Cooper, David Graham

Born in Cape Town in 1931, where he received his medical education ^[5] : in 1955, Cooper graduated from the University of Cape Town . After that he moved to Paris, where he married, and then headed to London . In London, Cooper rented an apartment on Harley Street , where he opened a private practice ^[5] . In addition, in London, he worked in several hospitals ^[6] and led the experimental department for schizophrenic young people, which was called "Villa 21".

In 1958, Cooper met Ronald Laing ^[5] , and in 1964 their joint work Reason and Violence: A Decade of Sartre's Philosophy was published , representing a creative development of the views of J.- P. Sartre ^[5] . In Reason and Violence, Laing and Cooper write not just about Sartre, but in many ways precisely about the ideas of Sartre that could be used in psychiatry and in studies of social groups and interpersonal relationships ^[7] . In 1965, Cooper, along with Laing and other like-minded people, took part in the founding of the Philadelphia Association ; in the same year, Cooper participated ^[8] in the creation of the Kingsley Hall experimental therapeutic community organized by Laing ^[5] .

Cooper was also one of the organizers of the Dialectic of Liberation congress, held in London in the Roundhouse building, then the center of the British underground ^[7] , from July 15 to July 30, 1967 . Among the participants were left activists and counter-leaders from around the world; Ronald Laing, Gregory Bateson , Paul Sweezy , Paul Goodman , Lucien Goldman , Herbert Marcuse ^[7] , Allen Ginsberg and Stalkley Carmichael from the Black Panthers organization performed at it. The congress received a wide public outcry, a documentary educational film was made based on its materials, articles and reviews were published about the congress ^[7] .

In 1967, Cooper's first independent book, Psychiatry and Antipsychiatry, was published, where the term antipsychiatry was first used ^[9] .

In the 1970s , as a supporter of Marxism and existentialism , Cooper quit his job at the Philadelphia Association, expressing disagreement with the fact that it grew more interested in spiritualism than in politics .

Cooper believed that insanity and psychosis are the result of the influence of society and that the final solution is achieved through revolution . To this end, Cooper moved to Argentina in early 1972 ^[5] , which he considered the most suitable country with revolutionary potential. In October 1972, in a letter to Laing from Argentina, Cooper wrote of his life as “so saturated that it is impossible to describe in words, beautiful, breathtaking and above all dangerous ...” ^[5] .

In 1976, at the initiative of Foucault, David Cooper was invited to the College de France with a series of lectures. ^[ten]

Before finally moving to France ^[5] in the late 1970s, where Cooper spent the last years of his life, he returned to the UK. Living in France, Cooper worked on his latest book, The Language of Madness, and taught at Vincennes for some time. He died in 1986 from a sudden heart attack in his Paris apartment ^[5] .

Cooper's views evolved from the development of ideas formulated by him together with Laing to the creation of an independent theory; this is characterized by a gradual increase in radicalism, a departure from existentially oriented ideas and the strengthening of Marxist elements. During this evolution, the subject of research has changed. Cooper has authored four solo books: Psychiatry and Antipsychiatry, The Death of a Family, The Grammar of Life, The Language of Madness, and one co-authored with Laing (Reason and Violence: A Decade of Sartre's Work). According to Cooper himself, each of his books was related to what he left behind. As Stephen Tiktin explains , for “Psychiatry and Antipsychiatry” it was a Shanley hospital and psychiatry, for “The death of the family” - the Cooper family, for “The Grammar of Life” - England , for “The Language of Madness” - Argentina ^[5] .

Cooper coined the term “antipsychiatry” to emphasize the rejection of the methods of traditional psychiatry of his time and the need to counter them, although the term could equally indicate the opinion of antipsychiatrists about traditional psychiatry, that is, the treatment of mental disorders. According to Cooper, the term “antipsychiatry” allows emphasizing the contradiction between the positive orientation of clinical psychiatry and its essence in negative reality. This contradiction is rooted in deep social mechanisms: clinical psychiatry is only a small part of the large-scale system of violence of bourgeois society - a system aimed at cultivating conformism among its members - and with the help of the tradition of making a diagnosis, prognosis and, finally, treatment, it turns a person into a subordinate robot system ^[5] .

Radical Marxism and Cooper's revolutionary attitude

Marxism was the main source of inspiration for Cooper, although Cooper himself consistently denied the Marxist nature of his views; in addition to the combination of Marxism and existentialism typical of antipsychiatry, it is worth mentioning another direction that formed the basis of Cooper's views - French structuralism and poststructuralism . While other antipsychiatrists, especially British ones, are characterized by some isolation from contemporary post-structuralism, Cooper often uses in his works post-structuralist concepts of the death of the subject, the death of the author , the priority of language and power, and others ^[5] .

