R.D. Laing (L) and Phyllis Chesler (C) in dialogue in 1972

When R.D. Laing (‘Ronnie’) came to America, he asked that we meet.

I was thrilled to do so. I was certainly familiar with his work. We met at

the Algonquin Hotel. I had expected that we would be alone but it

was not to be. One, possibly two, film crews were at work. The full

unpublished transcript runs to 42 pages, so this is just an edited

selection from that transcript.

At a certain point, I asked him to come into the bathroom (!)

with me so that we might have a brief, private conversation. We did so.

C: Well, should we sing songs, or tap dance? I haven’t any ostrich feathers,

no props for a one-night stand.

We each take off our jackets, sweaters, shoes and stretch out, side by side, on two

single beds.

C: This has got to be called ‘Conversation in Two Beds’ (laughter)

Two women film-makers, Amalie Rothschild and Claudia Weill, come in, joining

the small camera crew that has already begun to film us.

L: In many of the women that you meet going around, what’s your feeling

about … I mean what’s the way that opens it up most?

C: How do you get people to hear you?

L: Yes.

C: Well, I’m discovering one of the ways, at least as a moment in a mixed

audience, or on television, is never to show strong emotions. Never anger,

because that’s an emotion that women are not supposed to show. Women

are supposed to be ‘nice’, conciliatory, reasonable, peace-makers. Often people who’ve read my book (Women and Madness) when they

meet me, say ‘Gee, I didn’t expect you to look like you look’, or, ‘You’re

really a nice person’. What they really mean is, ‘You’re not a threat at

all’. I can say things on television rather casually like, ‘God is dead and

she was a woman’, and I can get the entire audience to go along with it

because I’m smiling and being very attractive, and very reasonable. This

is one of the limited privileges that women have that allows them to be

heard. But I don’t think that justice or truth is something, that if you are

eloquent enough will immediately cause people to lay down their guns

or take off their body armor, and we’ll all go out into the streets and

celebrate life.

L: One may state the truth, but the stating of it doesn’t insure the triumph

of it. More than that one cannot do, but state it whatever is the most

effective manner, according to time and circumstances that they dictate.

C: I think also that Christ is always crucified. If people put their bodies

where their ideas are, they are frequently called ‘mad’. If anybody speaks

the truth, or their truth, in a way that is socially unacceptable, or in a

way that is really terrifying because it has no socially redeeming factors

in it, they’re going to be crucified, either being socially labelled insane

or being labeled criminal, or by having their spirits broken. I think that

Wilhelm Reich was very good on this in the first three chapters of The

Murder of Christ.

L: Some people got away with it more than others. I think that Erasmus

got away with it. Here’s an eminently sane man, in Praise of Folly, who,

when people are freaked out all round him, he lampooned every

establishment, power, money, the church, theology.

C: How did he get away with it?

L: He kept on the move. He had powerful friends. He stayed with the

right people. Like Voltaire; he just got away with it.

C: Where would a woman have powerful friends like that who weren’t

men?

L: It’s like being the court Jew in the Hitler regime. All the Nazis chiefs,

including Himmler, had one or two Jewish friends. They told them, ‘Oh

nothing will happen to you.’ Those one or two people they kept. If it’s

just a matter of getting away with one’s skin, one’s name, which is

something, isn’t it? I would certainly prefer to get away with my body. Women never even sort of suffer in Greek or Judaic History. Their

suffering has been stamped out as a historically recognized fact by the

time male history starts to be written.

C: Of course, if one can save one’s skin, that does not insure the triumph

of one’s word.

L: Oh, no.

C: That is painful. As a woman, one is still always the ‘token woman’. It’s

always the Athena who loves men and despises women. If you can find a

way of communicating to them that any boat of theirs that rocks, is a

boat of yours too. If you find a way of letting them know that if you’re

sitting at their table and have learned something of their manners,

something of their desire to be good as well as be loved, have experienced

their humanity. I mean up close, Wall Street speculators aren’t evil –

they’re ‘religious’, they deal with abstractions. You, the court-Jew-artist-feminist-upstart wouldn’t upset their dinner table, throw their food back

in their faces, and run out of the house: where would you run to anyway?

Where do wives who’ve reached the end of their rope have to go?

C: How do you get people to hear what you’re saying?

L: I don’t know whether I get people to hear what I’m saying. It seems

to be more than most people … I’ve got a number of books that a lot of

people read. Since being over here people have been turning up – 2,000,

3,000 … overflows and so on, to listen or to hear whatever they think is

going to come … as the author of the books – and that is show business

in a way.

C: Oh yeah.

