Monday 1 January 2024

‘Is the madman mentally ill? No.’ (Heidegger, 1953). Did Heidegger anticipate Szasz? Anthony Stadlen conducts Inner Circle Seminar 293 (11 August 2024)

 


‘Is the madman mentally ill? No.

(Heidegger, 1953)


Did Martin Heidegger anticipate Thomas Szasz’s

‘The Myth of Mental Illness’ by seven years?


Anthony Stadlen

conducts by Zoom

Inner Circle Seminar No. 293

Sunday 11 August 2024

10 a.m. to 5 p.m


Anton Webern
3 December 1883 – 15 September 1945
Georg Trakl
3 February 1887 – 3 November 1914
Martin Heidegger
26 September 1889 – 26 May 1976
Thomas Szasz
15 April 1920 – 8 September 2012
at his 90th-birthday seminar
13 June 2010 (Inner Circle Seminar No. 153)
Photograph copyright jennyphotos.com
Not to be used without permission



























On 7 October 1950 the philosopher Martin Heidegger gave a lecture, Die Sprache’ (‘Language’), in Bühlerhöhe (near Baden Baden). The lecture focussed on a single poem by Georg TraklEin Winterabend’ (‘A winter evening’).
In 1953 Heidegger published an essay, ‘Georg Trakl: Eine Erörterung seines Gedichtes’ (‘Georg Trakl: An Elucidation of his Poetry’), in the journal Merkur (No. 61: pp. 226-258).
In 1959 Heidegger republished his 1950 lecture and 1953 essay as the first two chapters of his book Unterwegs zur Sprache (On the Way to Language), with the titles, respectively, ‘Die Sprache’ (‘Language’) and ‘Die Sprache im Gedicht: Eine Erörterung von Georg Trakls Gedicht’ (‘Language in Poetry: An Elucidation of Georg Trakl’s Poetry’). 
Trakl in his poetry mentions ‘der Wahnsinnige’ (‘the madman’) many times.
Heidegger asks in his second chapter (1953: p. 237; 1959: p. 53):
[...] der Wahnsinnige. Meint dies einen Geisteskranken?  Nein. Wahnsinn bedeutet nicht [...]
‘[...] the madman. Does this mean a mentally ill man? No. Madness does not mean [...]
The translator Peter D. Hertzin On the Way to Language (1982 [1971]: p. 173), translates these words of Heidegger’s thus:
‘[...] the madman. Does the word mean someone who is mentally ill? Madness here does not mean [...]
Readers could not divine from this translation that Heidegger had written:
(1) Nein’ (No) – he did not leave his own question unanswered;
(2) dies’ (‘this’) – he did not write ‘das Wort’ (‘the word’);
(3) Wahnsinn’ (‘Madness’) – he did not write Wahnsinn hier’ (‘Madness here’).
The French translators of this book, Jean Beaufret and Wolfgang Brockmeier, in Acheminement vers la parole (1976: p. 56), translate this passage:
[...] Le FarsenéLe mot désigne-t-il un aliéné? Non. La démence n'ést pas [...]
This is a little more faithful to Heidegger: an unequivocal ‘Non’ (‘No’); and ‘La démence’ (‘madness’), rather than merely ‘La démence ici’ (‘madness here’). But it also insists, without evidence, that Heidegger is discussing the ‘mot’ (‘word’) ‘madman’ or ‘madness’ rather than the madman himself or madness itself.
Do these details matter? Yes, if one wants to know what Heidegger is doing here.
Is he making a very limited statement about a particular ‘madman’ in one of Trakl’s poems?
Is he making a somewhat more general statement about ‘the figure of the madman’ in Trakl’s poems?
Or is he making a much more general statement: anticipating in 1953 the comprehensive proposition of Thomas Szasz, in his 1960 paper The Myth of Mental Illness and his 1961 book The Myth of Mental Illness, that there is no ‘mental illness’?
This proposition of Szasz’s has the corollary that, in particular, if there be such a phenomenon as ‘madness’, then, whatever ‘madness’ is, it cannot be ‘mental illness’, nor can the ‘madman’, or anybody else, be ‘mentally ill’ – for the simple reason that ‘mental illness’ is a myth.
It seems unlikely that either Hertz in 1971 or Beaufret and Brockmeier in 1976 supposed that Heidegger in 1953 meant something quite so radical. But might they have felt the need to play down even what he did seem to be saying, lest it make Heidegger himself seem a bit mad?
