Robert Abzug on Rollo May

It is always melancholy for me when I reach the end of an exceptionally good book, but my consolation is that if I leave it on my shelf long enough, I can come back to it again in a few years time and enjoy its riches anew. This I will do with a fascinating biography that was melancholy for me in a second way: it took me back to a time when there seemed to be a closer, richer relationship between psychology and theology (as well as existentialist philosophy) than obtains in most places today. 

That relationship was lived by Rollo May, whom I first encountered almost thirty years ago as an undergraduate in psychology with a strong interest in theology, especially in its mid-century existentialist manifestations which I had explored in the last year of high-school when a generous French teacher (who very much saw himself as a soixante-huitard and thus indulged his contempt for rules and routine) gave me the entire semester off from class provided I show up on the last day in June after having written him a final paper on existentialism. This I gladly did, and so availed myself of the opportunity to read a lot of Paul Tillich--in English--and then Sartre and Camus in French. 

The following year, as an undergraduate, I read at least one of May's books as I recall: Love and Will. (I also read Will and Spirit: A Contemplative Psychology by his half-brother, the psychiatrist Gerald May.)

May is now the subject of Robert Abzug's brand new book, Psyche and Soul in America: The Spiritual Odyssey of Rollo May (Oxford University Press, 2021), 432pp. 

I finished this biography about a month ago on a lovely early summer evening on my patio. It is superbly written and a real treat to read. Abzug has an extremely deft touch in knowing how much detail to give about May's fascinating life and how much contextualization the reader needs without in either case overwhelming one with an excess of details. One would expect no less of so seasoned a scholar who is now professor emeritus of history at the University of Texas at Austin. 

Following standard practice, I e-mailed Dr Abzug some questions and was delighted when he agreed to my request for an interview about his new book, His thoughts are below. 

AD: Tell us about your background

RA: I grew up in a suburb of NY City, went to Harvard as an undergraduate and then to Berkeley for graduate school, both degrees in history. I was raised and remain a reform Jew by belief and tradition, though of course writing about May (and before that about 19th-century Protestant reformers) deepened my sense of the power of Christian faith and influence.

AD: What led you to writing Psyche and Soul in America: the Spiritual Odyssey of Rollo May?

RA: I tell the story of meeting Rollo in the Preface of the book, but the short answer is 1) After having taken Erik Erikson’s course on the life-cycle in college, I began to have an increasing curiosity about psychology and psychotherapy, one that had already been reflected in my first two books but only as a non-jargony use of what I would call a psychological aesthetic. 

Also, while in graduate school, had taken an external seminar in the latest psychoanalytic developments at the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute. And, of course, being in the Bay Area between 1967-1977, I was in a culture awash with therapeutic visions of the world. That said, it was only the accident of meeting Rollo that I became interested in writing about May and, for that matter, seeing some of the history of psychotherapy and religion through the lens of his life. Of course, the experience of knowing him and his world of friends and concerns for the last eight years of his life proved richer than I could  have imagined.

AD: I first read May in the 90s as an undergrad in psychology who also had an interest in theology, especially the existentialists like Paul Tillich. Tell us a bit about the long-term and hugely important relationship Tillich and May had. 

RA: The early 1930s were key in setting May’s future. First, while still in Europe as a missionary teacher, he encountered, and I would say “converted,” to psychoanalysis by taking a seminar in Vienna with Alfred Adler. That put a certain shape on his spiritual quest but didn’t end it, and when he returned to the U.S. he enrolled at Union Theological Seminary in New York. 

Tillich meanwhile had just escaped arrest by the Nazis by being invited to teach at Union, which he started to do in 1934. He and Rollo met early on in that year, and it began a relationship that was intellectual, spiritual, deeply personal, and lasted for the rest of Tillich’s life (he died in 1965). That relationship is certainly a central theme of Psyche and Soul in America. The mentorship of Tillich for May is clear, but it was something of a two way street. That is best indicated by the fact that Hannah Tillich asked May to deliver the eulogy at his first burial in East Hampton, NY, where the Tillichs had a summer home, and his reburial at the park named in his honor in New Harmony, Indiana.  