L: In fact, if I was a more competent entertainer (I’m becoming that

with a bit of practice), I get them to laugh, get them to relax a bit; I get

them to ease up a bit; I don’t use any shocking words. I try to be

comparatively urbane. I come out dressed in a dark pullover and a pair

of dark trousers, suit and socks, and sit in a chair, and I don’t go out of

my way not to be charming: all that sort of stuff that eases down the

excitement. I mean, if people are not sort of in an emotionally excited

state of mind, sort of keyed up, then they can’t hear really anything you

say … what they’re prepared to hear. The level has got to become sort of

low key and naturally, I don’t mean … there’s a lot of stuff that one can’t

change in 5 or 10 [minutes] or [in] half an hour, that sort of apathetic violence – between violence and apathy and a lot of people I’ve been

seeing. Attention to that in the first place is of talking, is of Power – also

a loud sound not too much, of hemming and hawing and pausing and

so on, so that, that sort of ‘hot brains’ that people come with and sort of

hairy … simmer down a bit: some sort of pretense for their consideration.

Mainly in terms of stories I’ve got to tell with, so many fake parables:

stories about ... I think the most emotion I ever churned out was at

Goucher College.1 I told a bit about the Inquisition and the main thing

that the Inquisition was all about: taking and burning about 100,000

women – impotence in man. Among other things, that was plainly what

they were, when they went out on ‘search-and-destroy’ operations on

witches. They would find men who were married, say three years married,

and then a year and two years of marriage – that was when most men

apparently became impotent. That was most likely to be due to a woman,

who was bewitching them. It might be their mothers. It could be their

wives, it might be a girlfriend … it could even be their daughter.

C: There was a 19th century woman (Elizabeth Parsons Ware Packard),

who first made the comparison that Thomas Szasz has developed between

the institution of psychiatry and the Inquisition. I take it one step further

and say that the majority of people who supposedly help them (which

they very rarely do … there is no cure for the human condition, and

even less of a cure for the female condition, and never especially at the

hands of the male helper) …

L: No

C: … are men, known as professionals. So that I think it’s a good analogy,

although I think that men were burned as witches too.

L: Women lesbians, are they practicing as psychotherapists?

C: Some, but very few. That is mainly because the possibility of lesbianism

is legislated out of the realm of existence for most women. Just as sexual

or spiritual growth is very difficult and circumscribed for most women.

So that there is much less lesbianism, and there is male heterosexuality,

although bi-sexuality and lesbianism are definitely increasing. Male

homosexuality is very similar to male heterosexuality. I would say that

there are few men who are really heterosexual: most men prefer the

company of other men. Despite the competitiveness, there can be good

– or useful – non-oedipal, father/son relationships and there is a

protective brotherhood within class and race groupings. Women are experienced as the fearful, biological ‘other’. I think that part of why

there are laws against male homosexuality is because men do not like

the idea that some other man, older or stronger than themselves, can

therefore force them into a humiliating act, against their own will, when

they haven’t initiated it. That is why male homosexuality is punished in

our culture.

L: Because, to save, to save …

C: To save little boys! To save men from the kind of humiliation that, for

women, is the standard fare. In other words, the model of sexuality that

we hold to in Western culture is still an Olympian one, a Judeo-Christian

model. The model is that of rape, incest and procreation. Zeus liked

virgins. The Holy Ghost liked virgins. You’ve got to have a young virgin,

and you’re a father figure, and she’s a daughter figure, therefore you

impregnate her, in order to produce a divine male child. Within most

families, little girls are trained to love daddy and to reject mommy. The

early desire for adult nurturance means having to turn to a male body –

this habituates young girls in a sexual way, in an incestuous way. Little

girls are trained to disobey the incest taboo. And little boys are not.

Men cannot disobey the incest taboo. When they grow up, they marry,

or fuck, wives or women who may perform a lot of maternal and

‘forbidden’ sexual functions for them, but who are no longer any real

threat. Grown men trap and split their original mothers into ‘wife’ and

‘whore’, growing impotent or sexually disinterested in the mother-wife,

but in an emotionally safe way. Men are usually taller, and older, and

probably more economically mobile – and are seen as wiser than their

wives – their phallic mothers, now trapped and at male command,

whereas little girls, when they grow up, marry real daddies, over and

over again. If they go to marry somebody, it’s a ‘daddy’ man. It is not

common to have women marry men much younger, or economically

less mobile than themselves. The dominant pattern of sexuality, for

women and men, is legal rape …

If we believed that God was a woman, or if we believed that there

were 3,000 Gods, many of whom are female, then women would have a

different feeling about their body, men would not have to renounce

their mothers, as they now do in order to become ‘men’, they would not

renounce the female in themselves, they would not renounce their real

mothers, and they would not then have to keep renouncing, despising,

fearing, punishing adult women when they grow up. And that’s what I meant when I said that most men are not

heterosexual. So that, even if there are biological differences between

the sexes, which there are, the fact that culture has placed such a

significance on it, that culture cannot see its way clear to tolerate or to

celebrate differences, but rather assigns lower and higher positions to

these differences, I think, is a very good model for why things like

capitalism, imperialism, colonialism, etc. then later developed into world

history. I also think, by the way, that the shedding of female blood in

childbirth is the model in the Western world for the male crucifixion of

men. What men did with this fact was to invent murder, and during the

Judeo-Christian phase, martyrs – ‘redeemers’ who must die – when men

come in peace or love, which is counter to male values, they’re crucified.

