Martin Levy reflects on the Congress on the Dialectics of Liberation held in London in 1967 and the involvement of prominent anti-psychiatrist David Cooper.
Almost every account of the British anti-psychiatry movement follows a similar pattern: there was the charismatic psychiatrist and Scotsman R.D. Laing, then there was his colleague, David Cooper. But what if we put David Cooper first? What if we decide that he, not Laing, was the leading figure in the 1960s and 1970s British anti-psychiatry movement? Such a reversal might appear controversial. But, after all, Cooper did give the movement its name (whilst Laing famously objected to the label ‘anti-psychiatry’).
Over the following paragraphs I trace Cooper’s contribution to the anti-psychiatry movement’s key organisational triumph: the two-week-long Congress on the Dialectics of Liberation (for the Demystification of Violence) in London in 1967. I subsequently give a brief assessment of the impact of the Congress on his thinking and activism.
Cooper himself
David Cooper was born in Cape Town on the 2nd of February 1931 and educated at Rondebosch Boys’ High School and the University of Cape Town. His father was a wealthy chemist, his mother a homemaker.[1] According to Laing, who came to know Cooper after he moved to London to work as a house officer[2] at St. John’s Hospital in Lewisham, he was a member of the South African Communist Party who had ‘trained’ in China, Russia, and Poland. It was this experience, Laing adds, which brought Cooper to London in 1955: ‘He was frightened that he was a marked man and would be killed… so he didn’t go back [to South Africa]’ (Mullan, 1995, 195). In London, Cooper rose swiftly up the ranks of the psychiatric profession, moving from house officer to senior registrar at Shenley Hospital, all in the space of just five years. However, he never made psychiatric consultant- probably because of his close involvement with Shenley’s contentious Villa 21, an experiment in the care of seriously disturbed young men, known as an ‘anti-hospital’ (Wall, 2013; Chapman, 2016).
In 1966, Cooper left the British National Health Service (NHS), focusing his attention instead on his private psychiatric practice. He wrote several publications during this period, including ‘Two Types of Rationality’ (New Left Review, 1965), which was on the scientific method, ‘Men, Animals and Men’ (Resurgence, 1967), on factory farming, Psychiatry and Anti-Psychiatry (1967), and an introduction to the English abridgement of Michel Foucault’s Folie et Déraison (1967).
Congress on the Dialectics of Liberation (for the Demystification of Violence), London 1967
From Peter Davis’ Anatomy of Violence: www.villonfilms.ca
While the administrative work for the Congress was mostly carried out by two American psychiatrists, Joe Berke and Leon Redler, it was Cooper and Laing who provided its intellectual programme. Both men were profoundly influenced by the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, whose La Critique de la Raison Dialectique (1960) provided the Congress with its key terms: ‘dialectics’, ‘mystification’, and ‘violence’. The latter, Laing believed, was baked into practically all human relationships, in as much as one person’s freedom usually came at the expense of another’s (Laing, 1967).
To address the Congress, the four psychiatrists invited over thirty leading intellectuals from across the arts and human sciences. Those that agreed to turn up included the sociologist Herbert Marcuse, the anarchist and writer Paul Goodman, the systems theorist Gregory Bateson, the historian and journalist John Gerassi, the poet Allen Ginsberg and the Black Power advocate Stokely Carmichael.
Initially Laing, Cooper, Berke, and Redler hoped to stage the event at the Royal Albert Hall but, during the closing weeks of 1966, they settled on the Roundhouse in London’s Chalk Farm Road as the central venue. Not only was the Roundhouse cheaper than the Royal Albert Hall, but in its then decrepit state, without a proper ceiling or walls, it emphasised that the Congress was to be no ordinary academic conference. Instead, it was, as Cooper and the other organisers hoped, to be a conscious ‘destructuring’ of contemporary higher education (Levy, 2024).
The Congress opened to the public during the afternoon of Saturday July the 15th 1967 with lectures by Cooper and Laing, followed in the evening by a meeting for the two hundred or so ‘registrants’- i.e., the mostly young people who had signed up for the full two weeks of the Congress. Most of the attendees, if not the majority, were students, several of them originally from the United States. Others arrived from Canada, Italy, Germany, Scandinavia, and France. There was also a sprinkling of people from India, the West Indies, and countries in Africa, some of them also students, others long-term British residents with ties to Anti-Apartheid and other anti-racist movements.
Cooper used his first speech to say something about the ideas which had inspired the Congress in the first place. The organisers were concerned, he said, with the ‘form of consciousness’ which society ‘stigmatised’ as madness (Levy, 2024). Real madness, he went on, wasn’t in ‘them’ – i.e. the ‘patients’- it was in ‘us’, or rather in society’s institutions and in the ostensibly powerful people who ran them.
Similar ‘mystifications’ (the blurring or ‘masking’ of social reality) existed in other disciplines, he added. Teachers were gulling their pupils, politicians the electorate. What was needed was an international network that would challenge these mystifications by turning every hospital, school, theatre, and concert hall into a centre for revolutionary consciousness. It was time to demystify the mystifications (Levy, 2024).