AD: May was also influenced by Freud, Adler, and Rank. But Adler seems to have been especially important. Tell us a bit about his relationship to and influence upon May. 

RA: Paul Tillich and Alfred Adler came into May’s life at a crucial period in his life, where his spiritual searching needed greater guidance and inspiration. Adler certainly had a life-changing influence on May, giving him a new way of envisioning the world and the possibility of a new profession. 

But Adler died in 1937, only four years after May met him and aside from a few friendly and important encounters in New York, the two didn’t really have the same sort of relationship as May did with Tillich. Nonetheless Adler’s ideas formed a compelling basis for his exploration of Freud, Jung, and Rank. 

But May told me that in the end he found other first generation analysts and later American neo-Freudians like Harry Stack Sullivan and Erich Fromm more powerful than Adler in their sense of complexity of the human condition and intellectual reach.

AD: You note (p.54) that May for "remained all his life wedded to obsessive self-scrutiny." That certainly comes through in your biography down to the last years of his life. What lay behind such an obsession?

I was about to say, “that’s a question for his analyst,” but let me give you two answers. First of all, I think his sense of spiritual devotion, which as it developed was truly a relationship with Tillich’s “God beyond God,” one which a therapist might call, insufficiently, OCD, made him investigate and judge his every action. This compulsion was historically not unusual among what Max Weber called “religious virtuosi,” and May was certainly of that breed. 

But I think more important was that he had the genius to build a theory of therapy based in many ways on his somewhat perhaps narcissistic but very productive contemplation of self. In short, these ongoing themes that provoked incessant self-questioning were in fact the well from which he drew much of his best work.

 AD: Part of May's project, you write (p.114), was "marrying the insights of psychoanalysis with the eternal quests of religion in a manner meaningful to the modern reader." Given how popular his books were, it seems he was successful in this endeavor in one way, but I'm wondering in another way about the kind of reception his books received in the professional psychoanalytic community. Did you come across reviews of and reactions to his works by psychoanalysts, and if so can you give us an idea of what they were?

RA: From almost the beginning, he saw as his mission in life the spiritual counseling of individuals, whether in the first instance through religion and later through psychotherapy, but perhaps most of all by educating an interested public through his writings. This was true when he first started publishing books that implicitly or explicitly saw a crucial interaction between the spiritual and the therapeutic (The Art of Counseling of 1939 and The Springs of Creative Living from 1940), the latter being a main selection of the Religious Book Club. It remained true even after he shed the theological trappings of Protestantism for a spiritualized existentialism.

Much of the answer to your question about his impact on therapists and reviews of his books is as much the ever-changing nature of psychology, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis as it does with the specific contents of one May book or another.  

AD: In early 1940 or 1941, you write (p.135), May began an analysis with Erich Fromm. I've been re-reading Fromm for the last two years and amazed at how well some of his insights stand up three quarters of a century after his English-speaking debut. Tell us a bit about the influence of Fromm on May that you see.

Another very interesting question.

I think there was some influence, though some of the most important ideas about the world and culture were transformed in May’s work from neo-Marxist thought to existential thinking, for instance living in a culture where not so much through the transformation of society but rather the resistance of self an authentic sense of the world might emerge. 

Nonetheless, there can be no question that Fromm influenced May, especially in those early years of analysis before the post-tuberculosis restart of the analysis. And certainly, by reading Fromm’s Escape from Freedom, he got a new and materialist view of an idea that he was already familiar with from reading the late Victorians and conversing with Tillich: the notion that both faith and community had been in decay for some time and that these trends had deleterious effects on the ability of individuals to “be” themselves. In that general sense, May joined with Fromm and others of the postwar era—David Riesman, William H. Whyte, John Kenneth Galbraith, and others—each in their own way critiquing the conformity, consumerist values, and general weakening of individual autonomy.