When women come in war, they’re crucified. I’m thinking of Joan of

Arc and, of course, Christ in psychological terms.

L: Mmmmmmmm

C: I think that the so-called primitive association of blood with

redemption, or perpetuation of the species, was then translated into

the psychological equivalent of heroic human sacrifice? Male heroes

would have to shed blood to redeem us, as women do. Of course, most

women, as mothers, are no longer celebrated as fertility goddesses.

They’re condemned. They’re stepmothers. They’re witches.

Psychiatrically, they’ve been seen as the cause of juvenile delinquency,

schizophrenia, alcoholism, and drug addiction among their children.

L: Yea. Why do you particularly think it is blood at childbirth, rather

than menstrual blood?

C: Yes, because menstrual blood, per se, does not result in a child.

L: The whole is brought together with procreation, with birth.

C: Yes, and maybe the significance of blood in the human psyche. When

men experience blood, it is a wound. It’s something to be afraid of. It’s

something on a battlefield. Woman, in that sense, are closer to blood

and less fearful of it. But I don’t want to romanticize that closeness to

blood, or the earth, because women have been tied to the earth because

of their supposed closeness to it, long after men stopped respecting

flesh and earth. If women are indeed closer to blood and earth, and to

spiritual things, then modern Western culture has certainly not

celebrated, or followed, female leads in that way. It has scorned, despised,

pitied, burned as witches, condemned, and not listened to, either the body or the spirit. I mean, if indeed, women are closer to these things,

and I’m not certain.

L: Who can say?

C: Well, I can’t. A lot of people think they can: in terms of the incest

thing though.

L: Do you get up in public and talk about incest quite straight?

C: Oh yes. There are two sexual myths in a puritan culture. One is that

male sexuality reaches its peak, its most raucous and lusty and anonymous

peak, between the ages of 15 and 20. And women reach their peak

between the ages of 35 and 50. Now it is very interesting that these are

the two age groups most segregated and isolated from each other. I

mean Phaedra is killed, always. Often, despite male adolescent sexual

deprivation, young boys, traditionally, have been able to gang-bang, rape

or buy a woman. But few men, young or old, really sexually and spiritually

know how to, or want to, please the ‘older’ woman. These age groups

never manage to get together. So that, if the myth is true, that exploration

of self through sexuality is most intense at these two age groups, how

come we have a culture that not only represses everyone sexually, but

specifically then, the two groups that, mythically, believe should have

access to one another? Why are women so sexually and spiritually

deprived – actually and mythically?

L: Mmmmm

C: Tell me about how, in general, you were trained to cure, or view, or

help, unhappy or ‘non-functioning’ women? I mean as opposed to

unhappy men.

L: There are a few women in London, older than me. The women I

have known were evenly distributed as being the same age as me, or

younger, or older. The woman who was my supervisor and my

psychoanalytic training, Marion Milner, you’ll have come across her stuff

– she wrote a book, it is an autobiographical book called A Reader from

Jordan2 – she is very moving – it is the story of her working with her

relationship with a younger woman – about 20 years in analysis – and

Alice is getting electric shocks, she is battered around, and it took her

15 years to get over it – she’s a woman and if the time and circumstances

had been different, I would have, could have, known her more physically.

She is about 70 now. C: It would be very easy to put you on the spot – I don’t want to do that.

L: Try it.

C: You want to feel that wonderful ‘feminine’ feeling of helplessness –

and being better understood by someone else.

L: No, no – I’d been very surprised if I stopped feeling helpless, but

your come-on does invite me to take the opportunity of you just sort of

checking out the areas of blindness, which I can’t suppose I am lacking

in, since, so far as I’ve been around, everyone has [them] – and since

you’re sort of particularly sharp in this domain, then it would just be of

value to me and there is, sort of – I mean, if you’re frightened I’m going

to start closing up, or defending, or in opposition, or taking offence, or

getting frightened, or going into some one or another of those numbers

you’re familiar with – I might, I don’t know, but I would like to see if I

would. But setting it up that way is a bit false. I don’t want to invite a

heavy number, direct polarisation in that direction, and sort of free-ranging.