That Heidegger himself may have thought of himself as Trakl’s ‘madman’ is suggested by Jacques Derrida in what he calls a lengthy ‘parenthesis’ in Geschlecht III, the recently reconstituted and posthumously published (2018) third part of his sustained four-part meditation, Geschlecht, on Heidegger’s 1953 Trakl essay.
But, even though Heidegger insists that the ‘madman’ is not ‘mentally ill’, but engaged in an ‘other’ kind of thinking, did he draw back from what others and even he himself may have thought of as his own ‘madness’?
Heidegger points out that Trakl appears to emphasise (by spaced lettering) only one word, only once, in his entire poetical oeuvre: the word Ein’ (one’) in E i n Geschlecht’, where the meaning of Geschlecht’ is highly ambiguous, as discussed by DerridaHeidegger claims this E i n’ is the Grundton’ (keynote’) of Trakl’s entire oeuvre. 
But what justifies Heidegger’s assumption that there is a keynote, even of a single poem of Trakl’s, let alone his poetry as a whole?
Trakl is said to have been interested in Arnold Schoenberg’s atonal music, and – although in the 1910s and early 1920s great tonal music, such as Jean Sibelius’s last symphonies, was still being composed, and composers such as Paul Hindemith set poems of Trakl’s tonally – Anton Webern’s Opus 13 (1926) and Opus 14 (1924) atonal (though not serial or dodecaphonic) settings for soprano and orchestra of seven of Trakl’s poems appear quite extraordinarily ‘in tune’ with this poetry. (Webern wrote to his friend Josef Humplik that they were ‘just about the most difficult in this field’ to rehearse and perform.)
It is remarkable that no fewer than five of these seven poems set by Webern were discussed by Heidegger in his two essays on Trakl. Moreover, both the composer and the philosopher separated one Trakl poem, Ein Winterabend’, from the others they selected. It is the only Trakl song in Weberns Opus 13, of which it is the culmination, while Heidegger’s first chapter is also devoted to just this one poem. Heidegger’s second chapter, however, discusses, among many other Trakl poems, four of the six set by Webern in his Opus 14.
There seems to be an astonishing affinity – up to a point – between Weberns and Heidegger’s respective intensely sensitive responses to Trakl. But Webern responded atonally, Heidegger tonally.  
It is highly improbable that Heidegger knew Webern’s songs when, more than thirty years later, he wrote his essays on Trakl. François Fédier noticed, years still later, that Heidegger had the first recording (a boxed set of LPs conducted in the 1950s, after Heidegger wrote his Trakl essays, by Robert Craft) of Webern’s complete published works. Heidegger told Fédier that someone had given it to him but that he had got little from it; and he presumably gave it away (as he did many books and records), as it was not among the LPs inherited from Heidegger by his son Hermann and, subsequently, his granddaughter Gertrud. (Personal communications from the late François Fédier and Hermann Heidegger, and from Gertrud Heidegger). 
We shall compare Weberns composing with Heideggers thinking; and we shall ask whether Heidegger opened up a polysemous approach to Trakl’s polysemy only to close it off – just as in the Zollikon seminars he encouraged or at least tolerated Medard Bosss developing a Daseinsanalysis’ that remained medicalised and retained psychiatric diagnosis: making, in the words of the existential psychotherapist Martti Siirala, the violent’ and absolutist’ claim to unmediated access to phenomena; thus betraying Heidegger’s early (1919) glimpse of a possible diahermeneutics’, to which he never returned.

This will be an online seminar, using Zoom.

