A few weeks ago I heard R. D. Laing discussing his views on Schizophrenia with a group of Mar- utes later, Ann herself came running along the xists in North London. He told us about a classic case of madness involving a German judge called Scherer, who suddenly decided that he was turning into a woman, and that he had a direct link-up with God through his nerves. Laing told us Freud's interpretation of this case, which was a variation on the Oedipal theme-Scherer, Freud thought, was a suppressed homosexual who wanted to be fucked by his father. Then Laing gave us his own view of the Scherer case—-an interpretation which he believed was a Marxist one. Having done research into Scherer's restrictive and brutal upbringing, Laing had come to the conclusion that Scherer's "madness" was in fact a breakdown of his conditioning by bourgeois society. It Scherer was "mad" at all, it was when he was normal, when he was carrying on the ludicrously strict and puritanical traditions of his family. His so-called Schizophrenia was a step forward. It could be regarded as progressive, because it was a breaking down of the conditioning he had received as a child. It was, in fact, a valid experience-just as valid as Scherer's "normal" Life as a German judge.
Laing left us with two important problems. First: is there really such a thing as Schizophrenia? - is anyone entitled to say that people eading "normal" bourgeois existences are any less "Schizophrenic" than the people in mental hospitals? Second: have Marxists paid enough attention to this whole area of psychology? Have they really examined the all-important question of how the values of our society are assed on to the individual, and how they can e broken down in later life? In particular, hav they thought about the way in which the family plays a mediating role between capitalist society as a whole and the individual growing child? An off-shoot of this problem might be question: how many Marxists bring up their children as miniature capitalists even though they are sincerely and energetically fighting against capitalism outside their homes?
DWARF X-MAS At last the Dwarf has carried a new revolutionary article! But the last sentence of "The Dialecties of Christmas" which says that despite everything we should still enjoy that festival, gives the game away.
In his opening section Fred Halliday shows that Christmas was not originally Christian, though, even under Christianity, it was once a time for a popular saturnalia. The modern Christmas has nothing of that. It is a nineteenth-century bourgeois festival, a vile and claustrophobic celebration of the Church, the Family and the State. That is why Fred Halliday is right to single out the ideological moment as the tionary aspects of the whole affair.
Christmas, even under the bourgeoisie, has a dual nature, and the vacillation in Black Dwarf's article reflects this. There is a definite element of liberation in Christmas; goods and food are not transferred on the basis of capitalist exchange value, nor even on the basis of the plain man's use-value, but on the basis of pleasurevalue. Capitalism exploits Christmas, but this fundamental aspect of it is profoundly anti-capitalist. At the same time, Christmas is especially oppressive. With the liberation from the market goes a forced and cultivated worship of the narrowest, meanest and most reactionary aspects of daily life. This is what must be abolished, the feeling fairly confused. I just wasn't used to dealing with these kinds of problems "as a Markist". Nor did I have any direct experience of insanity to base my views on.
Then, a few days ago, a friend of mine went dramatically mad. Her boy-friend Peter came round to see me on a Sunday, looking very worried. He told me that Ann had decided that the son she had borne four weeks before was the reincarnation of Jesus Christ. A few minute road with her carry-cot. She burst in, saying:
"I had to come and show you! Isn't it fantastic! You know, don't you! It's fantastic! John, I didn't know, I never realised. I didn't want this, I didn't know!"
Some of the time she was very frightened, and burst into howls of anguish. Other times she was beside herself with joy, and was equally noisy about it. She was like somebody on a very violent LSD trip, except that she organised verything that happened to her so that it would fit into this theory about her baby being JC. The feeling we all had-particularly my wife, who could relate it to her own experiences of childbirth-was that Ann was so overcome by the real, miraculous implications of having produced a baby that the only way she could cope with them was to transform them into this highly appropriate myth.
Two other things struck me. One was that she desperately needed our support and help. She definitely didn't want to be alone with this thing, she was too scared by it. The other was that part of her psychosis involved an ugly and dangerous revenge idea. She was the instrument of God's justice, and she was going to pay back the people "who had tried to kill the baby" at the hospital.
