Women, Madness, and point of the Kingsley Hall day "lunatics' ball," over staff was its Family the 231 sacramental late dinner and which Laing sacerdotally presided At nine-thirty and guests gathered long table garlanded with flowers In at a expounded on philosophy, medicine, religion, or mysticism About midnight, the table was pushed back, and "im- candlelight Laing promptu, unrestrained, free-form dancing to flamenco or the Rolling Stones continued until dawn." 32 Kingsley Hall became the center of countercultural activity in don, swarming with rock groups, experimental drama groups, poets, anti-university students, and hip Many were renegades from American medical schools about Kingsley Hall; indeed, was often a kind Most celebrities staff Lon- artists, members visitors wrote in addition to its therapeutic function it of schizophrenic Yaddo, where nearly everyone was writing a book Clancy Sigal kept a journal that would lead to his novel Zone of the Interior, Morton Schatzman was planning his study of Schreber and paranoia, and David Cooper and Aaron Esterson were engaged in their own psychomystical researches In antipsychiatry, too, the typical patient labeled "schizophrenic" — was — the misunderstood or mis- woman's female, and the that of patient rather than doctor In Laing's early of case studies describe women role remained work, the majority struggling with conflicting messages about femininity from their family and the society, but these potential theories of gender are not developed in the studies themselves In The Divided Self, for example, Laing analyzed the situation of Mrs R., a twenty-eight-year-old agoraphobic, as a "lack of ontological auton- omy," although to a feminist reader, her infantilization and dependence on male approval seem more immediately relevant Similarly, Mrs D., woman in an acute anxiety argued that in withholding comfort, he gave her the exis- a forty-year-old Laing, who tential freedom to take responsibility symptom was state, for her was life treated coldly by But Mrs D.'s main intense anger toward her husband, an anger Laing calls "unaccountable" and never takes seriously Marie, a twenty-year-old college student, strongly identified with the victimized girl in the film La Strada, but Laing never comments on Joan, Two this paradigmatic figure of young schizophrenic women, Julie and had parents who had wanted them to be boys but Laing does female oppression other — not consider the social and psychological effects of this preference Even Ophelia turns up in The Divided Self as "undoubtedly a schizo-