Honesty, authenticity, sincerityIn many places, including last month's journal, we have written about the necessity for being honest or authentic, as a condition of (mental) health. Some use the word "sincere" in this context. In the seventeen years I spent working with and relating to Aboriginal people I never found the meaning of these words problematic. No Aboriginal person ever asked "What do you mean when you say 'honest'?" Most Aboriginal people I have known prefer to use expressions like "telling the truth", "being fair dinkum", "being yourself", "not pretending to be what you're not", "not bullshitting" and so on. They know EXACTLY what they mean by these words. Yet, in my own culture, I have found that many people are confused by such terms. Why is this?
In January, 1964, R D Laing explained it this way: "Human beings seem to have an almost unlimited capacity to deceive themselves, and to deceive themselves into taking their own lies for truth … the result … is that (we have) been tricked and (have) tricked ourselves out of our minds, that is to say, out of our own personal world of experience …" (Laing, 1964: 61). This is achieved through the "double action of destroying ourselves with one hand" – this is what our parents and other family members have done to us – "and calling this love with the other". What we end up with, Laing said, are "socially shared hallucinations", that is, "what we call reality". We mistake this "collusive madness" for something "we call sanity". Modern homo sapiens is "haunted by the ghost of his own murdered self" (see Morton Schatzman, Soul murder). Laing quoted Marcel Proust, who wrote that we live "in a world where love is provoked by a lie and consists solely in the need of having our suffering appeased by whatever being has made us suffer" (namely, one or the other or both our parents).
What all this means is that, inevitably, what most of us call "honesty", "being honest" or "being ourselves" is a double act of dishonesty and deceit. We not only deceive ourselves (and others), we also deceive ourselves (and others) about the fact that we are deceiving ourselves (and others). The result can be violent and ugly. I may be feeling full of rage towards someone I am talking to. There may be a long history of things we've either done to each other or think the other has done to us. We may, as a result, be full of recriminations, judgements and accusations. There may well be, in addition, unresolved issues with our parents and other important figures from the past and we may be projecting all this onto the other. We may have been abused in the past and are full of toxins. We are unaware of most of this. If we now decide to be "honest" with the other, what will come out is a garbled mess of accusations, recriminations and selective memories, delivered in a "reasonable" but sarcastic manner, masking the depth of the violence and the flood of toxicity. We then lie to ourselves by telling ourselves that we are being "honest" and lie to the other by telling her that we are "just being honest". I have seen this scenario many, many times, mostly in places where people value self-expression and self-disclosure. For example, as a parent at Yinbilliko School in the 1970s and '80s I often witnessed ghastly emotional violence, abusiveness and plain rudeness rationalised as honesty and authenticity. Nothing could have been further from the truth.
It is certainly true that, other things being equal, the more honest we are in our dealings with one another the more likely we are to have a genuine relationship. But the only person to whom we owe an absolute obligation to be honest is with ourselves. We do not have an obligation to be honest with anyone else – and we should not even attempt such a foolhardy enterprise until we have first practised honesty to and with ourselves. If we make a commitment to be totally honest with ourselves, we will begin our journey of self-discovery. We will find that, for example, our feelings towards person X are complex, ambivalent perhaps. We can then, either on our own or with the help of someone we trust, explore these feelings towards the other person in private, rather than "dumping" on them, vomiting all over them or hitting them with a long list of recriminations, in an arrogant, self-righteous tone of voice. Indeed, as we explore our feelings we may even find, amidst the anger and the judgements, feelings of love or compassion or caring. This may allow us to share our feelings from the heart, that is to say, honestly (without inverted commas). The point is, we do not live in the kind of world our ancestors lived in: if we did, honest self-expression would come readily to us, from early childhood through to adulthood as a natural way of relating to each other. "Self" expression would then be an expression of our real, authentic self, not the false self we have all developed as a protective device to deal with the pain of living in a crazy world. Given what we have ALL gone through, from our first moments, when our mothers failed to attend to our needs because they didn't know how to do this, we need to be very careful about "being honest" (that is deceiving ourselves and others). We need to choose, with wisdom and great care, what to share, when to share and how much to share, of both our thoughts and our feelings. There are many, many situations in which wisdom requires us to withhold information or to keep our feelings and fantasies to ourselves. There are other situations – in particular those involving someone with whom we have an intimate relationship – when withholding would be generally inappropriate. Finally, we ALL need to develop greater humility about the whole process of relating to one another.