So what was needed at that moment was an immense amount of reassurance and warmth from us, to calm her down and bring out the love side of her experience instead of the paranoid side. This we proceeded to give as best we could, and by the evening she was much more calm and happy-but as deluded as ever. The next morning was the same, and we began to prepare her to go and see her psychiatrist as soon as possible. But now we encountered two related problems. The first was that though she was completely zonked out of her head, she was as intelligent as she had always been, and rather more sensitive. She had an uncanny knack of seeing through all our attempts to reason with her and persuade her to cooperate recently given birth to Jesus Christ, you may be slightly alarmed about it, but basically you feel pretty flattered and pleased. Ann, in fact, was as high as a kite on it, and simply didn't see why we should be worried about her. Her view was that if anybody needed help, it was us-so that even to get her to take her pills, we had to take them too, as a result of which we spent most of that day half-asleep.
We had been told by now that Ann was suffering from "Puerperal Psychosis" -a form of insanity that afflicts some women after childbirth. It can sometimes be very acute-even more than it was with Ann-but we were told that it usually clears up fairly quickly. This was moderately reassuring, but meanwhile Ann wasn't eating properly, the baby wasn't getting looked after properly, the strain was beginning to tell on poor Peter, and none of us felt we could give Ann all the time and help she was going to need. So she needed treatment. The question was: how does our society react to people going through an experience like hers?
n some ways she was obviously getting a terrific kick out of it, and was receiving-and giving out-a lot of valuable insights. What was society going to do about it?
The answer, as told to us by the psychiatrist, was: cart her off. Get her inside a mental hospital. If she was willing to go, fine. If not, drag her off. And there was no room for her to take the baby as well.
"What about Peter and John?" asked Ann. "I want them with me-I need them.
"said the psychiatrist. "You'll have Then I'm not going," said Ann.
"I really think it would be the best thing for you," said the psych "No!" said Ann vehemently. "It would be the best thing for you. That's why you want to get rid of me."
And she was quite right. We all wanted to help her. But part of the reason we wanted her to go to hospital was that nobody outside hospital could spare the immense amount of time and love that was necessary to look after her.
As she was so determined, the psychiatrist gave her another day to decide. Peter and I spent the time using our education and influence to try and get Ann a better deal. We phoned Laing. We talked to several other doctors as well. We persuaded Ann's psych. to try all the hospitals again to see if she could find somewhere more humane than the one that had articulate and knew about these things, we got Ann a place in a hospital where she could take her baby, and where she could be visited any time during the day. Most people wouldn't have been able to do that. They wouldn't have known where to start. So their wives and friends would have been carted off screaming, and parted from their babies.
But the real point of this story is this: not only are people who are mentally ill not pro ductive, in the usual sense of that word. The also represent an embarrassment and a threat to some of our society's most deeply held notions of normality and usefulness. They expose our society's contradictions in a particularly sharp way. So society does its best to get rid of them. It pushes them aside into a corner, hoping that nobody will be able to see them and be embarrassed by them. It treats them like dirt.
Yet more people go to mental hospital than university in our society. Our society actually makes people mentally ill-because it is so competitive, because it is so purposeless, because it isolates people, because it prevents them from a living collective relationship with each other, because it is basically uninterested in people's feelings (unless it can exploit them for the purposes of advertising). Capitalist society recog nises no debt towards these casualties of its inhumanity.
Often it is really necessary for these people to go to hospital. It was necessary in the case of Ann, because the kind of care and rest she need needed couldn't be had outside. But instead of the warm and understanding environments they should be, most of these hospitals are like prisons. Their facilities are hopelessly inadequate, the buildings are lousy, the nurses are under= paid, there aren't enough staff. Society puts people in them, not so that it can live up to its responsibilities to the mentally ill, but so that it can escape from them.
When we make a socialist society, we must make it possible for people like Ann to go through her experience with the minimum of suffering and with the maximum of creativity and learning. Mental illness must be treated as a useful, valid experience, insofar as that is posible. People undergoing it must be helped, no ejected. They must never teel that society has forgotten about them. They are an important part of the human race, and deserve the same consideration that everyone else gets-in fact more.
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worst part of the thing. But, to really abolish it, we must separate the progressive from the reac-