The Sixties (13 page)
Authors: Jenny Diski
We were a generation that wanted to give the children the childhoods we wished we had had, or thought we wished we had had.
Unless the easy access we had to the dole and those generous education grants was, after all, a covert gift driven by a similar
wish in the older generation, we were different from our parents. And we have turned out to be different from our children.
Both those generations, older and younger than us, were and are more inclined than we were to reproduce for their young what
they experienced in their childhood, rather than offer them Wonderland. We were stardust, we were golden and we had to get
ourselves back to the garden ...
*
Previously all children in the State system took an exam at eleven, the results of which filtered those who passed to academic
grammar schools, and those who failed to ‘practical’ secondary modern schools, where a good deal of woodwork and metalwork
was on the curriculum. Comprehensive schools were mixed-ability schools that children attended on the basis of locality, not
an exam. The eleven-plus was abolished with a few exceptions.
†
The school leaving age was raised to sixteen in 1973.
If I don’t know I don’t know, I think I know. If I don’t know I know I know, I think I don’t know.
R. D. Laing,
Knots
, 1970
Clon wore – it was still somewhat notable in 1969 – a ring in one ear, and his hair was dirty blond, falling in careless curls
around his face and neck like Shelley’s, though his overall look was more piratical than poetic. When asked what it was short
for, he repeated that his name was Clon. ‘Just Clon,’ he insisted, in a way that suggested it wasn’t. He was bold and handsome
in a roguish way, and his startling clear blue eyes looked directly at you, always amused, and with, it seemed, a rock-solid
confidence in himself that didn’t require yours because he had enough of his own. Compared to the rest of us, he seemed to
glow internally.
I was one of about thirty patients at the Paddington Day Clinic, an experiment in intensive group therapy, set up and funded
by the local Health Authority, at Royal Oak in West London. A committee of elected patients interviewed prospective patients
after one of the two psychiatrists in charge had done so and passed on to us those they thought could benefit from joining
the emotional scrummage. New people were only admitted if they passed their second interview. Admission committees generally
admit those most like themselves, so it was a fairly homogeneous group: young, very few people over twenty-five, disturbed,
angry, dysfunctional, but often talented in a wasted, wayward sort of way, and highly articulate. Not much point in a full-time
regime of group therapy from nine to five, five days a week, if people weren’t able to express themselves. We undertook not
to take any drugs, including prescription tranquillisers and anti-depressants, and to participate in the various large and
small groups that went on during the day. It was a place of high and constant drama. Everyone, some time or other, had their
moment as the centre (or victim) of the group’s attention – anyone who didn’t volunteer to talk about themselves and their
problem and have it considered by everyone else would, after a period of grace, be challenged and confronted on their silence.
It could be very harsh. There were tears, arguments, walkouts, collapses and sometimes violence. Relations within the community,
general and sexual, were examined with scalpels. The skin of everything was lifted back to look at the bloody mess that inevitably
lay beneath. Every day brought smaller or larger crises and emotional turmoil. You really needed to be quite tough or hooked
on emotional turmoil to survive it. Some of us were very troubled, others less obviously so, but if you got through the rather
gruelling, unsympathetic patients’ committee interview, it was reckoned you could cope. Mostly, this was right, but during
my four months there one or two people attempted suicide rather than talk (or as a result of it); others spoke out and, finding
themselves overwhelmed by the effort or the response, left, sometimes for less experimental psychiatric inpatient care. There
were those who watched, for as long as they could get away with it, and those who made themselves the centre of the group
as much as they could get away with it. It was an education in group dynamics if you were a watcher, but there was always
someone watching you and sooner rather than later you would be dragged into the collective eye of the group. If you denied
the accusation of evasion or defended yourself, you were not facing up to your problems, or you were aggressive and not facing
up to your problems; if you agreed with others’ assessments, you were too compliant and probably concealing the real issue.
Breaking down, one way or another, was pretty much a requirement; a proof that you were ‘working’.
Clon lasted longer than any of the watchers – even me. He was never successfully enticed or goaded into the centre of a group
session. He sat with his bold, knowing smile on his face and spoke neither on someone else’s problems or his own. If asked
directly for a comment or how he felt, he’d shrug and open his blue eyes wide. ‘I’m cool, man.’ He had an exceptional capacity
to resist being drawn in. Partly it was his compelling charm, and a mysterious ability to deflect attention as if he had a
mirrored surface that enquiry slid off harmlessly and on to whomever else his eyes might turn towards. But it was also because
of the confusion he created by the fiendishly cunning puzzle he set the community. I was on the committee that admitted him.