Like the work of other antipsychiatrists, Cooper's work has a pronounced critical connotation, but Cooper's criticism is also characterized by its own differences: while, for example, Sas is a polemicist, accuser, critic, Cooper is primarily a revolutionary, and his criticism is always an appeal , a call for unification, struggle and revolution. Cooper believed that he and his contemporaries were living in a pre-revolutionary situation and that the revolution should begin with the liberation of madness (the “madness revolution”) ^[5] - the destruction of psychiatric clinics, as well as with the “sexual revolution” (“love revolution”) - that is sexual emancipation, because, according to Cooper, “bed is perhaps the greatest unused secret weapon of the revolution” ^[11] .

Cooper argued that over the next two decades, psychiatric institutions will be completely discredited, but they will not be replaced by institutional forms of antipsychiatry: this is basically impossible, since antipsychiatry is revolutionary in nature. The revolution in psychiatry, as Cooper states, is only the first step, which should be followed by revolutions in all social institutions ^[5] and the destruction of the foundations of bourgeois society ^[11] .

According to Cooper, if the revolution of insanity is successfully carried out, bourgeois society will become less controlled and rigid or even completely uncontrollable; revolutionary changes will occur throughout the world, and the revolution of madness will paralyze the functioning of every family, every school, university, factory, and so on, putting mobile non-hierarchical structures in their place. The revolution should begin with transformations in revolutionary groups, and not only a social group has revolutionary potential, but also one person who, having changed, can also change relations in his nuclear family and other social groups. To destroy the system, everyone must actualize their own power, because the power of the system lies in the fact that they obey and attribute to it a force that it does not have ^[5] :

As Cooper notes, the regime’s power is largely based on the principle of “divide and conquer”: reformers and innovators in various social fields - in the fields of science, education, psychiatry, and art - are often not connected with other such figures in other areas. The loners are in the grip of the social bureaucratic system with which they cannot control, since for this they should unite ^[5] .

From this follows Cooper's conclusion that the revolution must include both collective struggle and individual work. In an afterword to the published materials of the Dialectic of Liberation conference, Cooper states the need to create revolutionary centers of consciousness that, in his opinion, could exist as anti-institutional, spontaneous groups of people functioning outside the formal bureaucratic structures of factories, schools, universities, hospitals, etc. etc. and acting without suppressing the personality, developing its autonomy ^[5] .

Political Grammar: Violence, Family, and Psychiatry

Like Laing, Cooper writes a lot about the mechanisms of group formation and the functioning of society, about the existential subtext of insanity, about experience and its status in society. He introduces the concept of “political grammar”, approximately analogous to the concept of “politics of experience” in Laing, and notes that the grammar of the deployment of power in the social space is manifested at several levels ^[5] :

1. The micro-political level of the internal space of a person is consciousness and body, which are included in the development of power. Deep personal concern involves our memories, dreams, conscious and unconscious expectations and fantasies, bodily manifestations and bodily organs in politics; according to Cooper, even a stomach ulcer can be regarded as a political act.
2. The micro-political level of the family: the bourgeois family is a mediator in the exercise of power by the political ruling class and, thanks to socialization, sets the role for the person to be adopted, which corresponds to the dominant system. The family creates a conflict between the active reality, experience and behavior of the person and the passive social role that he accepts, and it is thanks to the family that the ruling class begins to destroy the citizens it oppresses.
3. The micro-political level of confrontational groups - at this level there are groups that copy family experience and the role structure of the family: the police , the army, medical and educational institutions with which a person, like his family, has been dealing with since the first years of his life.
4. The macro-political level, which is the level of political entities as a system and political activity.

In the spirit of poststructuralism, Cooper argues that family deconstruction should be at the center of the transformation of society and culture: “It makes no sense to talk about the death of God or the death of Man, mimicking the serious intentions of some modern theologians and structural philosophers until we see with our own eyes the death of the family - that a system whose social function consists in discreetly filtering our experience and the subsequent deprivation of our actions of any genuine and full spontaneity. ” The family, according to Cooper, not only supports the power of the ruling class, but also is a prototype for all institutional structures of society: political parties and the government , schools and universities , factories and trade unions , the army and the church, hospitals. All these institutions have a “family” structure. The family model, Cooper believes, is universal for society, since the mediation function that any social institution must perform is universal ^[5] .