Cost: Psychotherapy trainees £140, others £175reductions for combinations of seminars; some bursaries; payable in advance; no refunds or transfers unless seminar cancelled

Apply to: Anthony Stadlen, ‘Oakleigh’, 2A Alexandra AvenueLondon N22 7XE
Tel: +44 (0) 7809 433250
E-mail: stadlenanthony@gmail.com

For further information on seminars, visit: http://anthonystadlen.blogspot.com/

The Inner Circle Seminars were founded by Anthony Stadlen in 1996 as an ethical, existential, phenomenological search for truth in psychotherapy. They have been kindly described by Thomas Szasz as ‘Institute for Advanced Studies in the Moral Foundations of Human Decency and Helpfulness’. But they are independent of all institutes, schools and universities.

Mystification: Double Bind: Praxis and Process. The second seminar of the third (60th anniversary) subseries on Laing and Esterson’s Sanity, Madness and the Family: Families of Schizophrenics (1964). Anthony Stadlen conducts Inner Circle Seminar 292 (14 July 2024)

 


Mystification: Double Bind: Praxis and Process

 

The second seminar of the third (60th anniversary) subseries on  

R. D. Laing and Aaron Esterson

Sanity, Madness and the Family:

Families of Schizophrenics

(April 1964)

2. Further exploration of why this book is still not understood


Anthony Stadlen

conducts by Zoom

Inner Circle Seminar No. 292

Sunday 14 July 2024

10 a.m. to 5 p.m.


Karl Marx
5 May 1818 – 14 March 1883

 

Gregory Bateson
9 May 1904
 – 4 July 1980

Jean-Paul Sartre
21 June 1905
 – 15 April 1980


Thomas Szasz
15 April 1920
 – 8 September 2012

R. D. Laing
7 October 1927
 – 23 August 1989

Aaron Esterson
23 September 1923 – 15 April 1999  



Because Marx by experiencing estrangement [Entfremdung, alienation] attains an essential dimension of history, the Marxist view of history is superior to that of other historical accounts. 
Martin Heidegger, Letter on Humanism’ (1949)  

This is the second seminar in a new subseries of fifteen seminars to mark the sixtieth anniversary of the publication in April 1964 of Sanity, Madness and the Family, Volume 1: Families of Schizophrenics by R. D. Laing and Aaron Esterson. We continue to ask why for sixty years readers have so spectacularly failed to understand this book. It should be emphasised that this does not mean they think they fail to understand it. On the contrary, almost all readers think there is no problem in understanding what the book is about: obviously, they explain, in this book Laing and Esterson are claiming that families cause schizophrenia. Such readers will usually go on to say that this claim has long been discredited by the advance of scientific biological psychiatry. It seems to make no difference whether the readers are ordinary unprofessional people, psychotherapy students, or eminent psychiatrists, internationally renowned and honoured authorities on schizophrenia’.

For example, the psychiatrist Julian Leff and the researcher Christine Vaughn wrote (1985) that Laing and Esterson’s work was ‘supported by little or no scientific evidence’. But Leff and Vaughn suppose that what needs support by scientific evidence is precisely the claim that Laing and Esterson repeatedly stress that they are not making, namely, to have, as Leff and Vaughn put it, a ‘theory of the family’s role in the origin of schizophrenia’.

As Laing and Esterson reiterate in the Preface to the second edition (1970):

In our view it is an assumption, a theory, a hypothesis, but not a fact, that anyone suffers from a condition called schizophrenia’. No one can deny us the right to disbelieve in the fact of schizophrenia. We did not say, even, that we do not believe in schizophrenia.        

This radical misunderstanding will be the subject of the first seminar in the new subseries, Inner Circle Seminar No. 290 on 21 April 2024. We shall discuss how the misunderstanding is primarily due to peoples failure to read what Laing and Esterson say, in plain English, they are doing in the book. We may suppose that readers do not expect the authors to say what they are in fact saying, and so, even if they begin to notice what the authors are in fact saying, they will dismiss the possibility that the authors might really be saying it. See:

https://anthonystadlen.blogspot.com/2023/01/60-years-since-laing-esterson-sanity.html

But in today’s second seminar in the subseries we shall consider some more ‘technical’ or ‘theoretical’ (human-scientific, not natural-scientific) terms which some readers have found difficult to understand. We shall ask whether Laing and Esterson themselves may, despite their usual admirable clarity, have unwittingly contributed to these readers’ confusion.