C: The whole psychiatric profession – and for that matter, mysticism

and acid culture – has a typically Judeo-Christian view of women. Even if

you are at war with this, and may have thrown off a lot, it’s very difficult

to really change.

L: That’s not nearly as much fun.

C: What?

L: Not nearly so much fun – the great thing about getting out of that

male – being up-tight – sort of identifying with the male saying, ‘I’m

getting all this sort of payoff that comes with it’ – that is, good male to

men, then, especially if you’ve got some sort of articulation, intelligence,

etcetera – butter men up – and become sort of male ideal to men –

there’s a lot of rewards that men get in that homosexual club. One’s got

to have – get over the fear of losing that male vote, and fear of losing the

sort of thing that males [have] – and some men then turn to women

and play at being, like sort of, male lesbians, who say, ‘Of course, all

these men, they don’t understand women.’ They deny this, that, and

the next thing – well, ‘I’m the friend of women’ …

C: I’m the ‘special friend’.

L: So, I’m not doing that, and that’s another posture.

C: Audiences are massing here to meet you because your books are

extremely valuable and good. But partly it’s another phenomenon too;

how many of those thousands of people really read, or understand, what

you’re saying: television has ruined a lot of minds in this country.

Knowledge is experienced as a form of entertainment, everything is like

a rock concert … Also, truth is better heard by a stranger coming from

afar. Christ was never listened to in his own home town – so you come

in, and you can leave town that night, and you can even really say what

you want to, more or less, and people can even dig it, for a moment.

People want to be turned on, to escape, to live through entertainers.

L: You never know – you’re getting kudos; you can start something.

C: I’d be very surprised – I was fired, and rehired, from my job last year

because, after womanning the radical barricades within the university

institution, I dared to start publishing successfully. ‘If she’s so “famous”,

she can’t be serious.’

L: What?

C: Just life in petty, mediocre Academe.

L: By the way, how is your book – Women and Medicine – doing? Is it

selling? Is it in paperback yet?

C: No, no paperback yet, and no major reviews – which is very interesting.

The New York Times, for instance, didn’t want to assign it. I guess The

Times didn’t know what to do with it.3 They didn’t know whether it was,

‘yet another goddamn feminist diatribe’ that’s been heard before, or

whether it was ‘original, brilliant, interesting’, and should they push it,

or wait, or what? They were very nervous about it. Women’s books, by

women are, like women, all seen as alike. They’re lumped together

systematically in reviews, or into categories, to contain them, to remain

blinded to differences … You know, I published an early study in

Psychology Today, and felt they deserved a ‘pick’ of a chapter from my

book, before it was published – and they sent me letter stating, ‘Oh well,

we’ve already published too much about women.’ What happened to

your wonderful book, The Divided Self?

L: In the first three or four years that it was published in this country, it

sold under 1,500 copies in all.

C: I read through it in one night. I was a psychology major, an awful life,

and that was a good evening.

L: I would have thought that anything that men can’t put into a bracket

takes a little while to be a newsmaker.

C: I’ve been thinking about the crowds, and about your correct

perception of the violence and apathy, characteristic of rock culture …

Increasingly, people are being rendered powerless by the effects of

totalitarian forces, and they turn to drugs, and they turn to what they

think is the inner life, or to messages about the inner life, because they

feel so little power over their own personal ‘outer’ life. They’ve given

up; and that’s where the apathy comes in, and they look perhaps for a

turn-on by someone who’s in touch with their inner life, and it’s got to

be only temporary, like a one-night stand; and then the violence comes

from the frustration, the Big Cheat of the impossible dream, so that, in

America, the whole counter-culture communal movement – drugs,

peace, love, male sex – has kept women barefoot, and pregnant, and

abandoned on the communes in the country, which is a far worse deal

than being left that way in the suburbs with alimony. The retreat to the

country, the ‘dropping out’ into a personal immediacy, has not been a

sexual or spiritual revolution for women. Americans turn to Eastern

mysticism, like to drugs (and rock frightens me a little). In general, it

doesn’t feel like a real recognition of the ‘sixth sense’, that science of

the next century.

L: And it’s not and, if it comes to that, the extent to which the sexual –

well in India and Ceylon, it has become almost completely rotten – the

relationships between the sexes. It was a sort of overt slavery, with not

any onus attached to their sort of reincarnation [as a] karmic mortal. A

female body is just the second best mortal state, and they say so,

completely and explicitly. If you’re really going to get into the higher

reaches of mysticism, or sainthood, or anything like that, with very few

exceptions – if you’re a woman, you just got to play out this time, and

come back as a man next time.

C: Of course, Hindu and Moslem societies are hell on woman.