Andrew Reiner
R D Laing (continued from November issue)
Laing wrote The divided self during 1956 but, although the manuscript was ready for publication by 1957, it was not published until December, 1960, having been turned down by a dozen publishers on the ground that such an esoteric work was unlikely to be commercially successful. By the time of Laing's death in 1989 it had sold 700,000 copies of the paperback version (published in 1965) in the UK alone and been translated into virtually every language, including Arabic, Hebrew and Japanese (Adrian Laing, 1994: 69). The divided self, subtitled "An existential study in sanity and madness" is a brilliant account, in existential terms, of the personality labelled "schizophrenic" by Psychiatrists. Its "basic purpose is to make madness, and the process of going mad, comprehensible". Citing the works of the existentialist philosophers Søren Kierkegaard, Karl Jaspers, Franz Kafka, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre and Paul Tillich, as well as existential psychiatrists like Ludwig Binswanger and Medard Boss and "maverick" psychiatrists such as Harry Stack Sullivan and Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, and using his experience with schizophrenic patients in the early 1950s as examples, Laing demonstrated that what we call "mad", "crazy", "schizophrenic" or "psychotic" is easily understood as ordinary human experience and that the line between sanity and insanity is a very thin one. Although as much had been said by Sullivan in the 1920s, '30s and '40s and by Fromm-Reichmann in the 1930s, '40s and '50s, Laing's analysis had a depth that was unique. Placing his account within the existentialist tradition added to the book's appeal (although John Bowlby, who had read the unpublished manuscript in 1957 and 1958, apparently thought the book would be improved by deletion of the words "existential" and "phenomenology").
During the four-year period 1957 to 1960, as Laing attempted to get his book published, he worked as Senior Registrar at the Tavistock Clinic, conducted research into "schizophrenia and families" at the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations (leading to his third major book in April, 1964, Sanity, madness and the family) and enrolled in a four-year training program with the British Psychoanalytic Society and the Institute of Psychoanalysis. The last of these required, amongst other things, that he undergo psychoanalysis, five days a week, for four years. His training analyst was Charles Rycroft, supervised by D W Winnicott and Marion Milner. In the event it was only because of the support of Winnicott and John Bowlby that Laing was allowed to qualify as a Psychoanalyst, against the wishes of the training committee of the British Psychoanalytical Society and the Institute of Psychoanalysis (the latter thought Laing was "a very disturbed and ill person"). Apparently, at this time (late 1960), Laing was so ill (physically) that he nearly died (Adrian Laing, 1994: 67). "The symptoms were consistent with glandular fever", we are told, without any further indication of either what the sickness was, or why he was so sick. What we ARE told is that he was suffering from depression, a "depression that lay buried in his heart all his life" (p62) and that the cause, obvious to the son, was never discussed during Laing's four-year analysis with Rycroft:
"Throughout the whole of this psychoanalytical process it never came to light that Ronnie had lived the first years of his life in an atmosphere of deep and unremitting depression. At the time of his birth, Ronnie's mother was preparing herself emotionally and spiritually for the death of her father. Ronnie was two months old when Amelia's father died. The following year Ronnie's paternal grandmother died" (p63).
To Adrian Laing, "the relevance of such external events to an individual between the time of birth and eighteen months" is obvious. R D Laing "thought of such factors as being crucial to the emotional and spiritual development of an individual, particularly at that age". Yet these issues failed to emerge during four years of analysis. Laing also began to use drugs at this time, according to his son.
Nevertheless, having qualified as a Psychoanalyst at the end of 1960 and, with The divided self recently published, he set himself up as a practising psychoanalyst in 21 Wimpole Street, London, at the age of 33. He was still Senior Registrar at the Tavistock Clinic and, with a new grant, continued to conduct research into schizophrenia and families at the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations in 1961. During 1961 Tavistock Publications, which had published The divided self, published his second book, The self and others.
