#peter sedgwick

[to-search-again]

Why is the image of the Asylum, with its multi-windowed blocks and the tall chimney of its furnace, so compelling? Not, as Goffman would have it, because it bespeaks an immutable social imperative, but because it symbolises an ancient, indefinitely renewed tradition of neglect whose liquidation, in the face of so many entrenched moral and material interests, will require a large and dedicated effort.

Peter Sedgewick, The Case of Erving Goffman, PsychoPolitics, p.55

[to-search-again]

The texts of his works are like the old Egyptian palimpsest, manuscripts with the first draft rubbed away and, while still partly visible, written over by another scribe - in this case Laing himself in a different ideological phase. ...he sharpens (or tones down) an ambiguous rendering, much as a poet will re-shape the meaning of a key line through altering one or two of its words. ...His strength, as well as his weakness, has come precisely from the wide span of his identities and from his capacity to entertain opposites as a prelude to marrying them off to each other.

Peter Sedgwick, R. D. Laing: The Radical Trip, PsychoPolitics, p.60/61

[to-search-again]

The expression 'double bind' refers to a specific pattern of disturbed communications, detectable within pathological families, in which one member is subjected to a pair of conflicting injunctions or 'binds,' both of them highly unsettling or traumatic; a third injunction, implicit in the situation, may prevent the threatened party from leaving the field and so avoiding the conflict. The unfortunate recipient of these messages is lost whatever s/he does, and if the ordeal is repeated tends to opt out of social interaction and to loose confidence in the accuracy of her/his perceptions of other people.

[to-search-again]

The categories we bring to bear in perceiving and judging the actions of a present other are not themselves drawn, in the first place, from our exposure to face-to-face situations; thus, the concept of 'illness,' or that of 'symptoms,' while applied and specified within particular encounters between relative and relative, or doctor and patient, does not derive its principle meaning or force from such contemporary goings-on, but from an entire history which includes the development of scientific rationality, the evolution of medical institutions, and the learning of complaints passed on by sufferer to listener over successive aeons. The interpersonal has, in short, a chronological or more exactly historical aspect which Goffman overlooks. Microsocial radicalism of the kind which influences much of Goffman's readership, if not Goffman himself, is often founded on this confusion between the interpersonal and the face-to-face, between the ensemble of human relations and the cult of 'relationships': a few immediate friends and/or lovers. 'Relationship begins at home' is the repeated refrain of these miniaturists of the feelings: and to these, as to Goffman, it is necessary to reply sternly: No, relationship ends at home, and not in any cynical sense. Home, or any other directly interpersonal setting, is the summing-up of myriad currents of thought, emotion and action which originate far beyond the videotape of the microsocial researcher or anecdotes of observed encounters. The face-to-face location is not 'Where The Action Is' ... rather its action keeps the score, registers the running total, of all the rest of human activity, including that taking place in other countries and other centuries. Limited to the visible setting, the micosocial portrait is bound to be a still picture, or an endlessly repeated short movie where ends are joined by its manufacturer; and the static and the cyclical visions of relationship are familiar in political theory as the basic philosophical framework for all forms of conservatism.

Peter Sedgwick, The Case of Goffman, PsychoPolitics, p.56/57

[to-search-again]

The secret behind social appearances - which usually amounts to a description of yet one more technique of saving either our own or someone else's 'face' - is a permanent structural feature of human interaction. Life after all consists of presenting and preserving face, in one or another setting, and since absolutely everybody is engaged in it, there can be no suggestion that we would take sides.

Peter Sedgwick, The Case of Erving Goffman, PsychoPolitics, p.51

[to-search-again]

There is a limit to the agony which most people can endure, and still maintain their 'place' or their 'face.'

Peter Sedgwick, PsychoPolitics

[revolutionaryeye]

Madness,Peter Sedgwick’s Psycho Politics and the SWP

Psycho Politics

by Ben Watson Have you ever gone mad? It’s not really a question you can ask a stranger. That is its power — and its attraction. When Pete Shaughnessy, Simon Barnet and Mark Roberts started Mad Pride in 1999, they did so because they wanted to stop New Labour’s imminent legislation concerning the mentally ill, which was a charter for the pharmaceutical industry: solve the mental-health “problem” by prescribing drugs. During the course of the year 2000, Mad Pride (with their knack for punk-style publicity) helped prevent the government’s amendments to the Mental Health Act[i] going through parliament. But Mad Pride weren’t just about mental health. They also resurrected something the organised Left had forgotten during the 80s: how “alienation” is not just Marxist jargon, it’s real, and it hurts. Keeping up a rational front to this crazy, unfair, competitive world keeps us apart and frustrates our species being, our animal instincts. We daren’t share our inner thoughts with others in case they think them unworthy or greedy or silly or sentimental or… mad.

