Zone of the Interior: A Novel

Clancy gets it spot on when, in describing what is the actual account of his own 'capture' by the Laingian mob after he attempts to leave 'the Brotherhood', he says their eyes were full of 'compassion and hatred'. What a perfect phrase for those harbingers of psychic violence, those creeping thugs and gurus. Mar 14, Martinxo rated it really liked it Shelves: Fascinating insider account of the anti-psychiatry movement of the s, a semi fictional work based on Ronnie Laing's crew.

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Clancy Sigal was the child of a love affair between two idealists. His parents Jennie Persily and Leo Sigal were labor organizers. Jennie, a single mother, raised Clancy on her own. This was a place where, it was hoped, residents who might otherwise be hospitalized as schizophrenics could experience madness as a natural voyage of self-reconstitution and discovery. Sigal, together with Cooper and Laing and others were founders of the mental health charity The Philadelphia Association which still exists today as an organization that provides psychotherapy and training in therapy, and therapeutic households for people suffering mental distress.

Zone of the Interior tells a story that draws on Sigal's actual experience of involvement with British anti-psychiatry. We need not read the novel, however, as merely a more or less accurate account of people and events. The text can, rather, provide us with new ways of thinking about anti-psychiatry. Sid Bell, the narrator, is an American writer, an ex-pat, a former GI, left-wing activist and Hollywood blacklistee we could say just the same for Sigal himself. Suffering dreadful stomach cramps he thinks of as psychosomatic and having already visited several psychotherapists, Bell consults a radical Scottish existential psychiatrist, Willie Last, who impresses him with his frankness, relaxed manner and playfulness.

Last introduces LSD into the therapy and soon takes acid with Bell, who joins Last in setting up a charity devoted to ameliorating mental health, Clare Council, an organization that eventually sets up a therapeutic household, Meditation Manor, in Brixton, South West London. In order to learn more about madness, Bell helps out at Connolly House, a democratized wing of a state psychiatric hospital that has been set up by Dr.

We are encouraged to compare Connolly House and Meditation Manor, which, to anyone who knows anything about British anti-psychiatry, point towards Kingsley Hall and Villa In a parody of the valuing of schizophrenic breakdown as a potentially healing journey found in the work of Laing and Cooper, Sid Bell longs to go mad, to experience the truth that, supposedly, can be revealed only by schizophrenia. The novel moves towards its climax, Bell's epiphany, his seeing into the truth of himself and his place in the world in a moment of transcendence.

When the epiphany occurs, far from being a moment of sublimity, it is one of bathos. The spirits and demons that Bell has been reading about and conjuring are nowhere to be seen.

Into the Zone of the Interior: A Novel View of Anti-Psychiatry

No arcane secrets are finally revealed. But Bell does meet God — and the deity is in the form of a trade unionist, an activist from the Industrial Workers of the World the Wobblies , who tells Bell to quit focusing on high-falutin radicalism and return to the world of the everyday. Bell recognises what is really important to him: It was not finally published in the UK until Laing, who died in , did not like the novel - and with good reason. The names Sigal gives to the novel's principal two characters clearly point towards himself and Laing.

And the name Willie Last, with the Christian name having two syllables ending with the 'e' sound and the single syllable surname opening with an 'L', clearly points towards Ronnie Laing. Last is presented as a manipulative, drug- and mysticism-guzzling, power-crazed, promoter of madness as hyper-reality. Willie Last is a name that poses a question: Do the ideas of Laing have any lasting worth? Let us consider how well Laing has endured.

The high point of interest in Laing was the late sixties and early seventies. The volume The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise , which followed several earlier texts, in particular the pioneering work of existential psychiatry The Divided Self , brought Laing fame on both sides of the Atlantic. While Laing never liked the term 'anti-psychiatry' - David Cooper's term - he was part of a wave, albeit not a uniformly characteristic one, of radical critiques of psychiatry.

But the question posed by Clancy Sigal is will he last — Willie Last? While in the 70s and 80s a number of books were published about Laing e. Boyers, Collier, Jacoby, Sedgwick , his star has faded in the academy.

The work of Foucault, Deleuze and Guatari is standard fare in the European and Anglo-Saxon academy, but interest in Laing has declined considerably. For several years, not even The Philadelphia Association, the organization he co-founded, taught his work on its training course. There is, though, what might be the beginning of a renaissance of interest in Laing. Another filmmaker, Tony MacDonald, with a script based on a biography of Laing by his son Adrian, is looking for the funds to make a biopic P. The Guardian newspaper, now, though its website, very much an international organ, devoted an editorial in to R D Laing and called for a reappraisal.