Although published less than a year apart, the two books were written five years apart – and this explains why they are so different (The self and others was completed by June, 1961). The divided self may have been radical, but its style was academic. In The self and others, the cool tone is replaced with an urgency. The divided self described how people labelled "schizophrenic" experience reality. The notion of "the false-self" was introduced, in contrast to one's "true self" or "real self", to "being 'true to his nature'" (or "being themselves", or to "be real"). The concept of inauthenticity was introduced. "'A man without a mask' is indeed very rare. One even doubts the possibility of such a man". The false self of "the schizoid individual" is much more extreme than "the mask worn by the 'normal' person". In The self and others Laing goes into a great deal of detail about how such a false self develops, in the family, through interactions through which parents ascribe "attributions" to their children, "define" them and put them in "untenable positions". They "mystify" and "invalidate the experience" of their children. When, in addition, they put a child into a "double bind" (a term borrowed from Gregory Bateson) schizophrenia can result. Laing introduced the concept of "injunctions"; it is through the attributions and injunctions of parents that children develop an "identity" (a false self). Sometimes they are put in an "untenable position", as a result of which they may go crazy ("schizophrenic"). The underlying theme of The self and others is that we are driven crazy by our families or, sometimes, by our relationships (eg marriage). But, even if we are not, our parents, partners and others (ie society) make the possibility of an authentic mode of existence virtually impossible. The self and others clearly owes a great deal to Laing's research (with Aaron Esterson), during 1958-1960, on the interaction patterns in the families of people diagnosed as "schizophrenic". The divided self, though published at the end of 1960, is a book written in 1956 and is not influenced by the 1958-1960 research on families.
Laing's son does not say anything about the possible influence on Laing of the atmosphere at the Tavistock Clinic, where Bowlby and his colleagues had been revolutionising the whole field of psychology for a decade, or of being around people like D W Winnicott or Melanie Klein (who died in 1960), yet the influence must have been profound. The research of people like John Bowlby, James Robertson, Mary Ainsworth and others on mothers and babies and their focus on "bonding", "attachment" and, more importantly, on how a rupture of these processes affects babies and young children could not have failed to affect Laing deeply – as becomes more and more obvious by 1963-1964. Adrian Laing does not mention this, focusing instead on the influence of the research on families being conducted in the US in the late 1950s, in particular the work of Gregory Bateson and his colleagues (Bateson et al, 1956).
The research on the families of schizophrenics at the Tavistock continued for five years, between 1958 and 1963. The manuscript of Sanity, madness and the family was delivered to Tavistock Publications in August, 1963 and published in April, 1964. In the meantime, Laing had left the Tavistock Clinic to work on his own (1962) and visited the United States, meeting with people working in the field of family therapy and mental illness (amongst others, Gregory Bateson and Erving Goffman). Although Adrian Laing mentions Chestnut Lodge, where Frieda Fromm-Reichmann had worked between 1935 and 1957 (and whose views on schizophrenia in the 1930s paralleled Laing's!), but, again, seems to be unaware of any influence (even though Laing quotes Fromm-Reichmann in both The divided self and The self and others, written before he'd gone to the US). Fromm-Reichmann, in turn, had been closely associated with Harry Stack Sullivan (another name mentioned by Laing), who conducted seminars at Chestnut Lodge, on Fromm-Reichmann's recommendation, for four years (1942 to 1946). Also, during 1962, Laing cooperated with two others at Tavistock, Herbert Phillipson (Principal Psychologist at the Tavistock Clinic) and Russell Lee on a project which led to a book called Interpersonal perception: A theory and method of research. Although the work was complete by 1963, it was twice rewritten, not being published until 1966. Hence, during the two years, 1962-1963, Laing and his colleagues – Aaron Esterson, David Cooper, Russell Lee and Herbert Phillipson – completed three major works: Sanity, madness and the family (with Esterson), Reason and violence (on Sartre, with Cooper) and Interpersonal perception (with Phillipson and Lee). Adrian Laing calls the period 1962-1964 "the most intense intellectual period in Ronnie's life". In addition to the above, there were "scores of papers, lectures, articles and television appearances". But it was the publication, in April, 1964, of Sanity, madness and the family which was the "catalyst which catapulted R D Laing from obscurity to controversy". This was due to "the implication, though not the thesis … that the very cause of madness lay in the family itself" (Adrian Laing, 1994: 75). By this time Laing had five children, the youngest, the author, born in April, 1958.