AD: I sometimes wonder if the existentialist movement in theology and psychology alike has been largely left behind, but then you trace out the burgeoning relationship between an older Rollo May and a then-young and upcoming Irvin Yalom, who is still with us after an astonishingly prolific career. Tell us a bit about that influence of May on Yalom.

RA: As Irvin Yalom has said many times, it was his reading of May’s Existence (a collection of essays from European therapists) introducing an existential framework to psychoanalysis and psychotherapy that inspired him to follow a psychiatric and analytic path. Later, when they got to know each other, I believe each helped the other in imagining the possibilities of existential psychology. However, there were differences. Yalom was a doctor, taught at a prestigious university medical school, pioneered group psychotherapy, was a self-declared atheist, and was a successful novelist. Rollo May was many things but none of those. In short, while they came together on existentialism, their careers and commitments were strikingly different.

AD: May's relationship to Christianity waxed and waned over the decades--from being a pastor and preacher early on to falling away it seems and then to returning to attending church later in life as an Episcopalian (p.331). Where, in the end, do you see May's life in relationship to Christianity?

RA: I think it is fair to say that past the early 1950s, at which point the formal church was no longer part of his life, he nonetheless lived a life imbued with the values he gained within the Protestant church culture and retained an abstract but real sense of what he called “infinitude.” His attendance at the Episcopal church in Tiburon in the 1980s had more  

AD: For those new to May and wondering where to begin, do you have, say, your top three favorites of his writings? What would you recommend beginning with for those who want to discover May today?

RA: My top three for getting to know May’s work would be Man’s Search for Himself (1953), Love and Will (1969), and The Courage to Create (1975), which is short, fits creativity into a vision of society, and as usual is clearly and compellingly written. And I would also suggest reading May’s introductory chapters in Existence (1958), an edited introduction to the possibilities of merging psychotherapy with existential thought. These are marvelous explanations of the power of existentialism. I might add that since the book’s publication, I have received any number of emails, some quite lengthy attesting to the influence May’s ideas had on their lives, and the three I recommended were ones that most often came up in our exchanges.

AD: Having finished this biography, what are you at work on now--new works in the pipeline?

I am still catching my breath but have thought about a short book based upon some lectures I have given recently about the practice of spiritual life in America, both in and out of formal denominations and traditional ritual practice. One element I wish to explore is the impact of religious and cultural pluralism on individual and group spiritual practice.

AD: Sum up your hopes for the book, and who especially should read it.

RA: Most of all, I hope to restore Rollo May’s place in the history of public intellectual life and, indeed, allowing readers to grasp the significance of his work to contemporary society and thought and inspire to engage with his ideas. As a biographer, I have also tried to write as “intimate” a biography as the sources allowed in order to provide readers with an account of May’s life that conjoins the public and private, as well as the unconscious and conscious—that is, brings an understanding that the origins of significant public lives lie in unique and often less than ideal sojourns. 

As for a readership, my hope is that psychologists open to a broader view of their profession as well as all who in one way or another were affected by May’s writings would profit from it. Yet, I also hope that those too young to know of Rollo May first-hand but who are in need of a broader and deeper sense of life somehow find the book and seek out May’s own attempts to offer roads to a richer life.

Daniel Burston on Psychoanalysis, Politics, and the Post-Modern University

Several years ago I came across Daniel Burston at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh. His biography of Karl Stern (A Forgotten Freudian) was fascinating, and since then I've profited greatly from several of Burston's books, including his study of R.D. Laing, and his work on Erich Fromm, about whom I have myself recently written a chapter for an international project based at Cambridge University in England.

Burston has a new book out, Psychoanalysis, Politics, and the Postmodern University (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), and having read it with great interest, it was my delight to be able to interview him about it by e-mail.

