I started to try to see through the dense opacity of social events from the study of certain people who were labelled psychotic or neurotic, as seen in mental hospitals, psychiatric units and out-patient clinics. I began to see that I was involved in the study of situations and not simply of individuals. It seemed (and this still seems to be the case) that the study of such situations was arrested in three principal ways. In the first place the behaviour of such people was regarded as signs of a pathological process that was going on in them, and only secondarily of anything else. The whole subject was enclosed in a medical metaphor. In the second place this medical metaphor conditioned the conduct of all those who were enclosed by it, doctors and patients. Thirdly, through this metaphor the person who was the patient in the system, being isolated from the system, could no longer be seen as a person: as a corollary, it was also difficult for the doctor to behave as a person. A person does not exist without a social context. You cannot take a person out of his social context and still see him as a person, or act towards him as a person. If one does not act towards the other as a person, one depersonalizes oneself.
Someone is gibbering away on his knees, talking to someone who is not there. Yes, he is praying. If one does not accord him the social intelligibility of this behaviour, he can only be seen as mad. Out of social context, his behaviour can only be the outcome of an unintelligible “psychological” and/or “physical” process, for which he requires treatment. This metaphor sanctions a massive ignorance of the social context within which the person was interacting. It also renders any genuine reciprocity between the process of labelling (the practice of psychiatry) and of being labelled (the role of patient) as impossible to conceive as it is to observe. Someone whose mind is imprisoned in the metaphor cannot see it as a metaphor. It is just obvious. How, he will say, can diagnosing someone as ill who is obviously ill, make him ill? Or make him better, for that matter? Some of us began to realize that this aspect of the theory and practice of psychiatry was an essay in non-dialectical thinking and practice. However, once one had got oneself out of the straightjacket of this metaphor, it was possible to see the function of this anti-dialectical exercise. The unintelligibility of the experience and behaviour of the diagnosed person is created by the person diagnosing him, as well as by the person diagnosed. This stratagem seems to serve specific functions within the structure of the system in which it occurs.
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I was struck by a remark that Sir Julian Huxley made to me a few years ago. He said he thought the most dangerous link in the chain was obedience. That we have been trained, and we train our children, so that we and they are prepared to do practically anything if told to do it by a sufficient authority. It is always said, “it couldn’t happen here,” but it is always happening here.’
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We can put no trust in princes, popes, politicians, scholars, or scientists, our worst enemy or our best friend. With the greatest precautions, we may put trust in a source that is much deeper than our egos-if we can trust ourselves to have found it, or rather, to have been found by it. It is obvious that it is hidden, but what it is and where it is, is not obvious.