Supporting the power of the ruling class, state and society, the family must nevertheless provide itself with the support of its members, and for this purpose it deceives them. Therefore, family love is not selfless; for the security given to its members, they pay with a lie. Cooper seemed to tear off the mask of cordiality, love and warmth from the family, revealing behind her the emptiness, loneliness, loss of autonomy that are necessary to maintain the power of society. The so-called happy family is, in fact, according to Cooper, it turns out to be a tough institution, making miserable and killing its members. The family determines the roles of its members and the acceptable mode of behavior in it; the task of each new member of the family is to follow the role, and not develop their own identity. Performing the function of socialization , the family instills in its children social means of control; each child, according to Cooper, is an artist, musician and poet, but the family gradually destroys the creative principle in him ^[5] .

The family always has the antithesis of “parents are children,” “rulers are subservient,” and breaking family relationships is very difficult, because the coarsest taboo of the family, according to Cooper, is the prohibition of loneliness. The family does not allow its members to be alone: autonomy inflicts a mortal blow on the family system. The family destroys the ability to doubt in a person, and mental illness is a consequence of doubt, is a movement from nepotism to autonomy, essentially violates the family’s toughest taboo and is therefore subjected to intense repression ^[5] .

Madness for Cooper is akin to political dissent : “Madness (contrary to most interpretations of schizophrenia) is a movement from nepotism (including institutions organized according to the family model) to autonomy. This is the real “danger” of madness, as well as the reasons for its harsh repression. Society should be one big family with a horde of obedient children. One must be insane in order not to want this ” ^{[12] [9]} . According to Cooper and his supporters, schizophrenia, understood in the broadest sense of the word, is a consequence of the practice of suppressing the individual in the family and society. “Primary violence” leads to infringement of rights and isolation in psychiatric institutions. Traditional psychiatry is seen as the last - ultra-repressive - link in the general chain ^[13] .

According to Cooper, psychiatry, like other social institutions, is built on the model of the family and, therefore, has the same functions, the same role models and mechanisms for influencing individuals within its system. Driven by the goal of violence and coercion, psychiatry completes the “business” begun by the family, if for some reason it was not able to type one of its members. From the moment when a person is recognized as mentally ill, his status changes: the person is denied activity and is considered him as a passive object, thing. He is only a carrier of symptoms, and psychiatrists interpret him as an “appendage” to his illness. He can no longer make decisions, he must do everything that the doctor says, prescribes and prescribes for him, perform actions under the strict supervision of nurses or the family. The patient “materializes and turns into an object in which the pathological process manifests itself” ^[5] .

Cooper considers the problem of schizophrenia in the family context as a problem of alienation: schizophrenia occurs precisely in those families where the degree of alienation is extremely high (higher than in normal or neurotic families), and psychiatric symptoms are a protest, although contradictory in nature ^{[ 5]} . Influenced by the concept of the double message of Gregory Bateson , Cooper notes: "... the dilemma that makes the potential schizophrenic locked up ... cannot be resolved to the extent that the only response he can give is usually considered psychiatric." At the same time, according to Cooper, those who have double coercion (double message) against a potential schizophrenic, in fact, themselves experience double coercion because of the “coincidence of conflicting social forces in their place of residence,” hence the “inconsistency, or a disease of logic ” ^[15] .

In other words, for Cooper, schizophrenia, as for Laing, is evidence of a group crisis: the so-called schizophrenic is trying to break out of the shackles of an alienated family system ^[5] .

Cooper comes to the conclusion that it is impossible to treat this completely insane family due to the subordination of her to the most double coercion (double message). It follows that the only way to solve the problem of schizophrenia, according to Cooper, is to destroy the family, all family formations that correspond to the married family of the capitalist world, since they are, by definition, insane ^[15] .

At the same time, schizophrenia, according to Cooper, is also an attempt by man to restore the lost former integrity, which runs counter to the differentiation of experience required by society; schizophrenia undermines the false schism that is supported by science and art, education and family. Cooper describes schizophrenia as an “abortive and always aborted attempt to achieve a higher degree of sanity” and notes that a condition considered normal is far and even opposite not only to madness, but to true sanity, and sanity, in turn, is closer to madness than to normality ^[5] .

Metanoia

Like Laing, Cooper uses the concept of metanoia , an existential breakthrough that both Laing and Cooper identify with insanity. Metanoia, according to Cooper, is a truly revolutionary act that undermines the foundations of society, takes a person beyond the social system and at the same time leads to his true self, as if resurrecting what a person loses in the process of upbringing and education ^[5] .

