[gruseom]

I'm curious. What do you dislike about Adam Curtis' work?

He has a considerable gift for digging up and presenting historical material. For example, the stuff about Bernays and Freud at the beginning of Century of the Self is riveting. But some of the narratives into which he frames that material seem questionable.

The one time I knew something independently about what he was presenting, I was surprised at how distorted it was. That was in his documentary about the Rand Corporation and game theory, when he included the radical Scottish psychiatrist R.D. Laing as an example of psychologists who worked to expand state control. To anyone who knows anything about Laing—a fascinating figure in his own right—that doesn't pass the laugh test.

[saljam]

> But some of the narratives into which he frames that material seem questionable.

Mostly this. I think it's because he's essentially making entertainment out of history, which is pretty much impossible to do without missing part of the picture. Otherwise it would be too boring (like real history).

[RodericDay]

Can you explain why it "doesn't pass the laugh test"?

[gruseom]

Laing was an anti-institutionalist who became famous for challenging the inhumane practices of psychiatry (his profession) and helping to set up safe houses where people having psychotic episodes could undergo them with emotional support from others without the intervention of medical or social authority. He became associated with a model of psychotic experience as a kind of inner process that some people go through. He was a charismatic guy and became a star of the 1960s counterculture, a bit like a Timothy Leary or Allen Ginsburg--an older mentor and kindred spirit to the hippies. He was also involved in the radical liberation politics of the time.

Laing's work was about giving support to non-conformist experience and building a conceptual model in which it could exist on its own terms, speak in its own voice and so on, instead of immediately being reduced to mental illness, a brain disorder, delinquency, or what have you. This was a popular view in the late 1960s. The idea that at the same time he would have been consulting for the Rand Corporation on how to apply psychological principles to reinforce a docile consumerist society doesn't pass the laugh test. It would have been far out of character for him.

If I recall correctly, Curtis brought up Laing in the context of game theory and how it was being (mis-)applied psychologically. There had been a massive bestseller called "Games People Play" in the mid 60s that applied some of these ideas to ordinary life. Many people became interested in the power dynamics of everyday relationships. This tied in to some of Laing's earlier work (especially about the power dynamics of family systems), so it was natural for him to use this language in his later work. My memory is that Curtis picked up on that and linked it to the mathematical game theorists of the Rand Corporation--and some of their more Strangelovian politics--in an entirely specious way. He simply juxtaposed them and said they were working on the same thing, with scary background music. No doubt it was very convincing, except to anyone who ever read Laing. He might as well have put J. Edgar Hoover together with the Beatles.

I hope it's clear that my point isn't about R.D. Laing. It's rather that I randomly happened to have read him and so could instantly see that Curtis wasn't just a little off there, he was totally full of shit. So I can't help but wonder where else he might be.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Games_People_Play_(book)

[RodericDay]

I think you're projecting a bit. You're talking about Curtis' The Trap. According to the wiki summary:

A separate strand in the documentary is the work of R.D. Laing, whose work in psychiatry led him to model familial interactions using game theory. His conclusion was that humans are inherently selfish, shrewd, and spontaneously generate stratagems during everyday interactions. Laing's theories became more developed when he concluded that some forms of mental illness were merely artificial labels, used by the state to suppress individual suffering. This belief became a staple tenet of counterculture during the 1960s. [1]

I don't remember Laing being particularly lambasted in the documentary as you do, and I don't recall Curtis simplifying things so much. If so, the above summary is being really charitable.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trap_%28television_document...

[gruseom]

That's possible, because I don't remember the details. But I distinctly remember the feeling that Curtis' portrayal of Laing was badly distorted, and I recall that a commenter who had known Laing personally said the same thing. If I have time later, I'll try to take another look.

[RodericDay]

If you go on YouTube and search for the doc (The Trap), and speed up to 36:50, they start on Laing.

Quote from the doc: He was about to use his growing power to attack one of the most powerful professions in America: The Medical and Psychiatric establishment. The result would be dramatic, but the outcome would be very different from what Laing intended. His ideas would undermine the old controlling medical elite, but far from liberating people, what would actually emerge would be a revolutionary new system of order and control, driven by the objective power of numbers.

He doesn't portray Laing as in cahoots with some evil plutocrats, although he does talk about the Rosenheim (sp?) experiment separately.