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All this comes after several biographies and critical appraisals of his work that followed his death in e. Burston, Clay, Kotowicz, A. With the 25th anniversary of his death just a year away now, it seems that interest in Laing is gathering a head of steam. And there is not just increased interest in Laing. Last year, there was a partial re-enactment of the London Dialectics of Liberation conference, an event that in the 60s brought together radicals who, alongside Laing, included David Cooper who edited a volume named after the event , Herbert Marcuse, Allen Ginsberg, Paul Goodman and Stokely Carmichael.

The commemorative event was held at Kingsley Hall, the site of the therapeutic community of the same name. Recently, too, a book of photographs of former residents of Kingsley Hall has been published Harris Zone can help us reappraise Laing and the scene of British anti-psychiatry. On its initial publication, the novel was positively reviewed in the States. And the therapists found themselves interested most in how far Sigal's work corresponds to the truth of events to which it alludes. Joseph Berke, Marv Munshin in Zone , writes of how Sigal is successful in showing how Laing "always positioned himself with those around him so that he knew what they were thinking about each other, but that they did not know what he was thinking about them Thompson, in his review of the novel, is most protective of the reputation of Laing.

Thompson sees Laing been unjustly maligned by Sigal, someone, according to Thompson, of a distinctly grandiose bent.

What does a novel’s interior design say about its characters? | Nichole Bernier

Responding to a passage in the novel in which Last makes a sexual advance to Bell, Thompson remarks that Sigal's resentment of Laing "smacks of the rejected lover, of the wound that never heals. Perhaps this is how he maintains his connection with Laing" Truth belongs to the analyst, who has nothing to learn from the text under analysis. The other therapists who are interested in the novel as something providing a displaced account of actual people and events are also imposing limits on what the reader can get out of this novel.

Clearly there are links between the novel and the scene of anti-psychiatry; that is undeniable. But if we can get beyond a focus on whether or not the novel represents Laing truthfully or faithfully or respectfully — whether it pays tribute to him or betrays him - and beyond worrying about the reference to actual, specific events, the novel has much that can help us think. What I want to focus on is the novel as a fundamentally sympathetic critique of anti-psychiatry, one that encourages us to think about the nature of community, about issues of class and gender, and about the place of anti-psychiatry as part of the New Left.

Sigal is critical of the doctors in Zone: This is not a novel, though, in which the problems of anti-psychiatry are measured against a standard provided by, say, psychoanalysis or psychiatry. Sigal is sympathetic to the anti-psychiatric project of breaking down boundaries between the mad and the supposedly normal, and constructing communities in which people might live with greater tolerance of others' eccentricities and even craziness. It is clear that Sigal is much more sympathetic to the community that approximates the Villa 21, a brief experiment in democratic ward-life in a state hospital led by David Cooper.

If there are heroes in the novel, they are the young male patients of Connolly House and the nurses of the unit. When, during a crisis, the patients take over the care of one of their number who is particularly disturbed and disturbing , we see a real community in action. The nurses, too, are given a voice in the novel. Les, for instance, speaks of how the nurse must bear the brunt of innovation and how, long after experiments have ceased and innovating doctors have moved on, the nurse will most likely be in the same job. The two therapeutic communities are separated by social class.

There is a telling passage toward the end of the novel when a group of Connolly House patients see their radical doctor, Dick Drummond, on television. The young men, far from feeling betrayed or feeling any moral repugnance at indecorous behavior, simply "stare at the screen.

As one of the boys remarks, "What would happen if any of us did that? Sigal, a writer who in The Secret Defector details humorously his own painful engagement with feminism in the s, employs lively satire to alert us too to matters of gender. The doctors treat their wives appallingly. Yet anti-psychiatry positioned itself as politically progressive and Sigal is drawn to it not only for personal reasons but also because of its political stance, the linking of madness to a mad world.

A good way into the novel is to begin with the title. Zone of the Interior suggests the interior world, of course.

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To those who know something of anti-psychiatry it might suggest the journey backwards and inwards, towards transcendence and religious truth, the inner voyage outlined by Laing in The Politics of Experience. Sigal satirizes this stress on the inner world. Satire often, but certainly not always, works by making a comparison between a deleterious state of an affairs and an ideal.

Sometimes the ideal might be quite abstract 'goodness', 'honesty' and at other times the ideal might be embodied in a character, real or fictional e.

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Where there is no discernible ideal or where this ideal is weak or undermined, as in some of Swift's work, the text is likely to be very unsettling. Where, if anywhere, is the ideal in Zone of the Interior? We have to wait until right at the end of the novel to find anything like a clear ideal.

At the novel's close, Sid Bell gains what he has been working towards for the entire novel: Bell's vision, however, is not a transcendental one.