Laing and Cooper consider metanoia as one of the ways to comprehend the meaning of existence, as a stage on the path of existential improvement. The process of destructuring being - metanoia - can be started in many cases: in extreme states of psychosis, as a result of taking psychotropic substances , etc. This process is a departure from passivity, the active implementation of various projects of being, a turn to one’s own experience, inside oneself and active discovery yourself to the world ^[8] . In Cooper's Death of a Family, Cooper describes metanoia as a movement between four states, passing through four points and three metanoic changes. He relates to these states ^[5] :

1. Eknoyu - the state of most people living in society, controlled and obedient citizens. Eknoya is associated with the chronic killing of one's self and is most distant from the true self; it is a person being outside his consciousness ^[5] , a state of maximum alienation from his actual experience - from immediate desires, actions, “a body for himself” ^[16] .
2. Paranoia - a transitional state that is associated with the first stages of personality changes; like a semitone change. A person in this state exists near consciousness ^[5] .
3. Noah is a condition characterized by an experience of depression and sadness. In the state of Noah, there is a separation of the "I" from other people, its cultivation. Interacting with new experience, "I" intensively and freely realizes itself in the world. Noah is a state within its own consciousness ^[5] .
4. Antinoy (Anoy) ^[16] - a state of fluent movement between the active and autonomous “I” and going beyond the “I”, movement through the destruction of the previously formed “I” ^[5] ; the process of active interaction between the autonomous "I" and "I and the world", a transcendental state ^[8] .

During the transition from stage to stage, the process of restructuring - restructuring ("the restructuring of alienated structures of existence and the restructuring of a less alienated mode of being") occurs, while a person is in crisis and goes through radical changes. Cooper considers insanity "an ongoing revolution in human life." One of the mechanisms of metanoia is the experience of ecstasy , which turns out to be akin to what the mystic experiences in his experience of the beyond. Destructuring is associated with the activation of more responsible behavior, with the development of one's own voice and autonomy, with the elimination from the existence of traces of another that enslaves the person, cultivating a devastated existence. The main goal of destructuring is to overcome alienation. At the same time, pronounced emotional experiences are observed: a union of enthusiastic joy and complete despair (which is a prerequisite for transformation); language undergoes denormalization and demystification ^[5] .

Restructuring is the negation of the restructuring and, thus, the negation of the negation ^[8] . It aims to incorporate its “transformed” existence into an unreformed world, moreover, speaking a different language ^[16] . Restructuring does not lead to normality, but to sanity, while the elements of the previous normality are preserved in sanity in a transformed form, and they facilitate the development of strategies for protection from the unchanging fear-causing world ^[8] .

Psychiatric intervention, according to Cooper, leads to the destruction of the “union of joy and despair”: first, with the help of psychiatric treatment measures, joy is destroyed, then despair is destroyed, “leaving the optimal“ good result ”of psychiatry - non-human, and this non-human can already be adapted to the existing social system, to function in it ^[9] . Cooper emphasizes that for psychiatry there should be no place in the practice of rebirth, since it is an institution of a capitalist society and should be abolished: “in a society of developed socialism ... there is no place for psychiatry, and in a communist society there is no place for any form of psychotechnology” ^{[5 ]} .

In contrast to both psychiatry and the family system, Cooper puts forward the ideal of the therapeutic community: a microsocial structure in which a fruitful dialectic between loneliness and being-with-others is achieved, autonomy and uniqueness of the “I” structure are maintained and contact is established between the inner world of the personality and its environment the world of other people; people interact without violating each other’s autonomy. The inner world should act here as the source of all actions of man and the outside world. According to Cooper, only on the basis of the possibility of being autonomous, being lonely, you can establish genuine relationships with others. The therapeutic community described by Cooper is characterized by signs such as a lack of psychiatric diagnosis and a lack of diagnosis, a lack of hierarchization and role stratification of the group. Without a diagnosis, the therapeutic community becomes just a place where people live and exist, where there is no difference between them, because it was the psychiatric diagnosis that could be the central sign by which they could be divided ^[5] .

Cooper tried to put his ideas about creating a therapeutic community into practice, in January 1962 he organized the therapeutic community "Villa 21", functioning for four years. The venue for the experiment was one of the departments of the Shenley Psychiatric Hospital in northwestern London - the department where insulinocomatous therapy was previously conducted. They began to gradually refuse treatment with insulin comas, and the department was freed. It occupied two floors: on the second floor there was a bedroom with 19 beds and four communicating rooms, on the first - a living room, dining room, staff room and dressing room, as well as two more small rooms, in one of which group meetings began to take place, in the other organized a rest room ^[5] .