Laing's collaboration with David Cooper on the analysis of Sartre's philosophy (Reason and violence) would link their names in the late sixties (after Cooper published Psychiatry and anti-psychiatry in 1967, concurrently with Laing's The politics of experience). According to Laing senior "the book was finished in three solid and intensive weeks (during 1963) with virtually no sleep, the two of them surviving on little else other than nicotine and caffeine" (ibid: 85). However, Laing had begun writing his contribution in early 1961 and it is clear they had both been "working on" the project for at least two years (Sartre's Critique de la raison dialectique, the book Laing and Cooper were mainly concerned with, had been published in 1960). Laing and Cooper had met in late 1958, at a time when the latter was working, as a Psychiatrist, at the Belmont Hospital, while Laing's unpublished manuscript of The divided self was "'doing the rounds' among an elite corps of psychiatrists and psychoanalysts". Cooper had moved from South Africa to London in 1955. He soon realised, Adrian Laing tells us, "that he had become just what he despised – a member of the professional middle-classes". He had "made it" in the field of medicine. Yet, "his life was a meaningless waste of an existence, a complete sell-out", he told anyone who would care to listen. "He was spirit-dead" (p84).
In early 1962, he had a private practice in Harley Street and was working as a Psychiatrist at the Shenley Hospital in St Albans. When the latter decided to close its insulin-coma ward, Cooper persuaded them to allow him to take over the ward and to convert it into an experimental unit for "schizophrenics", in which doctors, nurses and "patients" (now to called "visitors") had equal status. The experiment, lasting from early 1962 to late 1965, moved to one of the hospital out-houses and came to be known as "Villa 21", described in Cooper's (1967) Psychiatry and anti-psychiatry. In an appendix written jointly with Laing and Esterson, Cooper calls the approach used a "form of family oriented social therapy", "conjoint family therapy" and "milieu therapy". Although there was "reduced use of tranquillizers", there was no shock treatment, leucotomy or individual psychotherapy. The results (of the 42 "schizophrenics" admitted in 1962) were encouraging. "All patients were discharged within one year of admission. The average length of stay was three months. Seventeen percent were readmitted within one year of discharge. Seventy percent of those not readmitted were able to earn their living for the whole of the year after discharge" (Cooper, 1967: 135-136). The authors acknowledge the ridiculousness of this kind of attempt to "assess 'results' in a project such as Villa 21", but explain there are "strategic reasons for looking at the work in terms of the less objectionable psychiatric criteria of 'improvement', namely the tendency of patients not to be readmitted within one year of their discharge from hospital" (p124).
Adrian Laing, though somewhat ambivalent about Villa 21 ("It would be unfair, even with hindsight, to say that Villa 21 was a failure"), acknowledges that what was achieved "was quite extraordinary by any standards", explaining the "failure" (ie closure) in terms of the reluctance of doctors and nurses to share power with "patients". "To strip nurses and doctors of power was never going to be a popular idea" (Adrian Laing, 1994: 87). Cooper, Laing, Esterson and their supporters realised that this sort of thing could not be run "within the working confines of a state-run and state-financed institution".
(To be continued)
Andrew Reiner
References
Mary Barnes and Joseph Berke (1971). Mary Barnes: Two accounts of a journey through madness (Penguin Books, 1973).
Gregory Bateson, Don D Jackson, Jay Haley and John H Weakland (1956). "Toward a Theory of Schizophrenia". Behavioral Science, Vol I, No 4, 1956 (reprinted in Steps to an ecology of mind" [Ballantine Books: New York, 1972], pp201-227).
