“…In an interview with Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera[4] Cossiga made some interesting comments regarding the alleged Osama Bin Laden 9/11 confession video of 13 December 2001:
“As I’ve been told, tomorrow or the day after tomorrow [interview appeared on 30 November 2007] the most important chain of newspapers of our country should give the proof, with an exceptional scoop, that the video (which in reality is an audio tape, NdR) in which appears Osama, leader of “the great and powerful movement of islamic revenge Al Quaeda” - God bless him! - and in which are formulated threats to our ex president Berlusconi, is nothing more than a fake realized inside Mediaset studios [the huge television group owned by Berlusconi] in Milan and sent to arabic television station Al Jazeera.
The trap was organized to create solidarity for Berlusconi, who is having lot of problems related to the tangle between RAI and Mediaset. From circles around Palazzo Chigi, nerve centre of direction of Italian intelligence, it is noted that the non-authenticity of the video is testified from the fact that Osama bin Laden in it ‘confessed’ that Al Qaeda was the author of the attack of the 11 September on the Twin Towers in New York, while all of the democratic circles of America and of Europe, in the front lines being those of the Italian centre-left, now know well that the disastrous attack was planned and realized by the American CIA and Mossad with the help of the Zionist world to put under accusation the Arabic Countries and to persuade the Western powers to intervene in Iraq and Afghanistan…”
“…in his last two years as a President, Cossiga began to express opinions, at times virulent, against the Italian political system. In his opinion, Italian parties, and especially DC and PCI, had to take into account the deep change that the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War have brought.
These declarations, soon dubbed “esternazioni”, or “mattock blows” (picconate), were considered by many inappropriate for a President and, often, beyond his constitutional powers (like threatening to dissolve the Parliament to change government policies or threatening to stop sittings of the CSM - the self-governing council of Italian judiciary -, with police force if it was going to debate “sensitive” informations). Cossiga declared he was just “taking pleasure in removing some sand from my shoes”. Cossiga was supported by the secretary of the Italian Socialist Party, Bettino Craxi.
Tension developed between Cossiga and the President of the Council of Ministers Giulio Andreotti emerged when Andreotti revealed the existence of Gladio, a Stay-behind organization with the official aim of countering a possible Soviet invasion through sabotage and guerrilla warfare behind enemy lines. Cossiga declared his involvement in the setup of the organization. The Communist Party started a procedure for impeachment (Presidents of Italy can be impeached only for high treason against the State or Attempt to overthrow the Constitution). Though he threatened to stop his impeachment procedure with the dissolution of the Parliament, in the end the request of impeachment was dismissed and Cossiga was never impeached.
Cossiga resigned two months before the end of his term, on 28 April 1992. He was voted again for president by the Italian Social Movement, which had supported him in his campaigns…”
An Israeli journalist visiting another prisoner was amazed to see Vanunu. “For a short moment I saw a bucolic scene,” he wrote, “as if taken from some other reality: a serene man, sitting on a bench in a garden and reading Nietzsche in English. I approached him and extended my hand. Pleased to meet you, my name is Ronen,’ I said. I’m Motti,’ the most confined prisoner in the State of Israel replied. Before we could continue to talk, screaming wardens rushed over and grabbed him away.”
A couple of videos that background the painting ‘Tavistock 707′ (2007). I could also reveal that ‘Spooks’ was one of my favourite tv shows of the last five years, until it went the way of ‘The Bill.’ And that part of the pisstakeelaborate roast, that was my entry in the last ‘Sprung’ High School Yearbook in which I appeared… but that was someone else’s pisstakeironic tragicomedy, for which they have probably already claimed authorship.
But wait, there’s more…
‘Nike-you’re being used’ (2003). Painting inspired by the Sydney Hilton Bomb Hoax. When watching the second video above, the point was made that in looking for similarity and pattern they become obvious, confirming bias or nay. George Peterson, instrumental in the push to repeal the crime of buggery and “indecent act with consent” was also involved in the eventual exoneration of the Ananda Marga three. Whilst on the other side, Roger Rogerson well versed in the art of interrogation with a telephone book in the cells of Darlinghurst lock-up, was called in to work the police side of the Hilton Bombing.
The reprise performance was Port Arthur, where a beneficiary of George Adams largesse and Tattersals heiress Helen Harvey, played ‘Virgin’ to Martini Bryant’s ‘Wild Man’ at her farm in Copping. There are confounding factoids surrounding the events of Port Arthur, including the fact that John William Avery the replacement legal representative who convinced Martin to change his plea from innocent to guilty, later “pleaded guilty to stealing more than $500,000 from his firm and clients over a five year period”.
