Luke Fowler Cineforum: “Laing and the reception of anti-psychiatry in Spain”.”

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As part of the educational programming around the exhibition Luke Fowler: Common Sense, We propose three sessions of film forums, related to the theme of each of the three documentaries that form part of the exhibition.

The third and last one revolves around the documentary All Divided Selves (2011), an original essay on the Scottish psychiatrist R.D. Laing, whose radical rejection of the institutional treatment of schizophrenia placed him at the centre of the social revolution of the 1960s in the UK.

It is guided by the ppsychiatrist and essayist, Guillermo Rendueles. 

 “Laing and the reception of anti-psychiatry in Spain”.” 

Laing's early work did not shock the confused landscape of psychiatry because his studies continued a classical psychoanalytic line on the role of the family in the genesis of madness. The questionnaires comparing the construction of reality by the meta-perspectives of each person were surprising but did not seem to revolutionise existential phenomenology either. J.P. Sarte is the author who radicalised Laing. His concept of bad faith, of alignment, of dialectics of submission and liberation is what transforms our author into a revolutionary author who begins to conceive schizophrenia as a disqualifying label for subjects who try and fail in their struggle for autonomy from the family and social disalignment. The concretisation of the mediations of these processes of madness by the family endowed psychotherapy with a new practice that broke with the old Freudian left and demanded new means such as therapeutic communities where this badly wounded autonomy that we call mental illness could be cured. Spain was a country ill-disposed to take up Laing's work, both because of its theoretical poverty and because of the large number of asylums that existed. In this sense, F. Bassaglia was the anti-psychiatric author best received in our environment for his analysis of the total institutions, which to a certain extent caused the invisibility of Laing's work.