Robert Boyers and Robert Orrill (1971) (Editors). Laing and anti-psychiatry (Penguin Books, 1972).
David Cooper (1967). Psychiatry and anti-psychiatry (London: Tavistock Publications, 1967; Paladin, 1970, 1972).
David Cooper (1968) (Editor). The dialectics of liberation (Penguin Books, 1968).
David Cooper (1971). The death of the family (Penguin Books, 1972, 1973, 1974).
David Cooper (1974). The grammar of living: An examination of political acts (Pelican Books, 1976).
David Cooper (1978). The language of madness (Pelican Books, 1980).
Aaron Esterson (1970). The leaves of spring: Schizophrenia, family and sacrifice; A study in the dialectics of madness (London: Tavistock Publications, 1970; Penguin Books, 1972).
Adrian Laing (1994). R D Laing: A biography (New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 1994, 1996).
R D Laing (1960). The divided self: An existential study in sanity and madness (London: Tavistock Publications, 1960; Penguin Books, 1965 [with new Preface, September, 1964).
R D Laing (1961; 1969). The self and others (London: Tavistock Publications, 1961; second edition [Self and others], Pantheon Books, 1969; Pelican Books, 1971, 1972 [extensively revised, with new Preface, May, 1969]).
R D Laing and Aaron Esterson (1964). Sanity, madness and the family: Volume 1: Families of schizophrenics (London: Tavistock Publications, 1964; second edition, Pelican Books, 1970 [with a new Preface, October, 1969]).
R D Laing (1964). "Violence and love". Lecture given on 21 January, 1964 at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. Reprinted as Chapter 3 of Laing, 1967 under the heading "The mystification of experience", pp49-64.
R D Laing (1964a). "Transcendental experience". Paper delivered to the First International Congress of Social Psychiatry, London, in August, 1964. Reprinted as Chapter 6 of Laing, 1967: 108-119.
R D Laing and David Cooper (1964). Reason and violence: A decade of Sartre's philosophy, 1950-1960 (London: Tavistock Publications, 1964; New York: Vintage Books, 1971).
R D Laing (1965). "A ten-day voyage", Views, 1965, No 8; reprinted as Chapter 7 of Laing, 1967: 120-137.
R D Laing, H Phillipson and A R Lee (1966). Interpersonal perception: A theory and method of research (London: Tavistock Publications, 1966).
R D Laing (1967). The politics of experience and the bird of paradise (Penguin Books, 1967).
R D Laing (1969). The politics of the family; reprinted in The politics of the family and other essays (London: Tavistock Publications, 1971; Penguin Books, 1976).
R D Laing (1985). Wisdom, madness and folly (London: Macmillan, 1985).
Richard Leakey (1994). The origins of humankind (London: Phoenix paperback, 1995; reprinted 2000).
Herbert Marcuse (1964). One dimensional man (Abacus, 1972).
Morton Schatzman (1973). Soul murder: Persecution in the family (Penguin Books, 1976).
Alan Watts (1957). The way of Zen (Pelican Books, 1962).
Alan Watts (1961). Psychotherapy east and west (Penguin Books, 1971).
Send mail to reinerkaur@consciouslivingseminars.com with questions or comments. Copyright © 2003 Andrew Reiner and Harbans Kaur
Retrieved from http://www.sonoma.edu/users/d/daniels/R.D._Laing_Summary_.html
Ronald D. Laing's work was centered on understanding and treating schizophrenic patients. He could perhaps best be termed an "existential psychiatrist." Indeed, one of his early books was on Jean-Paul Sartre, and he used concepts from Sartre, Hegel and others in endeavoring to conceptualize the life and world of the schizophrenic. Laing himself grew up in a bizarre family setting. His parents forbid him to go out of the house alone or play with other children until middle childhood, they repeatedly conveyed the message to him that he was "evil," and when he went out with them he was kept on a leash with a harness. His childhood environment was such as to cause him severe confusion about which thoughts and feelings were his own, and which were "mapped onto" him by his environment. As an adult, he was himself schizophrenic for periods of time, spending some time as a patient in psychiatric wards. As such, he gained a perspective on schizophrenia which was unusual and perhaps even unique for a psychiatrist. That is, he truly understood what the schizophrenic's world looked like from the inside, as well as from the outside. He also had gained, from his own experience, a sense of the kind of situations in family, school, etc., that could drive a person crazy.
