when the man recovers, the community prevents him from getting back on his feet, lest they suddenly have to take seriously everything he says.
By the late 1960s, the anti-psychiatry movement was no longer concerned just about the treatment of the mentally ill, or even about creativity or art—it was about politics, justice, and social change. In his 1967 book, The Politics of Experience, Laing argued that the insane people were sane all along—and that to call someone schizophrenic was, in essence, an oppressive act. “If the human race survives, future men will, I suspect, look back on our enlightened epic as a veritable age of Darkness,” he wrote. “They will presumably be able to savor the irony of the situation with more amusement than we can extract from it. The laugh’s on us. They will see what we call ‘schizophrenia’ was one of the forms in which, often through quite ordinary people, the light began to break through the cracks in our all-too-closed minds.”
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MICHAEL DECIDED THAT the only thing wrong with him was the repressive way he had been raised. “There was some kind of suppression,” he would say. Michael believed conformity had corrosive power. He blamed practically all of his brothers’ troubles on that. But even he had no idea how to help them. To him, they seemed trapped in prisons of their own making, and no one, not even he, had the keys to the locks.
In 1972, the authors Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, in their Marx-meets-Freud mashup, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, called the family structure a metaphor for authoritarian society. Both the family and society, they wrote, kept their members under control, repressed their desires, and decided they were insane if they worked against the organizing principles of the larger group.
Schizophrenia had become a metaphor now. The theoreticians had left the idea of illness behind entirely, fixating completely on revolution. Families like the Galvins, meanwhile, were also left behind—collateral damage in a culture war—waiting for someone who actually knew how to help.
CHAPTER 14
1967
Dorado Beach, Puerto Rico
At a tropical hotel, under a blazing late-June sun, David Rosenthal—the researcher from the National Institute of Mental Health who had studied the Genain quadruplets and concluded that heredity and the environment must be working together—joined some of the most prominent thinkers in psychiatry at an academic summit about the continuing debate over nature and nurture and schizophrenia. Nothing like this had happened before, but a meeting seemed necessary now.
By the 1960s, the Thorazine revolution had raised the stakes in the debate. To those favoring genetics, or nature, the impact of neuroleptic drugs proved, at the very least, that schizophrenia was a biological process. But for the therapists on the nurture side, Thorazine and the like were just symptom suppressors—glorified tranquilizers—and there could be no substitute for probing the unconscious impulses that must have caused the disease. This conference, then, was a cautious attempt to break the impasse. While Rosenthal, as NIMH’s chief researcher of schizophrenia, was one of the event’s organizers, the psychotherapy camp was well represented, too—by, among others, Theodore Lidz, the Yale psychiatrist and pioneer in the study of family dynamics. The conference title, “The Transmission of Schizophrenia,” was diplomatically worded; transmission was thought not to tip the scales in favor of one side or the other, the biologists or the talk therapists. Even the setting—Dorado Beach, Puerto Rico—seemed meant to ease tension and, just maybe, help build a lasting peace.
In the three years since he had published his book on the Genain family, Rosenthal had been approaching the nature-nurture question from a different angle. Toward the end of his work with the quadruplets, he had begun to see all too clearly the limitations of studying siblings who grew up in the same environment. Instead, he started to wonder what would happen to a child with a family history of schizophrenia if you raised that child away from her family environment. Who, in other words, would be more likely to develop schizophrenia: a genetically vulnerable child who grew up among her blood relatives, or a similar child who had been adopted and raised by people who did not share her genes? Now, in Dorado Beach, he was ready to announce the first of his findings. Here, it seemed to