Bernard Kerik, the police chief hero of 9/11 once fetted to become Homeland Security Chief faced three trials on federal charges of corruption, tax fraud and lying to the White House officials who vetted him.
By all accounts Martin Bryant’s shooting spree at the Broadarrow Cafe puts him in a league with elite commandos. I think I smell a patsy, or at the very least, a pattern. Jean again, Jean-Martin Charcot? Genet sais quoi? Why is it that very public acts of violence are often mingled and mangled with very suspicious and corrupt characters with under the table dealings going on. And the patsy is nearly always someone experiencing emotional distress and/or learning impairment of a kind that suggests Pavlovian conditioning.
Within a decade Frank Walker lost two sons who having caught schizophrenia from some dirty toilet seat or from smoking banana peels without a prescribed filter, both then committed suicide after having been admitted to and receiving psychiatric help. Mary Gaudren and her family had fled their irradiated house in Nelson Pde Hunters Hill, five years earlier. Her daughter later developed thyroid cancer. Five other deaths in the area are attributed to the effects of radiation poisoning. It hardly seems conspiratorial that a leftist cabinet minister and legal high flyer and a leftist female high court judge would present a threat to the powers that be in the NSW ‘establishment’…
Two years to the day afte 9/11 Anna Lindh, a socialist minister in the Swedish cabinet was stabbed with a hunting knife while shopping, by Mijailo Mijailovic, born in Sweden to Serb parents. Mijailovic claims a voice told him, “God” wanted him to stab Anna. Anna had grown up near Enkoping, Uppsland. Enkoping dates from 1300 for those with an aye aye for numeric details.
“…Lindh criticised the 2003 invasion of Iraq, commenting that “a war being fought without support in the statutes of the United Nations is a major failure”. She also advocated greater respect for international law and human rights in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, criticising Ariel Sharon’s government in Israel, but also condemning Palestiniansuicide bombings as “atrocities”. In a January 30, 2003, speech, she called on Israel to “end the occupation, give up settlements, and agree on a pragmatic solution to Jerusalem” and on the Palestinians to “do everything in their power to stop the terrorist acts, and take legal measures against those responsible” and to “produce reform, for security, but also for democracy and human rights”.
“The copycat effect refers to the tendency of sensational publicity about violent murders or suicides to result in more of the same through imitation.”
“More than gods and demons, the best-attested apparitions are of saints, especially the Virgin Mary in Western Europe from late medieval to modern times. While alien abduction stories, much more the flavour of profane, demonic apparitions, the UFO myth can also be gained from visions sacred. Perhaps best knownare those of Jeanne d’Arc in France, St Briget in Sweden, and Girolamo Savonarola in Italy. But more appropriate for our purpose are the apparitions seen by shepherds and peasants and children…
Possible motives for the inventing and accepting such are not hard to find: jobs for priests, notaries, carpenters and merchants, and other boosts to the original economy in a time of depression; augmented social status of the witness and her family; prayers once again offered for relatives buried in graveyards later abandoned because of plague, drought and war; rousing public spirit against enemies, especially Moors; improving civility and obedience to canon law; and confirming the faith of the pious. The fervors of pilgrims in such shrines was impressive; it was not uncommon for rock scrapings or dirt from the shrine to be mixed with water and drunk as medicine. But I’m not suggesting that most witnesses make the whole business up. Something else was going on…
Nevertheless, in most of medieval Europe, such apparitions were greeted warmly by the Roman Catholic clergy, especially because the Marian admonitions were so congenial to the priesthood. A pathetic few ’signs’ of evidence - a stone or a footprint and never anything unfakeable - sufficed. But beginning in the fifteenth century, around the time of the Protestant Reformation, the attitude of the Church changed. Those who reported an independent channel to Heaven were outflanking the Church’s chain of command up to God. Moreover, a few of the apparitions - Jeanne d’Arc’s, for example - had awkward political or moral implications…
Both Jeanne d’Arc and Girolamo Savonarola were burned at the stake for their visions…
In a time when nearly everyone was illiterate, before newspapers, radio and television, how could the religious and iconographic detail of these apparitions have been so similar? William Christian believes there is a ready answer in cathedral dramaturgy (especially Christmas plays), in itinerant preachers and pilgrims, and in church sermons. Legends about nearby shrines spread quickly. People sometimes came from a hundred miles or more so that, say, their sick child could be cured by a pebble that had been trodden on by the Mother of God. Legends influenced apparitions and vice versa. In a time haunted by drought, plagueand war, with no social or medical services available to the average person, with public literacy and the scientific method unheard of, sceptical thinking was rare.