A sane response to an insane situation. This is Laing's comment about what "going crazy" entailed. Applying Gregory Bateson's concept of the double bind, in which anything a person does leads to one or another kind of punishing consequence, he observed that some children are faced with the dilemma of having an identity defined for them that is fundamentally different from who they experience themselves to be. Their alternatives are to either give up the parental approval and caretaking they need to survive, in order to be truly themselves, or to give up their own sense of their identity and comply with parental demands. Faced with this dilemma, most people choose to give up their own identities and adopts those that are handed to them by parental figures. In some people faced with this situation, the response is to "go crazy." This is analogous to being inside a tunnel which represents what are normally considered "sane" thoughts, actions, and feelings, finding that moving in either direction leads to painful experiences (giving up self, or giving up the other), and in response breaking through the ceiling of the tunnel into what is considered insanity. (I think, although I am not certain, that this analogy is mine rather than Laing's.)
Interest in the subjective experience of the schizophrenic. Given his own background, Laing was able to perceive how pathetically limited and inadequate the conventional psychiatric definitions of schizophrenia are. They are largely "looking at" from outside, and capture little of the schizophrenic's own experience. Laing tried to capture the structure of the schizophrenic experience in "The Divided Self," written when he was only twenty-eight years old. Later he would characterize that early work as too much in an "us-them" mode. His later work explored the nature of relationships and the workings of schizophrenogenic families. He also included many observations on the way in which school and other social institutions imprison both children and adults in situations that confuse them about their own thoughts and feelings, induce them to think they have the socially approved thoughts and feelings that others want them to, and as a consequenc drive them crazy.
Treatment of the schizophrenic. Laing established a treatment facility in a London suburb which housed, I think, about fifteen or twenty schizophrenic patients and several live-in psychiatric staff persons. (I'm not sure about that number.) Patients were given no drugs, They were provided with support in the form of daily group therapy, individual therapy, and ongoing interaction with staff. Staff members were careful to accept the subjective validity of the schizophrenic's experience of the world. In addition, there was reality-testing in the form of feedback from other group members. No drugs were administered. In Laing's view, drugs make it more difficult for a person to think and therefore interfere with the kind of personal work that can lead to true recovery. I read one case history of a member of the psychiatric staff who shared a room with one patient who defecated in the room and often screamed apparently uncontrollably. Laing's approach took the existential view that each person, including the schizophrenic is ultimately responsible for his or her own behavior, and ultimately his or her own recovery. He viewed his role as that of providing conditions that would facilitate that recovery. For a time there were a number of treatment facilities around the world that followed the Laingian model. To the best of my knowledge, today it has been largely abandoned, both because it is very expensive in terms of professional time and effort and drugs are cheaper and can be administered by poorly paid ward personnel, and because the psychiatric establishment is committed to a medical model rather than an existential model.
The situation has to be discovered: "We can never assume that the people in the situation know what the situation is. There is no a priori reason to believe or disbelieve a story anyone tells us. Different people usually have different stories about a situation. A psychiatric "history" of the situation is a sample of the situation. It is a story, one person's way of defining the situation. "Few psychiatrists are experts in sorting out these stories. They are experts in construing situations of a few standard psychiatric myths." (politics of the family, p. 33-4)
Family resistance: Laing notes that he often finds that what he thinks is going on in a family bears almost no resemblance to what anyone in the family expriences or thinks is happening. Often "there is concerted family resistance to discovering what is going on, and there are complicated strategems to keep everyone in the dark." (politics of the family, p. 77)
Complementarity: "That feature of relatedness whereby the other is required to fulfill or complete the self."
Confirmation: Some sign of recognition by another person that is relevant to an evocative act. This may include disapproval. "Every relationship. . . implies a definition of self by others and other by self. . . A person's 'own' identity can never be completely abstracted from his identity-for-others." (Self and Others)
Pseudo-confirmation. Acts that masquerade as confirmation, but are counterfeit. For example, I define who you are, then confirm your behavior and being that conforms with my definition.
