categorize the Barnes “trip” as one of Laing’s tricks, I think it is the right term for it. Who was Mary Barnes, and why was she at Kingsley Hall in 1965? Barnes was born in Portsmouth, England, into a middle-class family in 1923. She begins the autobiographical sketch by stating, “My mother had no milk and I was never put to the breast.” When Mary Barnes is two and a half, a brother, Peter, is born. “I felt pushed out. I wanted my Mother to do all the things she did to him. I wouldn’t talk I was so angry, I wanted to suck all day, and find another mother and run away.” This oral-Freudian formula formed the basis for the show Barnes and Berke performed at Kingsley Hall. “Mother forced me to take care of Peter. . . . Really I wanted to kill him. It was hell having to be a little brother’s mother.” At sixteen, Peter is diagnosed as schizophrenic and incarcerated. Barnes explains, “When Peter was in a state of breakdown and madness he turned away and was repelled by me. Now I know how he feels my past hate, all the time I wanted to murder him while pretending to be ‘nice.’ Peter inside knows all about my nastiness. . . . No one knew he was angry. . . . The emotional life of the family was killing him, breaking his heart. Peter, struck senseless with anger, just got more and more isolated. . . . Peter was instinctively seeking freedom. I too came to go that way. The route my parents had barricaded and barred.”3 It seems probable that Barnes’s recollection/construction is influenced by the view that schizophrenia is “caused” by schizophrenogenic parents, an idea Laing borrowed from a group of American schizophrenia researchers popular in the 1950s and 1960s. Mary Barnes elaborates the theme of wanting to be fed like a baby by dwelling on her love affair with her feces, or “shits,” as she puts it. “Mother always took my shits and water straightaway 88...