Breaking the Binds: Curing Western Schizophrenia

They are playing a game. They are playing at not 
playing a game. If I show them I see they are, I 
shall break the rules and they will punish me. 
I must play their game, of not seeing I see the game. 

Knots – R.D. Laing (Psychiatrist and Tavistock Insitute resident) 

In the 1950s and 60s, R.D. Laing, Gregory Bateson, and several other Tavistock and MK-Ultra-linked researchers took a keen interest in the study of schizophrenia. One of the key concepts that emerged was the idea of “double binds,” coined by Gregory Bateson in 1956. Bateson posited that schizophrenics exhibited signs of inner division and splintered personalities due to certain “communication dilemmas” they had experienced within dysfunctional family systems. These individuals, usually from early childhood, repeatedly found themselves in situations where they were confronted with mutually contradictory expectations about their thought and behavior, both of which they had to adhere to simultaneously. 

For example, if a child was expected to be a “perfect boy” or “perfect girl” and meet the expectations of an emotionally unstable or “needy” parent, meeting these needs meant the child had to suppress his or her own feelings of sadness, joy, or helplessness as a means of regulating the outside world i.e., the family. On the other hand, were the child to express their authentic feelings or “tell the truth,” since perfect boys and girls never lie and always “tell the truth,” they would be punished, deemed selfish and ungrateful “bad girls” or “bad boys” who didn’t appreciate all the things their parents did for them. In a word: these scenarios involved keeping the outside voices happy by silencing the inner voice or upsetting the outside voices and being true to the inner voice. 

These basic communication dilemmas created what Bateson termed “binds” or what Laing called “knots,” inescapable predicaments in which there was “no way to win.” Moreover, because leaving a family was not and never could be an option for a helpless child, a dissociation occurred, leading to what R.D. Laing famously described as the “Divided Self.” 

Laing famously captured these predicaments in his Knots, a book where he explored the many “games” individuals encountered within various relationships, including with themselves, their “self,” others, and the family. These divided selves could hold mutually contradictory ideas, and even contain markedly different personalities, each of which ultimately belonged to one and the same person. Depending on the situation, the individual would access different parts of themselves and simultaneously shut off others. 

And this is where our story of “games” begins. 

The Divided Self 

In The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness, Laing described the problem of the schizoid personality and schizophrenic experience. The schizoid personality was either trapped watching their inner world from the outside or watching the outside world from the prison of their inner world. In a word: they were estranged from their own self, exiled from home in their own body. However, Laing didn’t only look at the question of schizophrenia in the usual clinical sense, but also in a broader phenomenological and existential sense: the schizoid individual was not able to “experience” his or her own “experience” of “experiencing” either his or another’s “experience.”  

Later, in The Politics of Experience, Laing reflected on the more general idea of existential madness permeating our society: 

“If we can begin to understand sanity and madness in existential social terms, we shall be more able to see clearly the extent to which we all confront common problems and share common dilemmas.” (Laing, 108) 

Laing rightly observed that many “normal” and “everyday” families engaged in very irregular and “crazy-making” behaviors, but for him the schizoid personality was believed to be on the extreme end of a much broader spectrum, the schizoid being an individual whose identity and primordial self had been completely dissociated due to the various unbreakable “binds” and “dilemmas” that characterized their daily life. 

So, he observed that even people who were healthy and normal could experience disassociated states under extreme stress. In The Divided Self, Laing writes: 

“It is well known that temporary states of dissociation of the self from the body occur in normal people. In general, one can say that it is a response that appears to be available to most people who find themselves enclosed within a threatening experience from which there is no physical escape. Prisoners in concentration camps tried to feel that way, for the camp offered no possible way out either spatially or at the end of a period of time. The only way out was by a psychical withdrawal 'into' one's self and 'out of the body. This dissociation is characteristically associated with such thoughts as 'This is like a dream', 'This seems unreal', 'I can't believe this is true', 'Nothing seemed to be touching me', 'I cannot take it in', 'This is not happening to me', i.e. with feelings of estrangement and derealization. The body may go on acting in an outwardly normal way, but inwardly it is felt to be acting on its own, automatically.” (Laing, 78) 

This became the standpoint by which to analyze the overall family and societal systems which appeared to induce many to alienate their own self in order to become “well-adjusted” members of society. Laing observed that much of our experience is structured in such a way that many lose the ability to explore the deeper nature of their authentic self. Interestingly, he observed that fantasy was “the first kind of meaningful experience that children are taught to sever themselves from early on.” There were also dreams, imagination, and many other aspects of one’s “subjective” inner world. Alas, from an early age we learned very much about “the world” outside us, but very little about how to navigate the inner world within ourselves, or the self.  

Most famous for his book The Divided Self, The Politics of the Family, and The Politics of Experience, Laing also examined these unique predicaments in Knots, a book exploring the many “binds” individuals could encounter within various family situations, including relationships with others, one’s “self,” “false selves,” the family, and society in general. Ultimately, Laing, like other tavistockians, recognized that these general “group dynamics” within the dysfunctional family system could ultimately be modelled and extended to society generally, albeit with certain adaptations for scope and scale. 

And this is where our story of “games” takes a turn. 

Let’s Play a Game 

In the 1960s, Laing had the idea of applying “Game Theory,” championed by the Rand Corporation as the military strategy for winning the Cold War game of nuclear chicken with the Soviet Union. He had been introduced to the theory at the Mental Research Institute in Palo, Alto, California—the same institute that was the stomping ground for none other than Bateson, Huxley and a whole crew of social engineers and “researchers” of MK-Ultra notoriety. He observed that much psychiatry and the mores of society in general seemed geared towards creating “well-adjusted” individuals, each operating based on a set of learned behaviors unconsciously modelled after their early exposure to life within the dysfunctional family.  

So, Laing studied the various communication dilemmas and incongruent thought patterns and behaviors that ostensibly “normal” families used as a means of covertly meeting their own needs and interests. Notable was the proclivity for playing a host of “games,” each member having its own set of rules and patterns to play by. However, these were not “normal” games. There existed two sets of rules: one was explicit, the other was not i.e. there was a “quiet part.” 

Before proceeding, we should consider: what is a tribe, whether political, social, or cultural, if not a special kind of extended or artificial family within which one’s broader identity and “ego” are wound up? It is a well-known fact that from an early age, children learn to see themselves either in reflected glory or disgraced shadows. So, when faced with some cognitive dissonance, or abuse (whether emotional, physical, or psychological), the child is faced with a bind: recognize that they are powerless and have no ability to resolve the situation, and must therefore learn “to cope,” or try to defend one’s self and then experience the threat and feeling of alienation or exile from the tribe, in this case the dysfunctional family. In either case, one loses. 

Usually communicated covertly in the form of “shaming” or threats of “punishment,” given the child is unable to face the unmanageable reality of there being something deeply wrong with the family or tribe itself, the child resorts to “make-believe,” that is, rather than accepting that there is something wrong with the family, they come to believe that there must be something wrong with them. A world of “make-believe” emerges, serving as a means of convincing oneself that things are “normal” and that “this is the way things are.” We learn what to see and what not to see. 

From a phenomenological and existential standpoint, Laing rightly observed that many everyday families engaged in very irregular and “crazy-making” behaviors, but his ensuing observations and solutions only led to a more intricately woven web of madness—one which still entraps many individuals who aspire towards transcendence of today’s societal madness.

From Insane Normality to Creative Madness? 

Thus I would wish to emphasize that our “normal” “adjusted” state it too often the abdication of ecstasy, the betrayal of our true potentialities, that many of us our too successful in acquiring a false self to adapt to false realities. 

—R.D. Laing