  

In March 1964, a month before the publication of Sanity, Madness and the Familythe book Reason and Violence: A Decade of Sartres Philosophy, 1950-1960, by R. D. Laing and David Cooper, was published. It expounded Jean-Paul Sartre’s Question de Méthode and Saint Genet, and contained Laing’s précis of Sartre’s recently published, as yet untranslated, Critique de la Raison Dialectique, Tome 1 (1960), of which Sartre in an enthusiastic Foreword to Reason and Violence praised Laings parfaite intelligence’. Sartre also commended Laings studies of the family as ‘series and groupin the sense of the Critique; presumably Laing had sent him his important but little known paper ‘Series and Nexus in the Family(New Left Review, May 1962: 1-15). Sartre wrote that he looked forward to a time when psychiatry would become humaine.

The next month, April 1964,  saw the publication of Sanity, Madness and the Family. This book referred the reader to the theoretical background given in Laing’s The Self and Others (1961) and in Reason and Violence. In 1970 Esterson’s The Leaves of Spring: A Study in the Dialectics of Madness was published. It developed to book-length one of the eleven family studies (Chapter 4, The Danzigs) from Sanity, Madness and the Family; referred to the same theoretical background; and acknowledged indebtedness to the dialectical tradition of HegelMarx, and Sartre.

Key terms which Laing and Esterson use are mystification (from Karl Marx) and praxis and process (from Sartre). Laing also discusses the double bind (from Gregory Bateson), although Sanity, Madness and the Family gives only one alleged instance of it (p. 167). We shall briefly discuss these terms, and Laing and Esterson’s use of them, in what follows.


1. Mystification

Laing and Esterson, in these books and elsewhere, employ the term mystification’ and its cognates, sometimes in a relatively colloquial sense, without spelling out what it actually means. On one occasion, Laing in his paper ‘Mystification, confusion, and conflict(1965), attempts to adapt Marxs use of the word mystification’ to the study of family interactions, comparing and contrasting it with Bateson’s (1956) concept of the double bind’. But Laings account of Marxs usage misses the central point which we shall explain below. Laing also has a chapter ‘The mystification of experience’ in The Politics of Experience (1967). He writes: Marx described mystification and showed its function in his day.’ But he still does not say what Marx actually said.

This is unfortunate, because the first use of any form of the word mystify in Sanity, Madness and the Family (1964: 8) is consistent with Marxs meaning (though without saying so):

Phenomenologically, a group can feel to its members to be an organism; to those outside it, it can appear to act like one. But to go beyond this, and to maintain that, ontologically, it is an organism, is to become completely mystified.

Also, Esterson in The Leaves of Spring [to be continued]

Mystification, for Marx, means the seduction, the insinuation, the misrepresentation, the pretence, the self-deception, or the lie that certain relationships between human beings (primarily, the relationships between capitalists or landlords and labourers or tenants) are relationships between thingsMystification in his sense, therefore, is by definition also reification and alienation.

This may be seen from the following quotations from Das Kapital.

(1 and 2 do not contain the word mystificationbut point to what Marx meant by it. In 34, 5, and he does use the word mystification. In 6 he does not limit mystification to the capitalist-labourer relationship; he means that Hegel mystifies through reifying the human in general as Idea.)

1. ‘... das bestimmte gesellschaftliche Verhältnis der Menschen selbst, welches hier für sie die phantasmagorische Form eines Verhältnisses von Dingen annimmt
[‘... the specific social relationship of the human beings themselves, which here assumes for them the phantasmagoric form of a relationship between things.]

Karl Marx, Das Kapital, Volume 1, Chapter 1

2. ‘... daB das Kapital nicht eine Sache ist, sondern ein durch Sachen vermitteltes gesellschaftliches Verhältnis zwischen Personen.
[‘... that capital is not a thing (Sache), but a societal relationship between persons mediated by things (Sachen).’]