Why are the admonitions so prosaic? Why is a vision of soillustrious a personage as the Mother of God necessary so, in atiny county populated by a few thousand souls, a shrine will berepaired or the populace will refrain from cursing? Why notimportant and prophetic messages whose significance could berecognized in later years as something that could have emanatedonly from God or the saints? Wouldn’t this have greatly enhancedthe Catholic cause in its mortal struggle with Protestantism andthe Enlightenment? But we have no apparitions cautioning theChurch against, say, accepting the delusion of an Earth-centredUniverse, or warning it of complicity with Nazi Germany - twomatters of considerable moral as well as historical import, onwhich Pope John Paul II, to his credit, has admitted that the Church has erred.
Not a single saint criticized the practice of torturing and burning ‘witches’ and heretics. Why not? Were they unaware of what was going on? Could they not grasp its evil? And why is Mary always ordering the poor peasant to inform the authorities? Why doesn’t she admonish the authorities herself?Or the King? Or the Pope? In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it is true, some of the apparitions have taken on greater import - at Fatima, Portugal, in 1917, where the Virgin was incensed that a secular government had replaced a government run by the Church, and at Garabandal, Spain, in 1961-5, where the end of the world was threatened unless conservative political and religious doctrines were adopted forthwith.
I think I can see many parallels between Marian apparitions and alien abductions, even though the witnesses in the former cases are not promptly taken to Heaven and don’t have their reproductive organs meddled with…”
Carl Sagan Demon Haunted World pps 133 - 140
“Observers called it despotism of the soul. And certainly there was nowhere left for individual characteristics to hide. The best modern term for this process might be depersonalization.
At first glance Jesuit training seems to resemble our contemporary brain-washing or reeducation methods. Modern interrogations and indoctrinations do not use violence or even the threat of violence. They concentrate on dismantling and disinfecting the mind of the victim before reassembling it in a different pattern. As for the Jesuit accountings and reportings, they appear to be the originals of the twentieth century systems of social control through anonymous informants - systems we tend to identify with repressive societies, secret services and ministries of the interior.”
John Ralston Saul Voltaire’s Bastards p 114
“…Another critical target is behavioural psychology (popular ca. 1940–60s), as propounded by the psychologists John B. Watson and B. F. Skinner. Novelist Burgess disapproved of behaviourism, calling Skinner’s most popular book, Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971), “one of the most dangerous books ever written”.[7] The film’s Ludovico technique is widely perceived as a parody of behaviorist-based aversion therapy.[8] Although Watson conceded behaviourism’s limitations, Skinner argued that behaviour modification (systematic reward-and-punishment learned behaviour techniques, which differs from Watsonian conditioning) is the key to an ideal society (see the 1948 utopian novelWalden Two). Dr. Ludovico’s behaviourist technique of conditioning Alex to associate violence with severe physical sickness, to curb his violent nature is akin to the CIA’s Project MKULTRA of the 1950s. Dr. Ludovico’s behaviourist technique is based on classical conditioning, which is not quite the same as with B. F. Skinner’s operant conditioning.
In showing the “rehabilitated” Alex repelled by both sex and violence, the film suggests that, in depriving him of his ability to fend for himself, Alex’s moral conditioning via the Ludovico technique dehumanises him, just as Alex’s acts of violence in the first part of the film dehumanise his victims.
The Ludovico technique has been compared to the existing technique of chemical castration…”
“But is it possible to think about this ‘differently’ in terms of what it is that happens in this carefully constructed academic space, by considering the issue of what function it serves. Foucault suggests that the university has two functions: first, to put young people between the ages of 18 and 25 out of circulation, and second, to constitute a normalising basis which will allow them to be integrated ‘peacefully’ into society at large when their studies have ended:
Finally, the student is given a gamelike way of life; he is offered a kind of distraction, amusement, freedom which, again, has nothing to do with real life; it is this kind of artificial, theatrical society, a society of cardboard, that is being built around him; and thanks to this, young people from 18-25 are thus, as it were, neutralized by and for society rendered safe, ineffective, socially and politically castrated. There is the first function of the university: to put students out of circulation. Its second function, however, is one of integration. Once a student has spent six or seven years of his life within this artificial society, he becomes ‘absorbable’: society can consume him. Insidiously, he will have received the values of this society. He will have been given socially desirable modes of behaviour, so that this ritual of exclusion will finally take on the value of inclusion and recuperation or reabsorption.