Tangential responses: Those that deal with some aspect of a person's behavior other than those the person is concerned with.
Mystification: Misdefinition of the issues. A plausible misrepresentation of what the exploiters do to the exploited.
The situation has to be discovered: "We can never assume that the people in the situation know what the situation is. There is no a priori reason to believe or disbelieve a story anyone tells us. Different people usually have different stories about a situation. A psychiatric "history" of the situation is a sample of the situation. It is a story, one person's way of defining the situation. "Few psychiatrists are experts in sorting out these stories. They are experts in construing situations of a few standard psychiatric myths." (politics of the family, p. 33-4)
Mapping: A person "maps" some accepted social definition of reality onto his or her experience and then acts as if that map reflects his or her experience. Or else feels terribly oppressed and unseen, if the personal experience is very different from the "mapped" pseudo-experience.
"Call experiential structure A, and public event B. Sometimes the product of A and B, in a marriage ceremony, is a marriage. Both people are married in all senses at once. . .
"One function of ritual is to map A onto B at critical moments, for example births, marriage, deaths. In our society many of the old rituals have lost much of their power. New ones have not arisen.
"To preserve convention, there is a general collusion to disavow A when A and B do not match. Anyone breaking this rule is liable to invalidation. One is not supposed to feel married if one has not been married. Conversely, one is supposed to feel married if one 'is.' If one goes through a marriage ceremony, and does not feel it is 'real', if it dod not 'take', there are friends and relative s to say: 'Don't worry, I felt the same, my dear. Wait until you have a child. . . Then you will feel you are a mother,' and so on. . . .
"So one feels, perhaps, frightened or guilty, and probably wishes to disavow A; to take refuge in B, where everything is as everyone says." (politics of the family, p. 69)
Induction: Projection is done by one person as his own experience of the other. Induction is done by one person to the other's experience. One does not tell him what to be, but tells him what he is. Such attributions, in context, are many times more powerful than orders (or other forms of coercion or persuasion.)" One is told one is good, bad, evil, pretty, sexy, etc.
"When attributions have the function of instructions or injunctions, this function may be denied, giving rise to one type of mystification, akin to. . . hypnotic suggestion."
One may tell someone to feel something and not to remember he has been told. Simply tell him he feels it. Better still, tell a third party, in front of him, that he feels it."
What the parents tell a child "he is, is induction, far more potent than what they tell him to do. . . . These signals do not tell him to be naughty; they define what he does as naughty. In this way, he learns that he is naughty, and how to be naughty in his particular family."
"It is not sufficient to say that my wife introjects my mother, if by projection, and induction, I have manouvered her into such a position that she actually begins to act, and even to feel, like her, [perhaps] without ever having met her." (Politics of the family, 78-9, 119-20))
In induction the family members seldom know what they are doing. "Often the parents are themselves confused by a child who does x, when they tell him to do y and indicate he is x. "I'm always trying to get him to make fmore friends, but he is so self-conscious. Isn't that right, dear?"
Paradoxical orders: If correctly executed, they are disobeyed. If they are disobeyed, they are obeyed. "Be spontaneous." "Don't do what I tell you to."
We have rules against knowing certain rules. "Rule A: Don't. Rule A1: Rule A does not exist. Rule A2: Rule A1 does not exist."
Domain and range. "One can project a minute domain onto a vast rainge; or a vast domain onto a minute range. Scale is no deterrent in practice."
Psychiatrists as mind-police: "If a and B are incongruent, the mind police (psychiatrists) are caleled in. A crime (illness) is diagnosed. An arrest is made and the patient taken into custody (hospitalization). Interviews and investigations follow. A confession may be obtained (patient admits he is ill, displays insight). . . . The sentence is passed (therapy is recommended). He serves his time, comes out, and obeys the law in the future." This is how the "official story of psychiatric consultation, examination, diagnosis, prognosis, treatment. . . is often experienced." (politics of the family, p. 74)
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