Mary Barnes, thanks to her.....

I didn't write the following words...talking about this book so strong, so deep,would be too difficult for many reasons...so I borrowed Tony O'Brien's voice... Two accounts of a journey through madness Mary Barnes' autobiography is one of the frankest and most literal accounts of madness you are likely to read. From her description of her early family life to the sometimes tediously detailed description of her day to day experience of regression into psychosis, Barnes spares herself and the reader little. Interspersed with sections by her therapist, Joseph Berkes, and with new epilogues added since the publication of the 1971 edition, the book spans the entire period of Barnes' life until her death in 2001. Barnes' story is not simply an autobiography, but a first-person account (two if you include Berkes') of a tumultuous time in British psychiatry. The asylum era had faltered under the weight of internal critique, public distrust, and the seemingly limitless capacity of society to consign the mentally ill to institutions. New theories of mental illness, especially schizophrenia, were emerging. In particular, psychoanalytically oriented theorists were looking at the role of the family in schizophrenia. Thus Barnes' personal life history followed a path toward, and then away from the mainstream of British psychiatry. Barnes begins with the ironic comment: 'My family was abnormally nice'. From there she recalls a childhood under the austere gaze of her mother, and her struggle to live with the conflicts carried into her adult life. She recounts early experiences of her reaction to her mother's pregnancies, and her sense of rejection, displacement and rage. Trained as a nurse, and for a time employed teaching nursing, Barnes' life does not show the trajectory of adolescent role failure often considered to characterize schizophrenia. Her conversion to Catholicism showed a concern with questions of meaning that were later to assume almost mystical proportions. According to her account Barnes achieved considerable success professionally, but remained troubled by self doubt and at times delusional ideas about herself, her family, and her effects on the world around her. These led to hospital admissions and intervention with the standard treatments of the time, ECT and chlorpromazine. When she met R.D Laing her life changed, and it is here that the biography takes on and additional social and historical interest. In 1965 Barnes entered Kingsley Hall, a therapeutic community set up by antipsychiatrists Laing and Esterson. The mood was radical; the techniques primitive and untried. Laing considered psychosis to be a healing experience which, fully experienced would bring about its own resolution. Laing was the enfant terrible of British psychiatry in the 1960s. His somewhat precocious The Divided Self set out what he saw as the basis for an alternative scientific account of schizophrenia, that of schizophrenia as an indicator of pathological family interaction. Kingsley Hall was the crucible in which Laing's ideas would be tested. Barnes would become one of Laing's ambassadors; a voyager into the depths of psychosis, who would emerge to explain its mysteries to those who would listen. A lot of people listened. Kingsley Hall, during the time of Mary Barnes residency, became a magnet for radical thinkers in psychiatry. Visitors included Fritz Perls and Loren Mosher. As mainstream resistance to Laing's ideas became more entrenched, his critique took on an explicit political dimension through his identification with concerns of emancipation and liberation, rather than merely the alleviation of distress. According to Berkes' account, doctors working at Kingsley Hall were exhorted to drop their medical persona, and instead engage with their clients as one human being to another. There seems to be little that is problematic about such an attitude. Many doctors of the day, especially those who were psychoanalytically trained, would probably have agreed that the relationship between doctor and patient is the prime ingredient of psychiatric care. Michael Balint's 1957 The Doctor, his Patient and the Illness certainly took such ideas seriously in applying them to general medicine. However it is not entirely clear that Laing and others were prepared to abandon the status arising from their background as doctors. Their role as therapists appears in large part derived from their medical authority, augmented by a considerable dose of personal charisma. At one point in Berkes' therapy with Mary Barnes, Berkes lashed out in frustration at Barnes' childish demands, bloodying her nose. What is notable about his response is his consternation at finding himself thinking in terms of the ethical framework of medicine. He is later relieved that Barnes thanked him for the assault and said “she loved me more than ever”. As she emerged from the cocoon of psychosis Barnes' discovered a talent for art......