L: In Buddhism – and I’m not supposing the present state of Buddhism

bears any more resemblance to the original Gautama, to whatever he

said, might have said – than the present state of Christianity has any

resemblance to what Jesus might have said – who knows? – but it’s very,

very far gone and Buddhist monks, in the Buddhist country, won’t even

look at a woman.

C: Like very religious Jews.

L: If they were introduced in a room they might put a hand out, but very

likely they won’t even talk to a woman – a woman could come and consult

them for some …

C: Yes, the supplicants; the unhappy believing masses.

L: But, even then, some older ones – the really old men, who bring their

eyes, and are trained not to – despite their conscious deliberate training

– to avoid looking at women, so that they would never see woman; they

never think of women; they never imagine women – they are trained

not to even think of woman, nor even imagine a woman in any respect.

C: That’s partly because women are only flesh – and the spirit, the eternal,

divine, in the human race cannot be incarnate in the female body, if

God is thought to be a man …

L: Well, it’s rationalized by them anyway that women are very dangerous

because they inflame desire, attachment and it doesn’t matter whether

it’s ‘N’ + one woman, or just women. Affection, for instance, is one of

the greatest vices that could be. The number of, or sort of, parables of

how much sufferings are caused by coming … developing any affection

towards anyone. For instance, in one of the Buddha’s previous lives is

told in a sort of canon. He was a householder, and he was working in the

fields, and his son, aged 12, was playing and got bitten by a snake, and

died. He went and collected his wife from the house, and people came

with shovels, and buried him where he was, and went away again.

C: I’m torn, you see, because I think that there’s something to it: to give

up, not earthly, but social types of relationships, if you want to harness

spiritual power. I think there is something to that. I don’t think it needs

to be as ruthless, or as anti-female, as it’s always been, but I think there

are so few women who have written philosophically about mysticism:

Helena Blavatsky is one, and she literally had to give up a sex life to do

so. Perhaps many men also do, but I suspect that many of the charlatans

don’t give up their sex lives, or their rock-star-like groupy female

following, who they dip in and then out of again, because of their

position.

L: Oh yes! The most sincere, whatever sincerity is, people, at least for a

long period of their life, live usually, as they call it ‘Brahmacharya’.4 I

mean completely celibate, whether man or a woman, as part of any radius or phase of training; that if they put themselves in the hands of a different

sorts of traditional training, mind–spiritual training, a discipline, of

course – I mean like in Ceylon or India – these things are as available, as

say psychotherapy, It’s certainly been going on for over 2,000 years, or

who knows for how long: specific disciplines and procedures, etc. I use

these terms as the terms are employed, but it’s very much a male

prerogative and, certainly in the Hindu sense, what one gets a sense of

almost more than … I mean the sort of thing that makes me sort of

immediately suspicious. No one, unless they were programmed to believe

that, would consider it for a moment.

C: Like most of the people in America … Well, I’ve got, among some

friends, I’ve got, are women who convey to me how they see things, who

are scanning in themselves that sort of domain in America [much] more

directly than I am. I’m torn between asking you many questions, and

telling you what has happened here, and what it means. Words, words,

words. How [does] one get out of that?

L: I am very glad to hear of this sort of thing. I haven’t heard this in such

an articulate and concentrated form, more a sort of sensibility that is,

with focus in some respect. I have been drawn by my own inner pool,

and by being sensitized, by things that are happening in that whole area

of childbirth and how children are set up for …

C: Brutal.

L: For women, having children in many parts of America, there are sort

of detailed procedures that are done.

C: Tied down. Strapped down, like cattle at the convenience of the

obstetrician.

L: Pubic hair shaved; episiotomies done routinely; put into unfortunate

positions, the most difficult positions for natural childbirth – the whole

thing being pre-empted, without any chance otherwise – so gripped in a

chemical control, right from the beginning: I mean not just anesthesia

and that sort of thing, but injections, so that a woman doesn’t even know

what she is getting, which control the rate and intensity of the

contractions, and the speed of it, so that the obstetrician can get off to

his cocktail party.

C: Health care in general in this country is going to be a tremendous

rallying forum for all sorts of people.

L: It’s a good tactical place to take issue. …

C: I think one of the things the media has done about feminism is to

distort its range of opinions and depth of thought and feeling. I

personally don’t think that we should, or can, ignore our biological makeups,

or that everything is conditioning. Feminist ideology is about coming

to terms with early Freud and Marx, with biology and culture. I suspect

that culture can probably equalize, or eradicate, or explain most of the

ways that people behave. It doesn’t mean that genetics or biology are

not important. We have no real way of finding out about it anyway.

