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R. D. Laing & A. Esterson
SANITY, MADNESS AND THE FAMILY
(Normálnost, šílenství a rodina) |
THE FAMILY SITUATION
Mr and Mrs Abbott appear guiet, ordinary people. When Maya (their daughter)
was eighteen Mrs Abbott was described by a psychiatric social worker
as 'a most agreeable woman, who appeared to be friendly and easy to live
with'. Mr Abbott had 'a guiet manner but a kindly one'. He seemed 'a
very sensible man, but less practical than his wife'. There did not appear
to be much that he would not do for his family. He had excellent health,
and impressed the interviewer as 'a very stable personality'.
Maya was born when her mother was twenty and her father thirty.
When his daughter was born, Mr Abbott had been reading of an excavation
of Mayan tomb. 'Just the name for my little girl', he thought.
Mother and father agreed that until sent away from home at eight Maya
had been her daddy's girl. She would wake him early in the morning and
they would go swimming. She was always hand-in-hand with him. They sat
close together at table, and he the one to say prayers with her last
thing at night. They frequently went for long walks together.
Apart from brief visits home, Maya lived away from her parents from eight
until the age of fourteen. When she came home then to live permanently
with them, they complained she was changed. She was no longer their little
girl. She wanted to study. She did not want to go swimming, or to go
for long walks with her father any more. She no longer wanted to pray
with him. She wanted to read the Bible herself, by herself. She objected
to her father expressing his affection for her by sitting close to her
at meals. She wanted to sit further away from him. Nor she did wanted
to go to the cinema with her mother. In the house, she wanted to handle
things and to do things for herself, such as (mother's example) washing
a mirror without first telling her mother.
These changes in Maya, mentioned by her parents retrospectively as the
first signs of illness, seem to us to be ordinary expressions of growing
up. What is of interest is the discrepancy between her parents' judgement
of these developements and ours.
Maya conceived as her main dificulty, indeed her main task in life, the
achievement of autonomy.
You should be
able to think for yourself, work things out for yourself. I can't. People
can take things in but I can't. I forget half the time. Even what I remember
isn't true memory. You should be able to work things out for yourself.
Her parents appear to have consistently regarded with alarm all expresions
of developing autonomy on Maya's part necessarily involving efforts to
separate herself from them and to do things on her own initiative. Her
parents' alarm remains unabated in the present. For example, her mother
objected to her ironing without supervision, although for the past year
she had been working in a laundry without mishap. Mr and Mrs Abbott regarded
their daughter's use of her own 'mind' independently of them, as synonymous
with 'illness', and as a rejection of them. Her mother said:
I think I'm so absolutely centred on the one thing
- it's well, to get her well - I mean as a child, and as a - teenager
I could always sort out whatever was wrong or - do something about it,
but it - but this illness has been so completely em - our relations have
been different - you see Maya is er - instead of accepting everything
- as if I said to her, er, 'Balck is black', she would have probably
believed it, but since she's ill, she's never accepted anything any more.
She's had to reason it out for herself, and if she couldn't reason it
out for herself, then she didn't seem to take my word for it - which
of course is quite different to me. |
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