His answer to the standard question ‘Why do you think you would benefit from joining this community?’ was instant and direct,
spoken with a broad open-faced grin: ‘Because I’ll get a medical certificate and the sickness benefit, man.’
It was a novel response. All patients did get a medical certificate for as long as they were with the clinic to say that they
were unfit for work by virtue of a psychological disorder and were entitled to about (I think) £7 a week state benefit. But
everyone, including Clon, had been referred to the clinic by an outside psychiatrist as needing treatment and being potentially
suitable for this particular experimental form. And nearly everyone given the opportunity at the admission interview to itemise
their neuroses and psychoses had to be silenced eventually, or there would be nothing left to tell the group if we let them
in. So we laughed at Clon’s casual joke. Yeah, funny, but, really, what was his problem?
‘I haven’t got one. Really. I heard about this place and it’s, like, perfect. I want to hang out here and get paid same as
you guys. I’m cool, man. Happy childhood, life’s great. But it would be better if I didn’t have to get a job.’ He smiled amiably
as he spoke, as if we were all in on the scam and knew exactly what he was talking about.
‘No,’ said the chair of our committee. ‘Seriously.’
‘Seriously,’ said Clon. ‘They’ve chucked me off the dole and I don’t want to work. I want to be like you cats.’
He had nothing to add. He gave a bland account of being brought up I can’t remember where, nothing interesting, no problems,
just didn’t want a job and had heard about the clinic. He went to his doctor, saw a shrink, said what he had to say to be
referred, and here he was. Smiling. Coming clean, wanting some of what we’d got.
‘Why should we admit you if you’ve really got nothing wrong with you?’
‘Why not? What’s it to you if I hang around here for a while?’
Bristling, the committee chairman said that everyone here was entitled to be here because they had serious and genuine problems
and needed psychiatric help. He would be taking the place of someone who needed treatment. Clon kept his face locked into
a smile, while he threw in his ace.
‘Yeah, well, how do you know I’m not faking it... the not being crazy?’
We sent him out of the room so we could discuss his application. It should have taken seconds to come to a decision, and for
one or two people there was nothing to talk about. But there was another view. Clon’s brilliant skill at concealing his problems
made him an ideal candidate for the clinic. Obviously, he had severe problems – he had been sent here by a doctor, passed
on to us by our psychiatrists – and anyone who insisted that they had no mental problems, in general and in particular to
the admission committee, was either really deluded or crying out for help to uncover their inner horror. He had virtually
told us, with a sneer that by no means meant it wasn’t true, not to take him at his own word. Wouldn’t we be failing him if
we rejected him? Colluding with his refusal to face the painful truth about himself? He was in.
For weeks great efforts went on within the large morning and evening group and the smaller groups that continued through the
day to get Clon to confront his problems.
‘Clon, everyone has their difficulties. You’ve seen how people open up here. There’s no shame in admitting your fears. We’re
here to help. You have to work on your stuff, like everyone else.’
‘Yeah, well, I would, but I don’t have any problems. I’m having a great time. If you’re bothered by me, that’s your problem.
I’m getting what I want. This is fun and I’m being paid.’
It was true there was no evidence that Clon was other than quite content sitting in the groups, drinking tea, having lunch,
hanging out until five o’clock. He wasn’t moody or given to sudden violence, weeping in corners, turning over tables, or screaming
at someone he could no longer tolerate. He tolerated us perfectly, even seemed to enjoy himself, without ever actually participating
with issues of his own or commenting on those of anyone else. Eventually, the admissions committee met to decide whether to
expel Clon. He was summoned. All he had to do was say that he was fucked up like the rest of us.
‘Hey, I told you the truth and you admitted me. How can you expel me now? Nothing’s changed.’
