The Female Malady 230 ery which is only completed by his return to the normal world, to which he comes back with who itants At however, Laing's only contact with this point, journey was insights different from those of the inhab- never embarked on such a voyage 29 a schizophrenic Watkins's account of a psychotic episode his friend Jesse he had twenty-seven years before Watkins recounted regressed in time to a primitive stage of animal and a higher religious sphere, life, how he had then awakened in normalcy when finally willed a return to became unbearable Laing imposed death and rebirth on Watkins's narra- the intensity of his mystical visions his own tive, terminology of and added priest" his spiritual own interpretation of the role of the "physician- who accompanies pist "in a truly The proper the patient sane society," he maintained, is function of the therato act as the patient's guide in a metanoiac, or transforming, journey that heroic, is archetypally epic, and masculine, a psychic pilgrimage more exotic and perilous than the voyages of Ulysses or Kurtz We not regard as pathologically deviant to explore a jungle or it We to climb Mount mistaken in his construction the New Everest World We climber, the space man — indeed our time — explore project feel that of what he discovered respect It makes as a desperately to The metaphors of Columbus was the far be entitled to when he came voyager, the more sense to explorer, me to the as a valid and urgently required project the inner space and time of consciousness for 30 heroic adventure and conquest so prominent in Laing's writing of the mid-1960s were put into practice in the com- munal world he created with other members of the Philadelphia Association (a group dedicated to reforming the treatment of mental illness) The group included David Cooper, Aaron Esterson, and Clancy Sigal, an American writer and who became who had come to England to escape the blacklist, Laing's patient, friend, and enthusiastic co-worker In 1965, the Philadelphia Association established a therapeutic at Kingsley Hall into practice, and to might be healed factory for in if, East London community to put the theories of antipsychiatry test the belief that people who were lost and "mad" instead of going to a mental hospital, "a re-servicing human breakdown," encouragement and sanction they could "be guided with into inner space full social and time." 31 The high