Ronald David Laing’s article about the Abbotts describes how the young Maya Abbott became schizophrenic, or rather became viewed as schizophrenic, within her family situation. Laing strives to demonstrate that Maya’s experiences and actions can be understood through the dynamics of her family.
“What we are setting out to do is to show that Maya’s experiences and actions, especially those deemed schizophrenic, become intelligible as they are seen in the light of her family situation.”
In order for Laing to accomplish this, he tries to look at the family from without as well as within. That is, how others perceive the family and how they perceive themselves. Through their stories, the reader finds that many of Maya’s behaviors that are deemed “schizophrenic” actually mirror many of the behaviors attributed to normal adolescent behavior. But, because of the way the family was constructed, these behaviors were associated with an “illness” by her parents. The fact that this behavior was not accepted or deemed as normal on behalf of Mr. and Mrs. Abbott provides grounds for Maya’s progression into “schizophrenic” behavior. Since Maya was no longer being perceived as a normal teenage girl, her sense of self was profoundly changed. Her parents, especially her mother, projected such a powerfully different sense of who Maya really was, that eventually Maya herself no longer believed or knew herself to be a normal teenage girl.
The behaviors first exhibited as “abnormal” or as signs of “illness,” were as follows:
“She wanted to study. She did not want to go swimming, or go for long walks with her father any more. She no longer wanted to pray with him. She wanted to read the Bible herself, by herself. She objected to her father expressing his affection for her by sitting close to her at meals. She wanted to sit further away from him. Nor did she want to go to the cinema with her mother. In the house, she wanted to handle things and to do things for herself, such as (mother’s example) washing a mirror without first telling her mother.”
To me, this line of reasoning seems ludicrous. How on earth can you believe someone to be ill or sick based on these behaviors? What’s worse, is that Maya actually began to believe that there was something wrong with her, based on the fact that her parents continually viewed her this way. The fact that Maya would need permission to wash a mirror tells me that there is actually something wrong with Maya’s mother. She is 14 years old and has to ask permission to wash a mirror? No wonder Maya became schizophrenic! When those you are most intimately involved with begin to think you’re crazy or that you have changed so much that you are no longer a normal human being, you’ll probably start believing it.
This article ties closely with many other things we’ve read this semester, but the two that stuck out to me the most were Sabbat and Harré’s article “Positioning and the Recovery of Social Identity,” which dealt strongly with the positioning of Alzheimer’s patients, and “The Damaged Self,” by Robert Murphy. Although Murphy’s article dealt primarily with how he perceived himself after losing the use of his legs, some of his self was profoundly changed simply through the way others perceived him. “One of my earliest observations was that social relations between the disabled and the able-bodied are tense, awkward, and problematic.” Additionally, Murphy mentions how he himself had “a kind of selective blindness quite common among people of our culture,” to disabled persons prior to his own paralysis. Because others were no perceiving him in this way, Murphy no longer had the same sense of self as he once had. In fact, he felt in some ways that he was only half a person.