   Karl Marx, Das Kapital, Volume 1, Chapter 33

3.Das gesellschaftliche Verhälltnis ist vollendet als Verhälltnis eines Dings, des Geldes, zu sich selbst. ... Es wird ganz so Eigenschaft des Geldes, Werth zu schaffen, Zins abzuwerfen, wie die eines Birnbaums Birnen zu tragen. ... die Kapitalmystifikation in der grellsten Form.
[‘The social relationship is consummated as relationship of a thing, of money, to itself. ... It becomes just as much a property of money to create value, to yield interest, as of a pear-tree to bear pears. ... capital-mystification in the most glaring form.’]

   Karl Marx, Das Kapital, Volume 3, Chapter 24

4. ‘Die Vorstellung vom Kapital als sich selbst reproduzierendem und in der Reproduktion vermehrendem Wert ... hat zu den fabelhaften Einfällen des Dr. Price geleitet, die bei weitem die Phantasien der Alchimisten hinter sich lassen ... Pitt nimmt die Mystifikation des Dr. Price ganz ernst.
[‘The conception of capital as self-reproducing and in the reproduction increasing value ... has led to the fabulous notions of Dr Price, which leave the fantasies of the alchemists far behind them; ... Pitt takes Dr Prices mystification in all earnest.’]

   Karl Marx, Das Kapital, Volume 3, Chapter 24

5.... die Mystifikation der kapitalistischen Produktionsweise, die Verdinglichung der gesellschaftlichen Verhältnisse ... die verzauberte, verkehrte und auf den Kopf gestellte Welt, wo Monsieur le Capital und Madame la Terre als soziale Charaktere und zugleich unmittelbar als bloße Dinge ihren Spuk treiben. 
[‘... the mystification of the capitalist mode of production, the reification of social relationships ... the enchanted, back-to-front and stood-on-its-head world where Monsieur le Capital and Madame la Terre are up to their spookery as social characters and at the same time directly as mere things.]
Karl Marx, Das Kapital, Volume 3, Chapter 48
6.Die mystifizierende Seite der Hegelschen Dialektik habe ich vor beinah 30 Jahren, zu einer Zeit kritisiert, wo sie noch Tagesmode war. [...] Die Mystifikation, welche die Dialektik in Hegels Händen erleidet, verhindert in keiner Weise, daß er ihre allgemeinen Bewegungsformen zuerst in umfassender und bewußter Weise dargestellt hat. Sie steht bei ihm auf dem Kopf. Man muß sie umstülpen, um den rationellen Kern in der mystischen Hülle zu entdecken. [...] In ihrer mystifizierten Form ward die Dialektik deutsche Mode, weil sie das Bestehende zu verklären schien.
[‘The mystifying side of the Hegelian dialectic I criticised nearly thirty years ago, at a time when it was still the fashion of the day. [...] The mystification which dialectic suffers in Hegels hands in no way precludes him from being the first to represent its general forms of movement in a comprehensive and conscious way. With him it stands on its head. One must turn it the right way up, to discover the rational kernel in the mystical shell. [...] In its mystified form the dialectic became German fashion, because it seemed to transfigure what exists.]               
Karl Marx, Das Kapital, Afterword to second German edition
Translations by A. Stadlen

SartreCritique implies that Marx’s theory, and subsequent Marxism’, was itself a mystificationFor Marx writes:

7.Die Gestalten von Kapitalist und Grundeigentümer zeichne ich keineswegs in rosigem Licht. Aber ... [w]eniger als jeder andere kann mein Standpunkt, der die Entwicklung der ökonomischen Gesellschaftsformation als einen naturgeschichtlichen Prozeß auffaßt, den einzelnen verantwortlichmach en für Verhältnisse, deren Geschöpf er sozial bleibt, sosehr er sich auch subjektiv über sie erheben mag.

[‘I draw the figures of the capitalist and landlord in no way in a rosy light. But ... my standpoint, which conceives the development of the economic formation of society as a natural-historical process [sic, emphasis added], can less than any other make the individual responsible for relationships whose creature he remains socially, however much he may subjectively raise himself above them.’]              
Karl Marx, Das Kapital, Preface to first German edition
Translation by A. Stadlen

Sartre seeks to show that this supposed natural-historical process’ is itself socially intelligible as human-historical praxis (see below, under 3. Praxis and Process).