Cooper’s opening speech was followed by Laing’s. Over the succeeding two weeks, Bateson, Carmichael, Goodman and Marcuse and the other major speakers offered their own widely disparate reflections. But talks weren’t the only feature of the Congress. Consistent with the organisers’ desire for a free flowing ‘anti-structure’, there were seminars, music, and poetry readings, plus a ‘happening’ (a spontaneous art event drawing on philosophy, theatre, and psychology) by the American performance artist Carolee Schneemann. And these were punctuated by other group events, not only in the Roundhouse itself but also in neighbouring parks, pubs, and cafes.
Cooper delivered his second major speech on Monday, the 24th. Unlike the first, this one wasn’t planned. Instead, it was a hastily put together contribution to a day-long session on ‘Psychiatry, Anti-Psychiatry and other Matters’.
He began by defining the field of phenomenology, illustrating it provocatively with a reference to one of his own mental imaginings: a delusion that following his recent purchase of a mastiff (a breed of dog), he had grown a tail and developed a muzzle. Not that this delusion worried him, he added. In fact, he often turned into other things, and just as often turned out of them.
Cooper then gave a moving account of a young woman he had encountered whilst working on the hospital wards. This woman had the delusion that she was turning into a plant. His fellow psychiatrists labelled her as ‘mad’ and treated her with drugs and electrical shock treatment, thus destroying the sort of growth that, he thought, might have been the natural outcome of such a transformation.
He ended with an impromptu translation of part of a letter from his ‘patron saint’, the French artist and intellectual Antonin Artaud. The letter contained what could almost be described as anti-psychiatry’s foundational principles:
‘We protest against any interference with the freedom [and] development of madness or delirium. It is just as legitimate, just as logical as any other sequence of human ideas and acts. Madmen are above all else the individual victims of social dictatorship‘ (Levy, 2024).
Cooper’s final speech, on the concluding day of the Congress, identified some of the ‘dialectics’ that had played out during the previous two weeks, including those between theory and activism, between the individual and society, and between ‘compulsive speaking’ and silence. He reflected on the demystifying role of ‘white intellectuals’, such as himself, and upon the impact of the Black Power activist Stokely Carmicheal, whose appearances at the Congress proved so inflammatory that, even before the Congress had ended, he was banned by the Labour Home Secretary Roy Jenkins from re-entering the country. (Levy, 2024)
Cooper spoke of the way individuals collaborated in their own powerlessness by splitting parts of themselves off and projecting them onto others. He talked again of the ‘true’ nature of madness.
He ended with a reference to Herbert Marcuse’s speech of the previous morning when the veteran Marxist had referred to the French Communards shooting at the clocks on public buildings to arrest the ‘established time continuum’ (Marcuse, 1968). Looking out from the platform, Cooper said that he could see a ‘vista of broken clocks. And now I think it is our time!’ (Cooper 1968, 202).
Concluding remarks
So, what can we say about the impact of the Congress on Cooper? The central point to make is that as co-organiser and host, he embodied in himself the very dialectics that he initiated. In other words, the radicaliser was radicalised. Not only did the Congress bring Cooper into close association with prominent intellectuals from across the globe, thereby raising his profile both as a ‘radical’ thinker and activist, but in the short term, it led to an invitation to go to revolutionary Cuba where, again in the company of Stokely Carmichael, John Gerassi and other intellectuals, he addressed the Organización Latinoamericana de Solidaridad (OLAS).
The Congress also led to Cooper’s involvement in the anti-psychiatrists’ next major undertaking, an ‘anti-university’ in the East End of London (Levy, 2024). The Congress thus set Cooper on a new path- whether it was a wise or personally productive one is probably best left as the subject of another article entirely.
[1] Most of these and the following biographical details are from Cooper’s application for a Research Fund Fellowship (August 1963) in the Laing Collection (GC144/2), University of Glasgow Archive.
[2] House officer used to be the lowest rank in the medical hierarchy in the NHS for newly-minted doctors. It is now known as Foundation Y1
About the Author
Martin Levy is a librarian at the University of Bradford and an occasional writer on various subjects including anti-psychiatry and the free universities movement of the 1960s. In 2021 he published a book of interviews with the peace campaigner Michael Randle. His latest book is listed below.
References
Chapman, Adrian. 2016. ‘Re-Coopering Anti-Psychiatry: David Cooper, Revolutionary Critic of Psychiatry’. Critical and Radical Social Work 4 (3): 421-432.
Cooper, David. 1967. Psychiatry and Anti-Psychiatry. London: Tavistock.
Cooper, David. 1968. ‘Beyond Words.’ In The Dialectics of Liberation, edited by David Cooper, 193-202. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Laing, R.D. 1967. The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Levy, Martin. 2024. Roundhouse: Joe Berke and the 1967 Congress on the Dialectics of Liberation. Stuttgart: Ibidem.
Marcuse, Herbert. 1968. ‘Liberation from the Affluent Society.’ In The Dialectics of Liberation, edited by David Cooper, 175-192. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Mullan, Bob. 1995. Mad to be Normal: Conversations with R.D. Laing. London: Free Association.
Wall, Oisin. 2013. ‘The Birth and Death of Villa 21.’ History of Psychiatry 24 (3) 326-340.