He was right. The question was whether Clon was madder than all of us or a brilliant con artist. Yet he wasn’t exactly conning
us. He certainly wasn’t pretending to be mad. But was he pretending
not
to be mad? Or – was he pretending to
be
mad by claiming not to be mad? He was a maestro of the double bind. Ronnie Laing would have loved him. But there were other
ways, easier ways of getting social security, without having to sit through day after day of people having tantrums and obsessing
about their inner demons. And even if he was just using the place, might it not teach him something in spite of himself? The
big question kept returning: was he or wasn’t he authentic? I found myself wondering why it mattered so much to us. Having
accepted him, shouldn’t we let him stay? And what the hell if he
was
playing the system? I had a kind of respect for his position, whatever it was, or really was. But then I’m the daughter of
a conman. It was a long meeting. Finally, he was expelled. The danger that we were being taken for a ride (even though, or
because, we couldn’t be sure what kind of ride we were being taken for) was too great for us to risk. As Clon had said over
and over again in group: it was our problem. We called Clon in and told him he was out. I remember his shrug, and the who-cares,
it-lasted-as-long-as-it-lasted beaming smile on his face.
‘Well, fuck you, then,’ he said, not entirely amicably, and swaggered out of the room, out of the building, never to be seen
again.
I’m still not sure whether I imagine in sentimental retrospect or actually saw a brief look of fear cross his face before
he cleared it, or if his shrug wasn’t exactly the kind of shrug I used to make as an adolescent when I was given up on yet
again, and all that mattered was to show that I didn’t care one bit.
I’d been sent to the day clinic after a consultation with Aaron Esterson, who had co-authored
Sanity, Madness and the Family,
Volume 1 of the proposed series
Families of Schizophrenics,
with R. D. Laing in 1964. In 1965,
The Divided Self
, written by Laing alone and originally published in 1960, was published in the Pelican series of books – that lifeline of
paperback knowledge and information of every discipline which adorned the period and, along with the system of free public
libraries, gave those of us who had rejected or been rejected by a university education, a way to learn. It was the beginning
of the anti-psychiatry movement of the Sixties.
Families of Schizophrenics
proposed the theory that it was families who were mad rather than simply the individuals who were scapegoated by them as the
‘sick member’. The case histories taken by Laing and Esterson were chilling and strangely familiar whether you came from a
recognisably mad family or one you had been brought up to think of as ‘normal’.
The Divided Self
extended this to suggesting that society itself estranged the mad, and caused them to create false selves in order to survive.
From this position, it was a short hop, given the ethos of the Sixties, to doubting the normality of normality itself and
then to questioning the madness of madness. The qualities of sanity or madness were defined as ‘degrees of conjunction and
disjunction between two persons where the one is sane by common consent’.
23
Laing was brilliant and was taken up by the intelligentsia, as well as, when they differed, the desperate. Admirers gathered
at his feet at parties to listen to him talk about his theories. He drank heavily and took to using LSD frequently. His book
The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise
24
confirmed the holy-madness/consecrated-drugs connection. Enlightenment found another branch: drugs were already a fast route
to opening ourselves up to the religious experience of Eastern philosophy, now they became a way for those not ‘blessed’ with
madness to get an insight into this newly hallowed state. From being victims of their families, the mad
*
became the victims of society in general, and its medical institutions in particular (in timely line with the concurrently
translated writings of Foucault). The mad – the word became a banner of resistance – were outcasts, prophets, speakers of
unspeakable truths, and were pronounced heroes. Pushed by malign normality, the mad, on behalf of those of us who hadn’t the
courage, took a journey to the furthest depths of the human psyche to look at what was really there, and who we really were.
They trod the lonely hero’s journey (a classic quest scenario, also in vogue through the new popularity of Joseph Campbell’s
Hero with a Thousand Faces
25
) beyond the boundaries of society to places most of us dared not go, and they returned changed but with news of the truth
they had found and brought back for us if we would just pay proper attention. When schizophrenics babbled or screamed or wept
about their voices and told terrified tales of being spied on by MI6 or Smersh, of being the risen Christ recrucified, or
Satan cast down again, they were, Laing said, to be listened to on their own terms, creatively understood, translated like
radio messages from the Resistance, not medicated and institutionalised back to numbness – the numbness of the so-called-sane,
now revealed to be a contemptible state of willed ignorance. The mad were the super-sane. We couldn’t hear them because we
were not sensitive enough, or we couldn’t bear to face the truth they spoke about our own ‘normality’. Just as we were later
to discover ourselves to be racist and sexist, so, in the mid-Sixties, we were to understand ourselves as madist. Not only
should we stop persecuting the mad, we needed to
become
mad in order to achieve real sanity.