AD: Tell us about your background

DB: I  was born in Naharia, Israel in 1954, and raised and educated in Toronto, Canada. As a child, I attended Bialik Hebrew Day School, and as a teenager, went to Forest Hill High School. I dropped out of High School after 10th grade, and enrolled in a “free school” modeled loosely on A. S. Neill’s experimental school Summerhill, where I focused on English, history and philosophy. After one year, I left that anarchic environment and my parental home, making a meager living on the fringes of Toronto’s waning counterculture, offering Yoga and guitar lessons to raw beginners, working odd jobs in vegetarian restaurants, bakeries, gardening and landscaping companies, picking up new skills and new friends, including some gifted and creative people who introduced me to spiritual, political and psychotherapeutic ideas, practices, and groups of various kinds. My immersion in the counterculture lasted three years, during which time I studied psychology, philosophy, and political theory; sometimes on my own, but often in dialogue with friends who, like me, were intellectually curious but not keen on acquiring a university education.

However, at 21, I finally decided not to remain an auto-didact. I needed a more formal education. So after completing an undergraduate degree in political science at York University, I completed two Ph.D.s there; one in Social and Political Thought (1985) and another in Psychology (1989). My second doctoral thesis became the basis for my first book, The Legacy of Erich Fromm (Harvard University Press, 1991). Shortly after the book appeared, I landed a job in the psychology department at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, and have taught there ever since.

AD: What led to the writing of Psychoanalysis, Politics, and the Post-Modern University?

If I am honest, irritation and dismay--among other things, I guess. When I started my undergraduate career, the university was often described to me by my teachers as “a community of scholars” (Paul Goodman); a community in which the social sciences and humanities held a pivotal, if not a privileged place. Getting a proper education was valued as an end in itself, and not primarily as a means to other ends, i.e. launching a career, making money, etc. Yes, the old “Ivory Tower” was insular and elitist, and therefore in need of urgent reform, as Paul Goodman noted. 

But the neo-liberal version of the university, which is dominated by the STEM disciplines and corporate agendas of various kinds, is worse. The professoriate has been transformed, by and large, from a cadre of respected professionals into an army of service workers whose job is to stuff and stock students’ minds with a pre-packaged bundle of information and skills, enabling them to succeed--or at any rate, survive--on the job market. As a result, we have been debased to the status of service workers who increasingly fear the wrath or disapproval of their touchy customers, rather than the other way around, which was how things stood when I started university. 

Meanwhile, as the professoriate has been proletarianized, the Liberal Arts have declined steadily in power and prestige, and faculty have been profoundly disempowered by the rise of the administrative (managerial) caste. The ideal of shared governance, once highly prized, is often no more than a pretense.

So, at the end of the day, I have devoted my entire career to scholarship and to post-secondary education, and in the process, born witness to the emergence of many worrisome trends in contemporary university life. After reflecting on them, and how best to address them, for two decades or more, it finally dawned on me that a close look at certain trends in the history of psychoanalysis and critical theory might help illumine the state of contemporary university and intellectual life in useful and unexpected ways. Erich Fromm’s theory of authority – which has seldom received the attention it deserves – was particularly useful in this regard.

AD: I was glad to see your acknowledgement at the opening of your book of the work of the late Paul Roazen, whom I stumbled upon in 2018 and read with great profit. Tell us a bit about your own relationship to him, and why his work is important.

DB: When I was approaching 20 years of age, I stumbled across Paul Roazen's book Brother Animal. During the previous two years, I had struggled with a series of books by and about Freud, C.G.Jung, the Glover brothers, Erich Fromm and Erik Erikson, and the impressions I had gleaned of Freud’s personality from these disparate sources did not create a clear or consistent impression. Freud was doubtless one of the major thinkers of the 20th century. But Freud the man was a mystery to me, rendered all the more elusive by the dense controversies that swirled around him. 

So when I read Roazen’s gloss on the correspondence between Lou Salome and Sigmund Freud with respect to Tausk’s abortive analysis and subsequent suicide, I was completely “blown away”, as they say. Thirteen years later, while researching my 1991 book The Legacy of Erich Fromm, I discovered that Erich Fromm also greeted Roazen’s revelations with considerable shock, but in due course, praised Paul’s clarity and courage--unlike Kurt Eissler, whose odd, abrasive, and unpersuasive rebuttal, Victor Tausk’s Suicide set out to discredit Roazen entirely. Indeed, I soon discovered, Fromm recommended Brother Animal to all his students in Mexico and the United States, most of whom read the book with considerable appreciation.