Similarly, Sartre sees Heideggers praise (above) for Marxs account of history as itself based on existential idealism: a mystification which subordinates the human to Being other than man’, as Laing puts it in Reason and Violence (1964: 116).

Laing and Esterson give many specific occurrences of what they call mystification in the family interviews. But they appear to have missed an opportunity to state their central hypothesis in terms of 
mystification in Marx’s original sense (but of course without reference to capitalism). For their hypothesis is precisely that the very concept of ‘schizophrenia’ is a mystification in Marx’s sense, as that concept misrepresents a ‘human’ relation between persons (primarily in the family) as a ‘natural’ relation between things (the ‘illness’ of one daughter, the ‘imbalance’ between ‘things’ in her ‘mind’ or ‘brain’).

The first reference in Sanity, Madness and the Family (1964: 4, n.1) is to Thomas Szaszs The Myth of Mental Illness (1961), which was published almost simultaneously with Sartre’s Critique, too soon to take account of it. Szasz, like Sartre, criticised what Karl Popper called Marxhistoricism’, his reification of human history as natural-historical process’. Szaszs thesis was essentially that the ‘myth of mental illness’ is a mystification in Marxs sense, though he did not put it in these terms. 


2. Double Bind

Laing and Esterson could also have reasonably argued that the central mystification they studied in Sanity, Madness and the Family, that the ‘schizophrenic’ women were alleged to be ‘ill’, was, precisely, a ‘double bind’.

Laing discusses the double bind in The Self and Others (1961) and iits (much revised) second edition Self and Others (1969). The double bind is mentioned on the dust covers of the two hard-back editions of Sanity, Madness and the Family (1964, 1970) but only once in the text (ibid., p. 167), although there are instances in the family interactions where it could have been applied with accuracy. It is often used erroneously (though not by Laing or Esterson) to mean any kind of mixed message or contradictory attribution or injunction; but it has a precise meaning defined by Bateson (1956) in terms of Bertrand Russells theory of Logical Types in his and Alfred North Whiteheads Principia Mathematica, Volume 1, Chapter 2 (1910). The point is that the contradictory communications are, as Bateson conceived them, of different logical type: a communication and a metacommunication.

Laing wrote in The Self and Others (1961: 141; 1969: 129) that the 1956 work of Bateson and his colleagues on the double bind had revolutionized the concept of what is meant by environment’. Laing did express doubt as to whether ‘the Logical Type theory, which arises in the course of the construction of a calculus of propositions, can be applied directly to communication’. He also claimed that in real life there probably will be at least three persons involved’, although a double bind could surely arise between a single mother and her single child. But the theory of the double bind prepared the ground for Laing and Estersons work. For this reason, and because it has been generally banalised and misunderstood, though not by them, we shall examine it today.


3. Praxis and Process

Both Laing and Esterson also place great stress on the terms praxis’ and process’. They claim they are using them as Sartre does in Critique de la Raison Dialectique. They explain Sartres use of praxis correctly but their own definitions of process seriously misrepresent Sartres term processus’.

Sartre in the Critique uses both praxis’ and ‘processus’ to refer to human (not natural) events. Praxis’ simply means human, freely chosen action. Processus’ is a human, usually group, happening that merely looks like a natural, mechanistically determined event. Sartre states explicitly (1960: 542; English translation 1976: 549) that neither praxis nor processus is deterministic. Laing made an excellent English précis of this section in Reason and Violence (1964: 153-4), of exemplary clarity; but he seems subsequently to have forgotten or ignored it.

Laing and Esterson (1964: 8) define the term ‘process’, misleadingly, to mean ‘a continuous series of operations that have no agent as their author’. In other words they wrongly define it as if it were really a natural, mechanistically determined event. But they use it, in practice, confusingly: sometimes incorrectly to mean simply natural events; and sometimes correctly to mean what Sartre actually does mean by ‘processus’, namely, as explained above, human (usually group) events which only appear to be natural events having no author, but which it is the purpose of his book to demonstrate can be revealed by dialectical reason to be not natural, not deterministic, but socially intelligible as deriving from human praxis. Esterson (1970: xii) explicitly, wrongly, defines ‘process’ as referring to natural events, as does Laing in his much later confused presentation in 1985 to the first Evolution of Psychotherapy conference (1987: 203-4) when Szasz was a justifiably exasperated respondent (1987: 210). Esterson (ibid.) even gives an allegedly defining example of ‘process’ which he asserts is deterministic’, apparently without realising that this contradicts Sartres definition.

