As promised this is the third post of my ruminations about the Becker conference.

[A sad aside: I took my time with this post because my trusty MacBook Pro that I bought in early 2011 decided life was not worth living anymore and pulled the plug on itself. So what to do? Buy another computer of course. Maybe later. What I did instead was pull the hard drive out of it and put it in its own stand-alone case. Now I can boot it from Carolyn’s computer just like it was my own aside from a few little glitches. It’s very slow though because it has to run through a USB port, We’ll fix that by increasing the ram in Carolyn’s computer and get it a new battery while we’re at it. Now Carolyn and I have to share a computer, sort of. I’m actually typing this on an old PowerBook G4 I had in my studio for pulling up photos for painting. It can’t handle a lot of new software including Chrome and Firefox, but it’s better than nothing and I can get my mail and do this. So that’s good. It won’t be good for the Cumberland Forest Society’s Trivia Night in a couple of weeks – I’m the quiz master and we need to drive a projector with new software. For that we’ll need my (ah..Carolyn’s) MacBook Pro with its new ram and battery. I actually amazed myself by how much I grieved over the loss of my computer. Thankfully, I was able to salvage it’s brain even if I had to let its heart go.]

I’ll restrict my comments here to the presentation by Andrew Feldmár. It was on Sunday morning, the last presentation of the conference. To be honest, I was a little hung over at the time but that was probably appropriate given the content of the  presentation. So Feldmár was a very popular professor in the psychology department at SFU for many years. He was there when I was first a student at SFU in 1972. I didn’t take any courses from him. I was kind of anti-psychology at the time. I’m much less so now. In fact, even at the time I read a lot of psychology and psycho-analytical writing. Still, it was generally reading on the critical side. I understand that psychology has its place in the world, but my perspective and that of a lot of my fellow grad students was that psychology’s focus on the individual was an ideological bow to the individualism characteristic of capitalism, the basic target of our collective criticism. Even more, we considered psychiatry, specifically, as an extension of the police in modern society, persecuting anyone not ‘towing the line’ of modern capitalist institutions. Feldmár shared our critique of psychiatry although I didn’t know that at the time.

In fact, Feldmár worked with one of the most famous critics of psychiatry, R.D. Laing, who worked in Britain and conducted a lot of experiments on the ontology of schizophrenia and other ‘mental illnesses’. Laing was a most impressive guy who virtually pissed off the entire body of psychiatry at the time. I’ve recently been re-reading his The Divided Self and continue to be impressed by his work. Of course, his ‘colleagues’ considered him a brash, arrogant rebel. All the more reason I would read his work. Laing as well as Thomas Szasz and others more recent like Peter Breggin argue that schizophrenia arises in certain individuals because of a confluence of genetic/biological predispositions and family dynamics. They argue that families and ‘society’ create schizophrenia and that it is not a disease per se, but is a dynamic set of relationships that become intolerable to the ‘patient’, In other words, families create schizophrenics, not an idea very popular with the families of schizophrenics. To be clear, Laing and Szasz did not feel that the families of schizophrenics were in any way malevolent, except in the sense that the people with the power in the family, generally the parents, would stand on very strict behavioural parameters for their children not allowing their children to develop their own sense of self and self-determination. Asking the parents of schizophrenics why they thought their children became ‘ill’, they determined that to a large extent, the parents felt that they had absolutely no responsibility for it arguing that they had provided their children with all the best life could offer them including love and acceptance.

In fact, the situation in the family, Laing finds, is highly complex, and is founded on a series of contradictory behaviours expected of the children by their parents. So how would Laing endeavour to ‘cure’ schizophrenia? Well, Laing used LSD very successfully to ‘shake up’ the patient in a way that allowed them to see their situation from a different perspective. A recent CBC Ideas program notes that using LSD in therapy resulted in a 50 to 90% success rate for certain ‘problems’ such as alcoholism and other mental illnesses. Andrew Feldmár, in his talk, discussed the use of psychedelic drugs in therapy and how successful it’s been in Laing’s experience and his own. Of course the ‘establishment’ opposition to the use of psychedelic drugs pretty much made the practice illegal and illegitimate although there’s been somewhat of a revival lately. Feldmár is a large part of this revival in his current work and hearing about it firsthand was amazing to say the least.

However, I don’t believe that Feldmár’s presentation lived up to its title, A Laingian/Psychedelic/Therapeutic Perspective on “The Denial of Death”. I don’t recall Feldmár talking a lot about Becker although Becker definitely leaned heavily on Laing and Szasz in the psychological aspects of his work. I would have appreciated a more direct outline of how Becker uses Laing and Szasz in his work. Becker never mentions psychedelics and therapy that I know of. I have to go back and look as some of his earlier works. I’ve focussed much more on Becker’s later works, The Denial of Death and Escape From Evil, for my own purposes. Like I said, I was a little hung over on Sunday morning, October 4th, when Feldmár made his presentation. If I’m misrepresenting him in any way here, I’d be happy to hear about it.

By the way, I’ve decided to write one more post on this topic. It’s not about the conference directly, but about an interaction I had with an old professor of mine and one of Becker’s colleagues at SFU. That will come next week.