Having read Brother Animal, I acquired a copy of Freud and his Followers, which was thoroughly engrossing.  And since Paul Roazen taught at York University in my own home town, I resolved to study with him. I spent my first year as an undergrad getting core requirements out of the way, but much of my second and third year centered around my course work with him. I was dazzled and occasionally confused by his richly stimulating (but poorly organized) lectures on Freud and his followers, which were leavened with lengthy reflections on Norman O. Brown and Phillip Rieff; philosophers Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and Isaiah Berlin; eccentrics and free spirits like Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, Thoreau, and T.E.Lawrence; poets like Rilke and Frost; and European and American political commentators like de Tocqueville, William Bullitt, Harold Lasswell, Walter Lippmann, and Herbert Marcuse, among others. It was quite an education! When I started on my MA, I was fortunate enough to continue on as Paul’s teaching assistant for two years, during which time I got to know him and his work even better.

Paul’s work has been largely forgotten in the aftermath of the Freud wars, but his pioneering work exposed many of the problems and oversights of mainstream psychoanalytic historiography right into the 1990s. Like Erich Fromm, he believed that the history of psychoanalysis provided by orthodox Freudians was riddled with distortions and omissions of truly Stalinist proportions. But while he freely acknowledged Freud’s authoritarianism and personal blindspots, he never wavered in his admiration for Freud’s courage and originality as a thinker.

AD: Having gone back to him in my own work just this year, I was even gladder to see Erich Fromm getting renewed attention 40 years after his death in your first and fifth chapters. Tell us a bit about your own work on him both here and in your earlier biography of him.

DB: As it happens, I stumbled on Fromm’s work a few years before I read Roazen’s works. Indeed, I was drawn to Roazen in part because he confirmed many things that Fromm had said earlier about the biases inherent in orthodox Freudian historiography. 

I think the first book I read of Fromm’s was The Sane Society, which was published in 1955, in the early years of the Eisenhower era, but which I only read in 1969 or so. What struck me then-- and strikes me still--was Fromm’s contention that an entire society can be mad, and that “adjustment” to a deeply disordered society--one largely unaware of or indifferent to its own perversity--constitutes a “pathology of normalcy.” Of course, in this context, the term  “normalcy” denotes something more akin to a chronic, low-grade deficiency disease than it does to genuine health. Normalcy, or normality in this sense reduces internal suffering and ongoing tension or friction with one’s environment to a tolerable minimum, but only at the expense of one’s development as an honest, intact and responsive human being. 

As an alternative to this kind of socially patterned defect, Fromm advocated what Martin Luther King Jr. later called “creative maladjustment.” Another thing that attracted me to Fromm’s work was the fact that he cared deeply about spiritual values, and despite his radicalism, demonstrated a deep familiarity with and respect for various (Eastern and Western) religious and contemplative traditions.

As I studied Fromm’s work more closely, it started to dawn on me that he had been unjustly dismissed by many fashionable intellectuals in the late 60s, 70s and 80s as a lightweight, a popularizer or as little more than a self-help guru. Moreover, the secondary literature on Fromm – in psychology textbooks and histories of psychoanalysis – is riddled with errors, oversimplifications, and omissions. That being so, I felt it was time to rehabilitate him, and to situate his work in the history of psychoanalysis and the Frankfurt School.

AD: In your fifth chapter Fromm appears again along with Reich, Adorno and others on authoritarian personalities, one of whose hallmarks is that they “may become attached or become passionately attracted to others. But they cannot genuinely love other human beings” (p.97). The study of authoritarianism began, as you note, in Europe in the interwar period, but has acquired more recent relevance in the US, Israel, and elsewhere in the last few years. Tell us about the forms of authoritarianism you analyze today—both of the left-wing and right-wing types.