The whole purpose of Sartre’s extraordinary book is to demonstrate that ‘processus’, while appearing to be a natural event, is socially intelligible by dialectical reason as the outcome of human praxis. Sartre’s project is the awesome one of making history itself socially intelligible.

The error of Laing and Esterson is, on occasion, to treat Sartres process, which like praxis also refers to social relationships, as if it merely referred to things. In other words, their error is precisely to mystify, in Marxs sense, Sartres concept of process.  

It is difficult to see why Sartre would have required to use special terminology (praxis, processus), or why Laing would have needed to make and publish a difficult translation-précis of the entire, excruciatingly difficult Critique, if it were merely a question of what are usually called human events (with reasons) and natural events (with causes). Heidegger and Szasz were content to use this ordinary language, without implying the reification of a cartesian dualism.

Like them, Sartre insists in the Critique that his concept of the human and the natural is not dualistic. And far less so is his concept of praxis and processus, since the very nature of processus is only to appear to be a naturally determined process but to reveal itself on dialectical investigation to be non-determined praxisSartre goes so far as to argue at one point that even the eruption of a volcano is in some sense also human praxis, since it is experienced by humans.

Heidegger observes that tears cannot be understood by natural science although their physical properties can be. Szasz observes that a wedding ring cannot be understood by natural science although its physical properties can be. Heidegger and Szasz are making the same point, and Laing made it too.

But it is not dualistic. The two ways of seeing tears or a wedding ring, the personal and the physical, are like the two ways of seeing a human being, as person or as organism, which Laing discusses in The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness (1960), published a few months before The Myth of Mental Illness. As Laing puts it, in the language of existential phenomenology, each of the two ways of seeing is a different ‘initial intentional act’. Laing writes:

There is no dualism in the sense of the co-existence of two different essences or substances there in the object, psyche and soma.

No mountain need have laboured to bring forth this pair of mice, the human and the natural, if they had been all that Sartre meant by praxis’ and ‘processus’, as Laing and Esterson at times misleadingly assert.

It is crucial not to lose sight of their simple, unassuming question as they restate it in the Preface to the second edition of Sanity, Madness and the Family (1970: viii):

Are the experience and behaviour that psychiatrists take as symptoms and signs of schizophrenia more socially intelligible than has come to be supposed? [Emphasis added.]

This makes sense as ordinary English. It also makes sense when stated in terms of Sartres actual technical notions of praxis, processus, and social intelligibility correctly defined as Sartre meant them. But one can understand the question without using or understanding them.

Or so one might suppose.

However, such is most readers’ mystification by, and investment in, ‘schizophrenia’, which Szasz called ‘the sacred symbol of psychiatry’, that they persist in misreading this simple question as if the seven words emphasised were simply not there.


The greatness of these books transcends these errors; but it may well be that the errors have contributed to the almost universal misunderstanding of Sanity, Madness and the Family and, on the rare occasions it is noticed, The Leaves of Spring. We shall try to remedy this today. Your questions and contributions will be warmly welcomed.


This will be an online seminar, using Zoom.

Cost: Psychotherapy trainees £140, others £175; reductions for combinations of seminars; some bursaries; no refunds or transfers unless seminar cancelled

Apply to: Anthony Stadlen, ‘Oakleigh’, 2A Alexandra AvenueLondon N22 7XE
Tel: +44 (0) 7809 433250  

For further information on seminars, visit: http://anthonystadlen.blogspot.com/

The Inner Circle Seminars were founded by Anthony Stadlen in 1996 as an ethical, existential, phenomenological search for truth in psychotherapy. They have been kindly described by Thomas Szasz as ‘Institute for Advanced Studies in the Moral Foundations of Human Decency and Helpfulness’. But they are independent of all institutes, schools, and universities.