L: Well, it is very, very difficult. It is not my particular bit to get into that,

but I suspect that if people’s mind cleared a bit, they might, for instance

… A chap, Everett Strokes,5 I don’t know whether you have come across

his stuff. He is dead now, but he’s got sort of an in-group following, as

they say phenomenological philosopher in America: talking about space,

writing about space, produces the observation that there is a sexual

differentiation of genetics. This is very important as to whether it is true

to, in terms of this particular sort of thing. How are you going to decide

whether it is the case or not? He described little boys, when standing

sort of like that; they have got a lateral movement, like a discus

movement; whereas little girls when they get involved will stand like

that. Who knows?

C: But girls are taught to conserve space, to take up the least amount of

space, in the universe, or in the room, as possible. Men are taught to

expand: space, land, territory, and mobility belongs to them. They have

legacies to pass on to people, you know, their sons.

L: So you and I would agree with that. One couldn’t accept that as a

genetic thing. All observations that have been made have been made in

a culture, which is already skewed – all space is acculturated – from the

moment of conception …

C: For instance, some adolescent girls, even eight- or nine-years-old girls,

before they discover that they can’t inherit the earth, before they know

that, they walk in a certain kind of way. They walk like they are free: they

run, they jump, they climb, and they inquire. You can see female body

movements change, and the need to serve, and love, and be protected

by a man becomes paramount. I believe that mental illness does exist

and that we cannot romanticize it and should not punish it. But, women

in states of ‘Divine’ madness – part of the reason, that I got involved in thinking about Mother-religions, and Amazon myths and Amazons – is

because some women I talked to were describing things that came from

another culture, another time. I know they were, and I wanted to make

sense out of it, beyond noticing that these women were ‘acting’ in ways

we think are ‘masculine’.

Grandiosity, anger, hostility, sexuality, physical presence, the putting-together of body and feeling … part of what some women experience

in states of divine madness are reincarnations of Joan of Arc,

reincarnations of the Virgin Mary (or an earlier Mother figure), in which

they give birth to themselves, or to the divine male child – with whom

they’d naturally mate – or, in which they experience some kind of union

with their own mother that they never knew in this century.

L: It’s the sort of thing I’ve seen; that some women have sinned two or

three times … a woman, sort of cut adrift, who’s gone wild, who’s broken

the sort of internal things that bind her, and then moved through

different zones of what’s called madness, and then the sort of jerkiness,

the fearfulness, the sort of splitting the hebephrenic-catatonic thing,

and then what comes out then … it has a rhythm, and a logic, but it’s

very, very seldom.

C: And a forcefulness.

L: But is very seldom tapped – I think there will be more – I wouldn’t

dare hazard more than guesses as to what leads to these transformations

in the depth of the human species, but there is something happening

just now, definitely to do with a transformation of the sexual sort of

thing in the direction of women – sort of pushing through that …

C: Yes, I agree. But it’s dangerous to romanticize something that society

punishes.

L: Oh no.

C: I know that you’re not doing that, but that’s what some people in

America have done with your work.

L: Oh, yes. I have never encouraged anyone to go crazy.

C: You see, there are some people who think that what you’re saying is

that it’s a rite of passage … that, if acted out, they’ll reach paradise. But

there’s so much pain, so much punishment, involved that, if I’m not

going through it myself, I hesitate to extol its eloquence, its virtues, to

anyone else – especially to women, who are seen as ‘crazy’ no matter what they do, who are ‘pitied’ and held at arm’s distance by men.

L: Well, there is nothing to pity in this sort of ferocity.

C: True, well, they’re feared – and punished accordingly.

L: Power and ferocity just begin to come through an authority, but that’s

a woman’s route into that zone and I don’t remember it in any sort of

completely achieved form, in either man or woman.

C: Well, feminism may be another such route for some women.

L: What’s your take on the Bacchae from Euripides? It’s not one of the

things you’ve looked at. It’s just one of the things I’ve wondered about

… what to make of that play. Because it’s the first European expression

of any dramatic form in the theme of what we would really call madness.

Both, the man being driven mad by the God, who puts down women’s

rights (the king) – his mother, and the other women have gone off into

the hills – and the God, Dionysus, defined as the son of the woman that

Hera, has been jealous of, she’s blasted her. He was born out of the

lightening that destroyed her womb. There’s a tremendous scene; he

wants to see what these women are up to – you’ve got to dress up like a

woman yourself, so he turns himself into drag. He goes out – Dionysus

drives all the women mad; he’s taken to be a stag; his mother cuts his

head off and comes back on stage with the head of her son, and shows it

to her husband. I mean, it is an amazing scene. And the king says: ‘Well,

that isn’t a stag, that’s your son’s head’, and then she sees it, and so on.

C: The worship and slaying of horned male gods as divine sacrifices or

victims, by women, is a theme of many early religions; Diana-worship.