DB: The literature on “the authoritarian personality” is now so vast that I find it difficult to summarize my own thoughts and conclusions succinctly. Suffice it to say that, as a rule, the main difference between Right- and Left-Wing authoritarians resides in the ideologies they embrace or espouse, not in their modus operandi once they are installed in power. In their efforts to win the hearts and minds of the populace, Right-wing authoritarians typically extol law and order, and promise a return to the status quo ante, or the “good old days,” which are heavily idealized, and  exist only in the collective imaginary. Their propaganda taps into people’s fear of change and nostalgia for the past, and they preach the pursuit of racial or religious “purity.” 

By contrast, Left-wing authoritarians promise their followers liberation and equality, the removal of the status quo and its replacement with a new egalitarian social order, only to renege on those promises later on. Their propaganda doesn’t dwell on the past, or indulge in nostalgia. Instead, they typically tap into people’s anger about current conditions and their hopes for a brighter future. And in theory, at least, they tend to eschew religious or racial purity in favor of ideological purity or “political correctness”, although many Left-wing authoritarians in the West have an affinity – or at the very least, a high degree of tolerance for – Islamic fundamentalism, even though they mistrust and revile Christian fundamentalists.

What authoritarians of the left and right both share in common, despite their different ideologies and rhetorical styles, is an attraction towards authoritarian strongmen who place themselves above (or outside) the law and show contempt for weakness, a strong attraction to violence as a means to solve (real or imaginary) social problems, and an eagerness to resort to secrecy, lies and deception to achieve their political ends, which have to do, above all, with seizing and holding onto power. They also have a pronounced tendency to dichotomous, “black and white” thinking, an intolerance of ambiguity and complexity, and to projection, i.e. to seeing authoritarian tendencies on the other side of the political spectrum, but minimizing or disavowing the same tendencies on their own side. All of these traits are in keeping with what Wilhelm Reich and Erich Fromm first described as the “sadomasochistic” or “authoritarian” character.

AD: Your chapter on Jordan Peterson (whose book I reviewed here) opens by discussing some aspects of the decline of the liberal arts in the university today, noting where Peterson is not entirely incorrect in blaming “post-modernism”, but that such a critique overlooks “cultural and market forces” and “the rather obvious fact that at the end of the day, most people care very little about the pursuit of truth” (136). You sift the contents of Peterson’s claims, and their reactions, and the debates they engendered, with great care before concluding that “Peterson [is] an enabler for Trump’s authoritarian agenda” (p.154). Tell us a bit more what you mean by that.

JB: Look, Jordan Peterson is a complicated man. I vividly remember an online interview he did with a crusty, conservative columnist in Canada named Rex Murphy several years ago. In this interview, Peterson was remarkably honest and vulnerable, the exact opposite of the aloof, steely, hyper-masculine presence he usually adopts in public fora. I remember thinking then that despite our political differences and all the bad press he’s received to date, this guy really means well, that he wants to make the world a better place. In that moment, I wanted to extend him the benefit of the doubt, even though I disagree profoundly with his one-sided analysis of our social ills and with the solutions that he proposes to the current crisis in the Liberal Arts. It struck me then that his basic intentions are good, nonetheless.

Unfortunately, however, Peterson seldom extends the benefit of the doubt to his liberal and left wing critics, whom he swiftly converts from potential partners in dialogue into implacable and unreasoning adversaries because of his penchant for polarizing people. You either love Peterson, or you hate him, as a rule. There is no middle ground. Those like myself, who are prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt, but dare to criticize his manner or ideas, are swiftly dismissed by his ardent supporters and his ferocious detractors.

That said, as a somewhat reluctant Canadian ex-pat, and as a (Jewish) resident of Pittsburgh for many years now, I was profoundly disappointed by Peterson’s public remarks about Trump after the Tree of Life massacre on Oct 27, 2017. Don’t get me wrong. Peterson is not an anti-Semite. 