Mad Pride was the first politics I encountered where those involved had nothing to hide. Mad Pride didn’t bring “politics” into mental health so much as demonstrate that our psychoses are not purely individual ailments, they’re a social issue, products of capitalist alienation and poverty. When Pete Shaughnessy founded “Reclaim Bedlam” (a forerunner to Mad Pride), he announced he was no longer ashamed of his bouts of mania and delusion, in fact he was going to celebrate them. Shaughnessy’s courage and humour and sheer bloody-mindedness shifted something. Permanently. “Radical subjectivity” was no longer just a phrase bandied around by post-grads writing PhDs on Guy Debord and the Situationists; it was something palpable, something which could motivate people and help them organise. It’s a cliché that the 90s was a touchy-feely decade, bringing a new subjectivism to bear in pop culture and journalism: Mad Pride gave touchy-feely a revolutionary edge, activist and critical.

But the left had thought about these issues before. In championing Marx and Freud simultaneously in 1924, the Surrealists denounced capitalist business-as-usual as psychic repression. Opposing the French Chauvinism which surrounded them, they also championed Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and his “dialectics”, German imports which they brandished in the face of patriots and fascists at home. But Surrealism never really crossed the Channel; André Breton’s intense dialectic between the intellectual juggernaut of Marxism and the experimental madness of Parisian poetry got lost in its English translation. Surrealism was a product of a Parisian avantgarde whose raison d’être was épater le bourgeois. In Britain, due to the Norman Conquest (1066) all French culture, however oriented, is deemed classy (just as in the United States, due to its ruling-class coming from English stock, Englishness — despite the Beatles (1964) and the Sex Pistols (1977) — is deemed posh). In France, it would have been inconceivable for critics or artists associated with Surrealism to accept knighthoods. They would have been expelled from the movement instantly. In Britain, we had two — Sir Herbert Read and Sir Roland Penrose!

Surrealism was received in Britain as a purely “artistic” current (new weird pictures to buy!) with no stance on official politics other than a vague anarchism which could be interpreted as an aristocrat’s eccentricity or a poet’s fondness for day-dreams. Not until the 60s counter-culture, when opposing the war in Vietnam seemed to involve self-exploration as much as street politics, did anyone associate social liberation with psychic emancipation again. Mad Pride emerged out of Punk, and made no reference to the 60s. However, its practical politics had been anticipated by Peter Sedgwick, who worked throughout the 60s as a psychologist before becoming a lecturer in politics at the University of York in 1968. A member of the International Socialists (fore-runners of the Socialist Workers Party), Sedgwick distilled 25 years’ worth of struggle into a book called Psycho Politics. It was published in 1982, by Harper & Row in the United States and by Pluto in Britain.

Psycho Politics was a critique of the gurus of the new psychiatry: R. D. Laing, Michel Foucault, Erving Goffman and Thomas Szasz. All four came under fire for not serving the best interests of working-class mental patients, i.e. those who cannot afford private treatment and must depend on the National Health Service (“users” in today’s terminology). Like Marx and Trotsky, Sedgwick had little time for “public opinion” or fashion, which he considered smokescreens for justifying social inequality and economic exploitation. Laing was a celebrity, a 60s face on the level of Marshall McLuhan or Timothy Leary. In criticising him, Sedgwick was out on his own, thinking on his feet, attempting to square the revolutionary Marxism he’d learned from Tony Cliff (founder of the International Socialists) with ideas so radical they appeared unprecedented. Perhaps the mad were sane and the sane mad? Perhaps the nuclear family was the root cause of schizophrenia? Sedgwick’s politics made him assess these apocalyptic claims with a much-needed sobriety..... Read on at:- http://www.eleusinianpress.co.uk/ben-watson-psycho-politics/