Just as female virgins, or witches, were slain and often canonized by

later male religions. Sometimes, I like to think of Dionysus as a girl

child to begin with, because I think her fate describes how mothers

police and crush the spirits, the ‘heads’ of their girl children. But

Dionysus means many things: to be pregnant; to be one, and then

suddenly to be two – to be split apart – is a very ‘maddening’ experience

and that is partly what Dionysus is about. I think there is a female need

for clarity, only achievable through murder or retaliation, in order to

become one again. The myth talks about that. But I think that seeing

modern women, even madwomen, as being like the Bacchae, is wrong.

Mother-goddesses were experienced as both the givers of life and the

bringers of death – they had at least two awesome faces. In male-dominated times, the ‘Good Mother’ aspect exists no longer. Medusa, an Amazon Queen, who had been raped and abused for acting

independently, her head bristling marvelously with power and knowledge

– with snake-locks – would not be killed. When Perseus does finally

manage to decapitate Medusa, her death should be seen as a tragedy, as

the death of a culture, not as the slaying of a hideous monster. Similarly,

Orestes kills his mother to avenge her slaying of his father, Agamemnon.

L: Orestes is driven mad. In the Bacchae, Dionysus is taking revenge on

both men for slighting him and his name, and women on behalf of his

mother, Semele, because his mother was slighted by the human queen

and the other women didn’t give her the honor that was due to her –

that’s the moon, Semele.

C: One of the many faces of Diana … what I wanted to say before was

that Aphrodite worship – now known as the ‘sexual revolution’ – is a

real ‘con job’ on women. Men want to have civilization and its

discontents, but they also want to return to supposedly more heretical,

‘bestial’ stages of historic development and psychological behavior, and

they do it at women’s expense. Women are pretty removed from the

mythological models in which women do ‘pick off’ men for grand

reasons, so that it wouldn’t occur to most women in a state of madness

to feel the strength coming up from a female source. So even a modern

Bacchante, or a modern Amazon, in a state of madness is still more

Athena than Diana; is still more Athena, than Clytemnestra. Women

don’t even have social roles yet. We still have only biological roles.

Women, who are angry enough not to care, and to let their hair down,

and to be found directing traffic, you know, in Times Square – when I

hear them speak – I know they could be talking to me about matriarchies

long gone, and about Amazon states long gone. But they’d turn against

me first, rather than against a male psychiatrist on the ward. The hatred

of women by women is so deep, it’s one of the key levers for how men

can keep things as they are. ‘Mad’ people don’t abandon all of their

social roles, their sex roles, their scars, their identification with the

‘oppressor’, any more than poor or persecuted people do. Male ex-mental

patients, just like male ‘radicals’ in America, or male drug addicts

on the road to rehabilitation, are still mesmerized, controlled by the

image of what it means to be a ‘man’. Only the very privileged can afford

to flout conventions and still be safe.

L: They have typed themselves into providing themselves with other social

roles, like calling themselves ‘mental patients’, ‘liberation’ and so on. I met a few people like that, but they come on as, ‘We have been in a

mental institution ten times, and we’ve been diagnosed as schizophrenic,

and we’ve had electric shocks, and tranquilizers, and brutalization, etc.’

It’s both something to use – all right – it’s not something to put under

the carpet, but it’s all they can talk about. I suppose if I’d been put

through that kind of grill, there might be nothing else. I’d want to talk

about [it] for years and years and years, and get other people to see it,

to realize it.

C: Yes. We also remember pain much better than pleasure, and if it’s

traumatic pain, then even more so. In this crazy historical moment, in

which oppression is even glorified, romanticized, you get various

liberation movements waving their wounds, not trying, or not yet able

to heal them, but somehow stuck showing the extent of the wounding.

It means that they – we – have really been deeply wounded by families,

by schools, by churches, by hospitals, by governments, by men, and may

never recover in this life at all. And there’s nothing I can do except, as

we spoke about in the very beginning, try to get out of the way when I

think my skin is about to get burned. There’s nothing I can do. And

some things are too late, and too long gone, to change and then you

have to deal with the strongest elements, and not with the weakest.

‘Absolute powerlessness corrupts absolutely!’

L: Very few people manage to come through extremes of pain and

suffering so that they are any the better for it.

C: And then what relationship can the so-called ‘stronger’ have to the

so-called ‘weaker’? That’s not exploitative! That’s reciprocal,

complementary, and cooperative!

L: Well, if the so-called ‘strong’ is simply the strength that society endows

certain social positions with, both of us have got different sorts of social

strength, none of which really comes from ourselves. You might feel in

a more vulnerable social position than me. In fact, you might be, but …

imagine that things might turn, so that quite rapidly, in the next few

years, you’re in a very strong position. Socially endowed with kudos,

reputation: all these things are very transitory; and sufficient money to

be able to take a train or plane or transport oneself physically from one

dangerous location to a safe location. That’s very important. It would

really frighten me a lot if I were pinned down in one place and was

involved in saying things that I thought were true. I would feel endangered, if I didn’t feel I could get away from that situation, if things

got too hot.