This reabsorption takes one of two forms, either reabsorption into society at large, or continuing endless reabsorption as an academic within the university system itself.”
Philip Barker Michel Foucault an Introduction p 118
“…there is nothing in Skinner’s approach that is incompatible with a police state in which rigid laws are enforced by people who are themselves subject to them and the threat of dire punishment hangs over all. Skinner argues that the goal of a behavioral technology is to “design a world in which behavior likely to be punished seldom or never occurs” - a world of “automatic goodness” (p. 66). The “real issue,” he explains, “is the effectiveness of techniques of control” which will “make the world safer.” We make the world safer for “babies, retardates, or psychotics” by arranging matters so that punishable behavior rarely occurs. If only all people could be treated in this way, “much time and energy would be saved” (pp. 66, 74). Skinner even offers, perhaps unintentionally, some indications as to how this benign environment might be brought into being:
A state which converts all its citizens into spies or a religion which promotes the concept of an all-seeing God makes escape from the punisher practically impossible, and punitive contingencies are then maximally effective. People behave well although there is no visible supervision. [Pp. 67-68]”
Noam Chomsky The Chomsky Reader p 177
“These references may help to explain something that might otherwise be a puzzling fact about modern literature. Irony descends from the low mimetic: it begins in realism and dispassionate observation. But as it does so, it moves steadily towards myth, and dim outlines of sacrificial rituals and dying gods begin to reappear in it. Our five modes evidently go around in a circle. This reappearance of myth in the ironic is particularly clear in Kafka and in Joyce. In Kafka, whose work, from one point of view, may be said to form a series of commentaries on the ‘Book of Job’, the common contemporary types of tragic irony, the Jew, the artist, Everyman, and a kind of sombre Chaplin clown, are all found, and most of these elements are combined, in a comic form, in Joyce’s ‘Shem’. However, ironic myth is frequent enough elsewhere, and many features of ironic literature are unintelligible without it. Henry James learned his trade mainly from the realists and naturalists of the nineteenth century, but if we were to judge, for example, the story called ‘The Altar of the Dead’ purely by low mimetic standards, we should have to call it a tissue of improbable coincidence, inadequate motivation, and inconclusive resolution. When we look at it as ironic myth, a story of how the god of one person is the pharmakos of another its structure becomes simple and logical.
COMIC FICTIONAL MODES
The theme of the comic is the integration of society, which usually takes the form of incorporating a central character into it. the mythical comedy corresponding to the death of the Dionysiac god is Apollonian, the story of how a hero is accepted by a society of gods. In classical literature the theme of acceptance forms part of the stories of Hercules, Mercury, and other deities who had a probation to go through, and in Christian literature it is the theme of salvation, or, in a more concentrated form, of assumption: the comedy that stands just at the end of Dante’s Commedia. The mode of romantic comedy corresponding to the elegiac is best described as idyllic, and its chief vehicle is the pastoral. Because of the social interest in comedy, the idyllic cannot equal the introversion of the elegiac, but it preserves the theme of escape from society to the extent of idealising a simplified life in the country or on the frontier (the pastoral of popular modern literature is the Western story). The close association with animal and vegetable nature that we noted in the elegiac recurs in the sheep and pleasant pastures (or the cattle and ranches) of the idyllic, and the same easy connection with myth recurs in the fact that such imagery is often used, as it is in the Bible, for the theme of salvation.”
Northrop Frye The Anatomy of Criticism four essays pps 42 -43
“He’s got this dream about buyin’ some land
He’s gonna give up the booze and the one night stands
And then he’ll settle down there’s a quiet little town
And forget about everything”
There was once a claim that toxoplasmosis is one environmental trigger that causes schizophrenia. Cat shit Feline faeces contained the active agent, which would be transferred to humans producing schizo like effects. The true carrier is mice, that infected with toxo loose inhibitions and will actively taunt cats causing their near certain demise and consumption. A trick the virus has to incubate itself in the gut and minds of cats. Shades of Viruses of the Mind by Richard Dawkins? Euphemisms and banalogies abound ‘for those with the ears to hear’.
