When I left Saragossa on the next day to return to the United States I could not leave Ronnie Laing behind. His voice kept ringing in my ears and for weeks I remembered every word of our conversations as if under a spell. The experience of our en�
counters was so intense that it took me several weeks to get Laing out of my system. My meetings with Bateson, Grof, and many other remarkable people were exciting, inspiring, and il� luminating. My meetings with Laing were all of that, but more than anything else they were dramatic. Laing shook me up, at� tacked me, and challenged my thinking to its very core, but then he accepted me and embraced many of my tentative ideas. In the end we had formed a warm, personal relationship with a strong sense of camaraderie that has continued to the pres� ent day.
Since our conversations in Saragossa I have visited Ronnie several more times in London and we have also been together in other conferences, joint seminars, and panel discussions. These conversations have continued to enrich and inspire me and
146 UNCOMMON WISDOM
have also deepened my understanding of Laing's personality, ideas, and professional work. The question of how experience might be approached within a new scientific framework had been at the center of our discussions in Saragossa, and over the subsequent years I came to see experience as a key to under standing Laing. I think that his entire life may be viewed as a passionate exploration of the "many-colored dome" of human experience-through philosophy, religion, music, and poetry; through meditation and mind-altering drugs; through his writ
ing, his intimate contacts with schizophrenic,>, and his struggles with the pathologies of our society. It is through experience, Laing insists, that we reveal ourselves to one another, and it is experience which gives meaning to our lives. "Experience weaves meaning and fact into one seamless robe," he argued in one of our conversations in Saragossa, and the book he was writ ing at that time is titled, characteristically,
The Voice of Ex-
•
perzence.
Experience, I believe, is also the key to understanding Laing's therapeutic work. The story he told me at our first meeting in London-of a patient bursting into tears after a seemingly ordinary conversation: "For the first time, I have felt like a human being" -stayed in my mind for many years. When Laing and I gave a joint seminar in San Francisco in January
1982,
I finally understood that this story was a perfect illustration of the way Laing works. His therapy is largely non verbal, goes far beyond technique, and, ultimately, has to be experienced in order to be understood."Psychotherapy," Laing explained during the seminar, "is a matter of communicating experience, not a matter of impart
ing objective information," and then he went on to illustrate his point by depicting a situation that seemed to encapsulate the very essence of his approach: "When someone comes into my room and stands there, making no movement and not say ing anything, I don't think of this person as a mute catatonic schizophrenic. If I ask myself, 'Why is he not moving and not talking to me?' I don't need to enter into psychodynamic, spec ulative explanations. I see immediately that I've got a chap standing in front of me who is scared stiffl He's scared so stiff that he is frozen with terror. Why is he frozen with terror? Well, I don't know why. So, I'm going to make it clear to this chap through the way I conduct myself that he does not have anything to be scared about with me."
SWIMMING IN THE SAME OCEAN 147
When asked how he would convey this message, Laing an swered that he might do any number of things: "I might walk around the room; I might go to sleep; I might read a book. To be an effective therapist, so that such a person might 'thaw out; as it were, I have to show that
I
am not frightened ofhim.
That is a very important point. If you are frightened of your pa tients, you shouldn't bother to be a therapist."As Laing spoke, I could imagine him falling asleep in front of a schizophrenic patient and I realized that he was probably the only psychiatrist in the world who would actually do such a thing. He would not be afraid of psychotics because their experience is not foreign to him. He has been to the far
ther reaches of the mind himself, has experienced their ecsta sies as well as their terrors, and would be able to give an authentic response, based on his own experience, to virtually anything a patient could show him. Laing's response would be essentially nonverbal, while his conversation with the patient might seem most ordinary to an observer. He remarked that., indeed, it would be difficult to recognize his exchanges with schizophrenics as being any different from an ordinary conver sation between two people. "Once a conversation has started up;' he observed, "whatever was once called schizophrenia has evaporated completely."
In his therapy, then, Laing uses his rich reservoir of ex perience, great intuition, and ability to give people his undi vided attention in order to allow the psychotic patient to breathe freely and feel comfortable in his presence. Paradoxically, the same Ronnie Laing often makes "normal" people feel very un comfortable. I have long puzzled over this paradox without fully understanding it. Since Laing makes psychotics feel com fortable by showing that he is not frightened of them, does he make so-called normal people feel uncomfortable because they frighten him? "Normal" people, according to Laing, form our insane society, and he seems to use the same intuition and at tention to disturb them and shake them up.