C: Right.

L: So, what one can do – as far as I can see – if not state truth always, and

without any dilution, since the system can’t stand too much truth, I mean

too much truth would blow the system completely. The coefficient of

truth in the system we’ve got, at all levels, has got to be very low. I feel

that communication that communicates truth, and not lies, is a lot of

nonsense. It’s very largely a system of lies, or hypocrisy, or deceptions,

or camouflages, or what not, etc. The disguise of the state of affairs,

from beginning to end, from kinesics to para-linguistics, to what people

say they do, to what people do: there is an unbridgeable gulf, I mean an

abyss, between what people say, and what people do, in every respect

almost. Sometimes, when I see that sort of thing, it really scares me,

because there is no sort of way of …

C: Getting it together.

L: All one can do, if one is doing anything at all, is to point out the state

of affairs to those people in it, who are perhaps the floating vote …

there are a few people who see it without freaking … and they can see

[that] the vast majority of people don’t see at all, and, in between, there

are some people, whose minds have waivered and are frightened to cross

over, to say, realizing that the positions in social space, and the people

occupying those positions in the social system itself, isn’t a benign and

secure and self-preservative one, but is destroying them. At this point,

people get very frightened: very frightened at seeing that, because there

is no one around who will validate that perception, and even if they dip

into the public library or something and try and find any validation,

coming across the TV screen, coming across newspapers, coming across

… It was a great consolation to me, when I was 14 or 15 or 16 years old,

to read things, because there was no one at all that I met for years, who

expressed anything like the views I read.

C: Getting it ‘all together’ can sometimes be very dangerous.

L: Oh yes, if your mind is evil. Very dangerous, if your mind is evil, and

you put your body into that: then you act out evil. I suppose all I’m

saying is that one can … Hypocrisy, who said, ‘Hypocrisy is the

compliment that vice pays to virtue’? Sometimes it’s a good thing that people can be hypocritical – at least they don’t do what they think – it

depends which way around.

C: I was thinking of your being frightened about people saying one thing

and doing another. When women in this country begin to analyze their

own marriages, or love lives, and relationships to men, on the job, or in

the home, and begin to see the face of a cold robot-murderer, or eternally

blind and dependent child, in their bed, whom they ‘love’, things are

frightening. Because, then, how can they lay down with an enemy? With

a stranger? What does it mean, if the bed and the family are

battlegrounds? And some women experience a special type of isolation

and stress because of what they recognize. If they’re lucky, they get some

support from other women who see it too. … It is very frightening when

you’re used to experiencing what you thought was understanding and

love from a male person, a male body, and then beginning to experience

that male body as a threat: a maker of war, as hater of woman, a torturer

of people. Women themselves are the first to blame themselves; the first

to feel guilty and to question what they do; their own validity and

credibility. They say, ‘I’m getting too emotional, I’m getting paranoid.

It can’t be as bad as I think. I am probably overreacting. I’m being

foolish’, and so many retreat in the same way that many black people in

this country retreat – because acting on the truth seems to invite death.

L: There’s a unique sort of consolation or refuge at the same time to be

found in the truth, once one makes friends with it.

C: Yes. It is certainly a more steadfast companion than arbitrary, not

usually freely chosen, social realities. But to be wedded to the truth in

this society usually means social martyrdom, and I think we have to get

rid of martyrdom.

L: Yes. As I said to some people, like Erasmus.6 There have been some

people who haven’t been martyrs, who have been wedded to the truth,

and for that they are put out by society.

C: Yeah. Once I was talking to a psychiatrist, which is usually a waste of

time, about slave labor in state asylums. And hooting and jeering,

whispering to each other, they said, ‘It’s not true. It doesn’t exist.’ They

have never seen it and they are not aware where I got my story from, but

I’d better check out my references. And then, after this particular

meeting, the wife of one of the psychiatrists came up to me, whispering,

‘I want to talk to you.’ And what she said was, ‘Yes, they did have servants when he was doing his residency at a certain state hospital in New York.

They weren’t paid and that they did come from the asylum.’ So I said to

her, ‘Why didn’t you say that out loud when everyone was jeering at me

and saying that I was lying?’ She said, ‘Well, those are my husband’s

colleagues, and that’s my husband. This is my job – being his wife, so I

couldn’t speak up.’ From her point of view, she was perfectly correct. I

couldn’t protect her. I haven’t got spells, cures, magic, or Caesar’s coin

to protect myself.

The edited transcript of the recording stops here.