The project involved patients aged 15 to 30 years, with two-thirds of them diagnosed with schizophrenia, the rest with psychopathy and personality disorder ; all of them were hospitalized for the first time or had a short hospital stay. Medical personnel were also selected on the principle of short work experience in a psychiatric clinic. Three doctors worked with patients, each of whom dealt with a group of 5-7 people ^[5] .

The daily routine included four group meetings: daily meetings of the therapeutic community attended by all patients and all staff of the community (problems that were relevant to the life of the community were discussed here: conflicts, lifestyle or events taking place in the community); therapeutic groups (patients were divided into groups that met with an accompanying physician); two working groups (one worked with a doctor, the other with a nurse: for example, one was engaged in interior decoration, the other was making toys); group staff meetings (staff meetings at which ongoing changes were discussed and further work was planned) ^[5] .

One of the research objectives of the project was, as Cooper emphasized, clarifying and eliminating the range of biased interpretations and prejudices through which psychiatric hospital staff perceive patients and each other ^[5] . During its historical formation, the psychiatric hospital has developed a set of protective measures against insanity, which is considered "dirty", "dangerous", "violent"; Cooper calls this attitude “institutional stupidity” ^[9] . In particular, according to the traditional opinion, if you do not force patients to obey the institutionally fixed regime and do not control its implementation, patients will ignore the daily routine and will not be able to function as an organized group. The Villa 21 project successfully refuted these prejudices: although no one followed the regimen, especially the sleep regimen, patients continued to follow their own routine on their own. Similarly, the prejudices associated with the prescription of compulsory labor as a mechanism for institutionalizing patients did not materialize ^[5] .

Cooper also sought to get away from stereotypes, according to which the doctor must certainly play the role of group leader, and the supervising function should be performed by paramedical personnel. In the framework of the Villa 21 project, the role of a leader in the therapeutic process and a controlling role in the daily life of the community should in some cases be assumed by patients. For four years in the functioning of this “mini-department” roles were changed (patients began to take an active part in their treatment and in the life of the department); many of the rules characteristic of psychiatric hospitals were discarded (a clear daily routine, compulsory labor, etc. were overcome). These changes did not entail a worsening of the situation. Cooper, describing the results of his experiment, noted: “In fact, over the past two years no one has received serious bodily injuries from patients, none of the young patients became pregnant, although they often visited their friends in the department and also went outside the hospital with them” ^{[ 5]} .

The Villa 21 experiment turned out to be significant primarily for Cooper himself and for the internal evolution of antipsychiatry. Compared to earlier therapeutic communities (in particular, Maxwell Jones), there was little new here - there were signs of similarity, such as the significance and openness of communication between medical staff and patients; role shift encouraging patient activity; group work and group reflection of the observed changes, etc. But by its status, “Villa 21” was the first antipsychiatric experiment (Laing’s “Noisy Room” , organized by him in the mid-1950s, should not be considered an antipsychiatric experiment - Laing created it before how I began to develop antipsychiatric critical ideas). The Cooper experiment arose in the context of antipsychiatric criticism and turned out to be the first social experiment inscribed in antipsychiatric ideology: it is based on dissatisfaction with psychiatry as a therapeutic institution and an attempt to organize alternative care. “Villa 21” became the forerunner of Ling's key social project, Kingsley Hall, many of its inhabitants became the first inhabitants of Kingsley Hall, and Cooper described “Villa 21” in his program work “Psychiatry and Antipsychiatry” ^[5] .

• Reason and Violence: a decade of Sartre's philosophy, Tavistock (1964) — co-authored with RD Laing
• Psychiatry and Anti-Psychiatry (Ed.), Paladin (1967)
• The Dialectics of Liberation (Ed.), Penguin (1968) — Cooper's introduction can be read at the Herbert Marcuse website
• The Death of the Family , Penguin (1971)
• Grammar of Living , Penguin (1974)
• The Language of Madness , Penguin (1978)

• Brother Beast: the David Cooper Anti-Page
• Brother Beast: A Personal Memoir of David Cooper by , written six weeks after Cooper's death
• Far out — Guardian article written by David Gale, a former patient
• The Planned Environment Therapy Trust Archive — holds the archive of the Institute of Phenomenological Studies.
• Double DB Chapter 2: Historical perspectives on anti-psychiatry // Critical psychiatry: The limits of madness . — Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. — 251 p. — ISBN 0230001289 .
• Власова О.А. Критерии нормативности в пространстве общества и истории: социальная феноменология безумия (рус.) // Журнал социологии и социальной антропологии : журнал. — 2007. — Т. Х , № 2 . — С. 184—190 . Архивировано 28 сентября 2011 года. Архивная копия от 28 сентября 2011 на Wayback Machine