Q: What does a two hundred kilo mouse say?
A: Here kitty kitty.
Wordpress apparently has problems embedding video so I am sending this daily missile over to http://gilbertgraceblog.blogspot.com/ where, thanks to the marvels of modern technology, I can wile away the hours attempting to regain a semblence of that ‘fetish period’ at the moment before I was sent insane by the machinations of mystic delusion and deliberated malevolence (or was that male violence).
The usual trash talking as I pass through the hypnophagic or is it hypnogogic state, various attempts to press this or that button to have me acting out this or that token human being as part of the Being Shirley Mason Syndrome (TM)*. Downloading of various and sundry post-hypnotic suggestions.
All in a days ‘work’. Different day same bullshit in ‘Other’ words.
Now it’s off to see the fire breathing wizard of Oz… and what’s behind curtain number two?! Why it’s a… NEW FAMILY CAR!!!
* Being Shirley Mason Sydnrome (TM) often incorrectly diagnosed as the Being John Malkovich Syndrome or Being The Talented Mr. Ripley Syndrome, but is differentiated from these two categories of induced role taking by the victim having in their possession a belt buckle identifying him/her as a member of the (Sybil Isabel Dorsett) Shirley Ardell Mason ‘Family’. Not to be confused with the authors of the Tate/LaBianca murders.
“ASTONISHING discoveries in space, revelations about human nature, frightening news on the environment, medical advances that will banish life-threatening diseases: an inexhaustible stream of wonders runs through the pages of New Scientist. All tell the same tale. Science is exciting. Science is cutting-edge. Science is fun.
It is now time to come clean. This glittering depiction of the quest for knowledge is… well, perhaps not an outright lie, but certainly a highly edited version of the truth. Science is not a whirlwind dance of excitement, illuminated by the brilliant strobe light of insight. It is a long, plodding journey through a dim maze of dead ends. It is painstaking data collection followed by repetitious calculation. It is revision, confusion, frustration, bureaucracy and bad coffee. In a word, science can be boring…” More
Which is why ‘they’ invented and keep re-presenting pseudo-science, or, how to trance-mute this,
Of detourning, the sheroic search for unity in diversity, with the tragicomic repression and sublimation of the divisive and falsely oppositional, either/or of the schizoid acting out school, ecole ab-nor-mal. How public stereotypes have artists spin ‘pain’ into fool’s ‘gold’.
Gabba gabba hey…
Can someone please remove the Kinsey Scale from mine eyes have seen the cuming of the glory of the Lord… putting the GLBT into Gilbert factor.
“…The sign, which means ”Work will set you free”, came to symbolise the horror of the camp in Nazi-occupied Poland, where 1.1 million mainly Jewish prisoners died during World War II. Some prisoners died from overwork and starvation but most were killed in the gas chambers…”
Ron Mead (Letters December 21) mangles the case for non-belief into a case for superstition. His first mistake is to misconstrue non-belief as not-knowing. There are many things, in the Rumsfeldian way, that I know I don’t know; where my grandmother was born, for example. But that doesn’t diminish my belief in the fact she was born.
Like Rumsfeld, he falls into the old logician’s game of forcing us to admit the limits of knowledge. But if I admit there are things I don’t know I don’t know, then they, obviously, are beyond my knowledge. Logically, not only can I not know them, I cannot say anything about them, not even that I don’t know I don’t know them.
Happily, the atheist is armed with much better logical weaponry. I can always defeat superstitious talk with Occam’s razor: ”Never multiply your entities beyond necessity.”
Pierre Mol Pymble
Ron Mead uses an interesting definition of atheism and agnostics. An atheist does not believe in any gods, and this includes people who explicitly believe there are no gods. An agnostic believes it is impossible to know whether gods exist. Many agnostics are atheists, some are theists; everyone who is not a theist is an atheist, by definition. If you hold no specific belief about the existence of deities, you are an atheist.
I find it ironic that he says atheism exemplifies human hubris, apparently claiming that taking a rational position of disbelief, based on the failure of theists to provide evidence for their beliefs, is more arrogant than believing that a being capable of creating an entire universe personally revealed fundamental truths to you, yet that every other religion making a similar claim is deluded. As they say, most theists don’t believe in thousands of gods; atheists simply don’t believe in one more.
Richard Hill Roseville
Ron Mead accuses atheists of ”human hubris”. He is not suggesting that gods are capable of hubris too?