However, his efforts to normalize the Trump Presidency, and to depict Trump as someone who is merely disagreeable and bombastic, rather than an authoritarian menace to democracy, seemed extremely blinkered, if not disingenuous, especially in light of all that has transpired since. Now that principled conservatives are slowly finding their backbones, and many are coming out publicly in favor of Joe Biden for president in November, 2020, one wonders why Peterson did not raise the alarm earlier, or say something strongly supportive of their efforts now. In dire situations, like the crisis facing America today, silence is complicity. What purpose does it serve, except to maintain a cozy relationship with Trump supporters?

AD: Your last chapter on anti-psychiatry was fascinating for several reasons, including the role played in it by R.D. Laing, on whom you published two earlier books. I always thought it was very much a fringe movement, but you open by noting that the “number of websites devoted to anti-psychiatry is utterly mind-boggling” (p.158). However, as you go on to show, the term is a bit of an omnium gatherum for diverse if not contradictory agendas. Tell us about how you understand anti-psychiatry and what may be valuable in parts of it today, including the critique of Big Pharma, and the still-relevant insights of Laing into alienation and estrangement.

DB: Like Erich Fromm, R.D. Laing was firmly convinced that psychological adjustment to an insane society was a symptom of alienation or self-estrangement; a form of pseudo-sanity, not the genuine article. Unlike Fromm, who leaned heavily on Marx, Freud, and classical sociology, Laing was schooled in existential psychiatry, and drew inspiration from a wide range of existential and phenomenological thinkers, including Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Dilthey, Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, and religious existentialists like Buber, Berdyaev, Marcel, Tillich, etc. 

Writing in the 1960s, Laing felt that the medical-model or classical psychiatric approach to schizophrenia is inadequate or misleading in many cases, and that the evidence on behalf of the medical model was weak and flawed at best. He believed that everyone, without exception, had the potential to go mad, regardless of their neurological integrity (or lack thereof), and invited his readers to consider madness as an existential crisis brought on by interpersonal defenses, dilemmas and stratagems that landed mental patients in a “check mate” position; one that the patient does not understand, cannot tolerate and yet is powerless to change.

However, despite his reputation to the contrary, Laing was not really an “anti-psychiatrist”, if by that we mean someone who called for the abolition of psychiatry as such. However, he did agree with the anti-psychiatric thesis that most psychiatric interventions into the lives of profoundly distressed and disoriented people entail a massive reification of the person, and an invalidation of their personal experience, and that psychiatric power is often wielded for the benefit of the powerful, not the powerless. And with rare exceptions, he was opposed to involuntary hospitalization and coercive medical treatments, i.e. involuntary drugging, electroshock, lobotomy, etc.

The anti-psychiatry movement took root in the mid-to-late 1960s, when involuntary commitment and old fashioned state-run mental hospitals were still prevalent. Places like these warehoused large numbers of people deemed to be deviant and/or dangerous to themselves and others, and deprived them of their basic civil rights. In those days, psychiatric power was exercised chiefly over in-patient populations like these, which were much larger than they are today. Moreover, the average length of stay in such places was much longer than it is now. All this changed with de-institutionalization, and the de-commissioning of state-run mental hospitals, which left many thousands of formerly hospitalized mental patients to fend for themselves on the streets. The resulting spike in homelessness, substance abuse and petty crime in the USA cost tax-payers at least as much as maintaining the old mental hospital system did. And Laing deplored this state of affairs, because it left former patients profoundly vulnerable, too.

However, the de-commissioning of state-run mental hospitals meant that the locus of psychiatric power shifted gradually from the steadily decreasing in-patient population to the burgeoning out-patient population. Why? Because, now people with diagnoses of severe mental disorders – schizophrenia, manic depression, refractory unipolar depression, etc. – were treated on an out-patient basis. If they were committed involuntarily, their stay in hospital would be curtailed to 2 weeks to 2 months, at most. This is when Big Pharma stepped in. As the number of people – including adolescents and children--diagnosed with severe mental disorders started to climb, so did the number of prescriptions they received. Even people who suffered symptoms of mild to moderate severity were now routinely medicated, and their access to long term, insight oriented psychotherapy curtailed by insurance companies. This was – and to this day, remains – a financial bonanza for Big Pharma, despite the fact that the drugs it produces seldom, if ever, cure the underlying disorder, and sometimes do not even control the patient’s symptoms effectively. Alternatively, their drugs may control the symptoms effectively for a time, but the so called “side effects” and neuro-toxicity that results from extended use are very injurious to people’s health in the medium to long term.

So, to summarize, the anti-psychiatry movement of yore emerged in response to conditions and institutions that no longer exist. Since their collapse, through its collusion with Big Pharma, psychiatry has extended its power immeasurably into the “out-patient” population since the de-institutionalization movement of the 1980s. And while the anti-psychiatrists of the 1960s faulted psychiatry for adhering rigidly to the medical model, and refusing to explore or acknowledge alternative ways of understanding madness, contemporary critics of psychiatry tend to focus on the utterly-mind boggling debasement of the medical model, when it is routinely subverted to serve corporate interests in defiance of the Hippocratic oath: “First, do no harm”. Fortunately, integrative and holistic medicine have recently generated many useful alternative strategies to mitigate and sometimes cure serious psychiatric conditions which do not require psychiatric medication. Indeed, in many instances, the first step in these treatment protocols is to wean patients off of the psychiatric meds they’ve become accustomed (or addicted to), sometimes for decades.

I am not an anti-psychiatrist. But I do think that the psychiatric profession is urgently in need of reform, and that both the earlier and current critiques of psychiatry have considerable merit. While the former is obviously less applicable to contemporary conditions, it still has much to teach us.

AD: As we come to the end of your book, it seems to me every chapter is an attempt to examine the question with which you began: “What happens when people lose all trust in authority” (p.3)? In place of different modes of rational authority, you write, we often instead get identity politics, conspiracy theories, and “irrational doubt.” And nobody, if I understand your argument aright, is free from the temptation of irrational authority or even outright authoritarianism—including not just politicians but also Freud himself and his defenders, or later Lacan, Peterson, or others in the academy, psychiatry, and elsewhere. Is that a fair assessment of what you were trying to do in the book?

DB: Well, not quite. Granted, mistrust of authority – of all kinds, and in all domains of expertise--is extremely prevalent nowadays. And perhaps no one is completely immune from the blandishments of power and irrational authority. But some people genuinely prefer to function and conduct their daily lives in an open and democratic fashion, and become profoundly distressed when the foundations of democracy are eroding before their eyes. But even democracies cannot function without relying (to some extent) on authority in the secular, scientific and spiritual domains. To imagine that we could do this is merely utopian nonsense. That is why it is important to emphasize that the way in which authority is wielded in these different domains of competence has a profound impact on how much the general population is able to trust those we deem to be experts, or to whom we entrust decision making powers.

The mode of authority most conducive to maintaining democratic norms and institutions is rational authority, because it promotes competence and mutual respect, values transparency and honesty, and does not stifle the critical faculties or the conscience of those who are subject to it in the course of their growth and training. Moreover, it strives to promote equality in the fullness of time by bringing those subject to it up the level of the person in authority, rather than the populist approach of leveling things by embracing the lowest common denominator. That being so, we should strive, as much as possible, to identify and root out irrational (and anonymous) authority and to encourage and augment rational authority whenever and wherever we can. This will never restore trust in authority completely, because a healthy dose of skepticism is consistent with an intact critical faculty, and because people in power can mask the exercise of irrational authority behind the rhetoric of freedom and emancipation quite easily.

AD: Having finished Psychoanalysis, Politics, and the Post-Modern University, what are you at work on now?

I am currently researching a book on the personal and cultural sources of anti-Semitism in the life and work of C.G. Jung and his inner circle, and their relevance to trends in contemporary Jungian (and post-Jungian) thought.