Noel McGuire Marrickville
Is it hubris for a thinking adult not to believe in the tooth fairy or Santa Claus, or a legitimate belief following consideration of the evidence?
Hugh Malfroy Leichhardt
Ron Mead raises the bizarre concept of the dogmatic non-believer. I would ask readers to ponder that concept for a moment. There is an infinite number of things we could believe in. I do not believe in giant pink rabbits, because I have no evidence for such a belief. Am I therefore dogmatically anti-pink bunny? Are there degrees of such non-belief, and is it the intellectual equal and opposite of the beliefs of the bunny faithful?
Lou Collier Surry Hills
I suppose Tony Abbott, who is sceptical about the science of climate change, is rejoicing at the Pope’s edict that Mary MacKillop cured a woman of cancer.
I am wondering if Tony Abbott would mind calling up Albert Einstein to see if uncle Albert would interceded on behalf of those afflicted with radiation poisoning, the spontaneous and unassisted cure of only one patient would be enough for uncle Albert to clear his name and conscience.
Tony wont have too much trouble finding a subject, survivors of the Iraq invasion were known to pillage the stockpiles of nuclear installations and succumb to radiation sickness. Spent uranium shells and bullets litter the killing fields. Poisoned water flows into their wells and rivers. Just one miracle cure then Albert’s ghost can be shot out of whatever canonthe church sees fit for propaganda purposes.
Whilst on the subject of my imaginary friend’s designated/self-appointed representative on earth, nice to see that the Vatican City will soon support the largest solar array of any nation state. http://www.inhabitat.com/2009/04/20/vatican-to-build-europes-largest-solar-power-plant/. Does this mean silicon has displaced Helios as ruler of the Popes world?
If all true believers are meant to perform ‘imitato christi’ then Tony’s vision of Christ - at least according to the reported and disseminated footage of Tony - must have Jesus being one evil, bullying s.o.b.
As befits the temper of the silly season, ‘the family’ - as defined by RD Laing - again intrudes upon my life world playing suggestion based mind games with public reinforcement pulling the leavers and triggers, pressing those buttons to enact their tarot based role taking games of truth or daring do do.
Coerced silence = consent. Therefore I will not be silenced and will report the occurrences in my own subjective way with confounding, explicatory texts, for the benefit of my amateur dramatic cum psychotherapeutic assertiveness and creative writing course-work-junky buddies… this is what happens when others think they have the right to inflict the traces of their lives, their desires, their motivations, and their failures, upon you as some sort of ersatz learning ‘experience’. A life dictated by token experiences and designed-to-fail therapies.
“…The pledged group corresponds to what Laing refers to as a “nexus”, which he defines as “a group whose unification is achieved through the reciprocal interiorization by each of each other, in which neither a ‘common object’, nor organizational or institutional structures, etc., have a primary function as a kind of group ‘cement’ … The unity of the nexus is the unification made by each person of the plurality of syntheses”.
It exists “only in so far as each person incarnates the nexus. The nexus is everywhere, in each person, and is nowhere else than in each.” The family, in so far as it is nexal thus depends on the internalizations of each member of its structures.
If there is no external danger (to provide its raison d’être), then danger and terror have to be invented and maintained. Each member has to act out the others to maintain the nexus in them … The stability of the nexus is the product of terror generated in its members by the work (violence) done by the members of the group on each other. Such family “homeostasis” is the product of reciprocities mediated under the statutes of violence and terror.
According to Laing the nexal family’s highest ethic is reciprocal concern of each member for each other’s actions. The family then operates as a protection racket in which each is offered “protection-security against the violence that each threatens the other with, if anyone steps out of line”. Each person’s need is not to have that need satisfied, but to have the others needing him to satisfy their needs. This is impossible, and spirals are set up. Nobody can be satisfied or fulfilled - a most unhappy situation.
The opposite polarity of the nexus is the series. In a series, each is united with the other through a common relation to an object, and at the same time, through not being involved with each other in any other way, a negative unity. The serial group is a plurality of solitudes, of reciprocal indifference. Each is serial other to the others, and “repudiates his identity as a member of the group” in an alienated praxis. In a serial family situation each acts in terms of what “everyone” else would think or do. “There is conformity to a presence that is everywhere elsewhere”.
Concrete family groups are, to a greater or lesser extent, a combination of nexus and series but normally principally nexal. According to Laing, then, family members can never be accepted for what they are. Each is under the reign of the violence and hostility of the others, denying him a personal identity.
Sanity, Madness and the Family is an attempt to provide a dialectical intelligibility for what happens in certain families, a (female) member of which had been hospitalized as schizophrenic. The intelligibility required is a translucency, a demystification, even a “diagnosis” or “seeing through” the family situation in terms of group dynamics and of the lived experience of the actors. This meant among other things that not only the family as a group was to be understood but also employing the concept of nexus in particular to what the family was for each of its members, what the family and its members were for members in certain combinations, as well as what the relations of these members were with each other. The world of the family was explored. What was hitherto considered to be the pathological process of one member designated schizophrenic was to be illuminated through a tracing back of this to the praxis of the family group itself. That is, the “pathology” of schizophrenia was found to be intelligible in terms of the social phenomenology of the family “world”. Individual “madness” is dissolved in the broader context.
It should be made clear what Laing and Esterson claim to be doing here. In the Preface to the Second Edition, they point out that a control group of “normal” families is strictly irrelevant to their question which is: “Are the experience and behaviour that psychiatrists take as symptoms and signs of schizophrenia more socially intelligible than has come to be supposed?
This is not to deny the interest that such a control group might have, but even if this projected group revealed the same sorts of interactions (which is unlikely given the fact that the status of schizophrenia is not that of a biochemical fact or strictly medical disease), this would not show the situation in families of schizophrenics to be less understandable socially. For example, certain social situations might predispose particular biochemical or genetic propensities toward schizophrenia to become filled, whereas in a similar situation where these predispositions were not present, this would not be so. The study of families of schizophrenics highlights the social interactions and alterations of family members. Strategies regarded as legitimate, and even necessary, within the family’s “world” might be regarded as illegitimate and even crazy by others, outside that group. As Sartre had pointed out, irrationality is irrationality “for us” and not “in itself”.
Laing and Esterson in fact claimed to have discovered that schizophrenic symptoms could be intelligible in terms of social praxis. They regard the shift of emphasis from individual pathology to their standpoint as of “historical significance no less radical than the shift from a demonological to a clinical standpoint three hundred years ago” This is in line with Laing and Cooper’s estimation of the work of the later Sartre, whose major concepts Laing and Esterson employ.
Also the American communications theorists who had previously influenced Laing, as well as the American researchers into families of schizophrenics, are acknowledged as of considerable help in their study. Their view that schizophrenia is not a medical, pathological fact is in line with much current psychiatric research. For example, an Editorial Brief in The Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatrystates;
It is probable that in the present state of our ignorance we are not justified in regarding schizophrenia as an illness or a disease, since the use of these words suggests that we have knowledge about its fundamental nature which we are in fact lacking.
But it should be noted that the schizophrenics of Sanity, Madness and the Family are markedly different from those of The Divided SelfThey do not speak “schizophrenese”, and are very coherent. They are the “victims” of a group terror, rather than lacking inner ontological security (which was related with what happened in the first year of life). The schizophrenic of Sanity, Madness and the Family appears not to have very much to do with causing or creating some of the mystifications. The designated schizophrenic appears as passive recipient of the terror of the others to whom he can only react. In The Divided Self the onset of schizophrenic symptoms would ipso facto change the family situation and create other reactions. The schizophrenic of Sanity, Madness and the Family seems nothing more than the scapegoat for the rest of the group…
The family scene is seen by Laing not as an object but as a drama. Each member is an actor on the stage as well as a critic in the audience. The drama has been carried out over many generations and carries across generations.”
The critics in the audience, however, have not bought tickets: they are part of the cast itself. The participants in the situation cannot be assumed to know what is going on: the situation must be dis-closed. In fact, no one knows what the situation is.
The family is characterized by an internalized system of reciprocal coinherences. It is a common “we” against the other “them”. “To be in the same family means having the same ‘family’ inside oneself.” The internalized patterns of relationship are incarnations of the family group structure. In the family structure “each person in turn is … a synthesiser of the interaction of the others, and finds himself synthesised into a social object in the course of similar interactions by another or others. Each person as a third party has a relation to each other as third, different in kind from the relation that each has with each as interactor being synthesised into a dyad by a third”. Laing writes elsewhere, “We cannot expect to catch the curtain going up or down in a drama we are born into. But there are plays within plays.” There are syntheses each makes of the others serially, but each is part of the situation being synthesised. Even the “plays within plays” are seen by a player in the role of a critic. The whole drama itself is beyond the observation of the players themselves. No wonder that Laing questions the “inner/outer” distinctions as misleading in a web of reciprocal attributions, perceptions, internalizations and projections among a large number of members — especially where the family is smoothly running. These families may be the most mystified. These may be a “transpersonal system of collusion”.
The scenarios for the drama are set by the family’s microhistory — the “terrain” between individual biography and large-scale history. By processes of mapping past onto present and future, of structures of relationships being mapped onto other ones (nexification inducing others into our games and vice versa), and through operations of mystification, the family’s microsocial world system becomes the fundamental reality for its members through the prism of which all else is viewed and acted on.
The mystified person operates in terms already mystified for him, just as the actor finds his place within the terms of the scenario. Reality is the group reality. The drama is the frame of reference but in terms of the mystifications, the actor does not recognize his self-identity as actor in a drama. The group mystification is a form of praxis, albeit alienated, not a pathological process. The actor does not know he is acting in the group praxis of the drama.
In The Politics of the Family in particular, Laing attempts to unravel the terms of the group phantasy system drama. He tries to uncover the mystifying operations involved in the attempts to keep a relative homeostasis of the family nexus, to ensure that “reality” remains intact. The scenarios and dramas are denied existence. First there are rules, then meta-rules which deny the existence of these rules and finally meta-meta-rules which deny their own existence as well as of those of the meta-rules and the rules. Such “govern the whole social field” and unless we can “see through these rules, we can only see through them”. According to Laing: “Rules govern all aspects of experience, what we are to experience, and what not to experience, the operation we must and must not carry out, in order to arrive at a permitted picture of ourselves and others in the world”. Yet meta-meta-rules and meta-rules prevent our seeing this as so.
We are acting parts in a play that we have never read and never seen, whose plot we don’t know, whose existence we can glimpse but whose beginning and end are beyond our present imagination and conception.
The more “normal” or involved in the drama of life we become, the more alienated and mystified we are, the more adjusted within the family context, the tighter the knot. The less we see the inherent violence and terror in the nexus, the more “real” and “sane” we become. The most “normal” are the most mystified, and conversely.
In this situation, according to Laing, psychiatry plays a repressive role. Those who “see through” the mystifications are “outlawed and excommunicated” and “undergo secondary transformations”.Paraphrasing Laing, the psychiatrists (mind-police) diagnose an illness (crime) whereupon the patient (criminal) is hospitalized (imprisoned) and investigations follow. The patient (criminal) is convicted and sentence is passed (therapy). Those with a poor prognosis are dealt with as such, but most at the end of treatment (release) are adjusted (or obey the law) in future. Obviously, Laing basically characterizes psychiatry as a violent criminal activity upon the self, forcing him to conform. It is not seen even potentially as healing, as bringing the person to wholeness as it is in The Divided Self.
It should scarcely be surprising then that Laing’s attitude to the schizophrenic himself is different in this phase. Schizophrenia is a derogatory ascription by psychiatrists of a condition which they claim is pathological. But assuming pathology is self-validating, perhaps “much research into the origins of schizophrenia is hunting a hare whose origins may be in the mind of the hunters”. Laing believes the institutionalization of the “pathology” causes much of “schizophrenic” behaviour and refers to the work of Scheff, Goffman, Foucault and Szasz in this area. Taken out of the family context the “schizophrenic’s” behaviour is a cause of “schizophrenia”. But to what extent does “schizophrenia” cause his subsequent behaviour? Laing surmises that “normals” treated as “schizophrenics” would develop “schizophrenic” symptoms, and vice versa. He quotes his own work at Kingsley Hall and David Cooper’s Villa 21 as illustrating how people treated as “schizophrenic” can become well. But such are normally prevented from doing so by “treatment” like ECT or psychotropic drugs. Laing suggests that the “schizophrenic” go through a “metanoia” (change of mind) which resembles a voyage toward a rebirth and reintegration. What is often regarded as the beginnings of schizophrenic illness to be treated by cold packs, ECT and so on is in fact the “possible beginning of becoming well”. Healing is prevented instead of encouraged. The schizophrenic, who often regresses, is not tolerated by the society.
Schizophrenia itself, writes Laing, is
a kind of conceptual straitjacket, that severely restricts the possibilities both of psychiatrists and patients. Observations of animal behaviour in captivity indicate nothing reliable about their natural behaviour. The observations psychiatrists base their view of schizophrenia on have, almost entirely, been made on human beings in a double or even treble captivity…”
