Women, Madness, and Like the in a women autonomy and alternately threatened is who demand pendent, and docile Family 237 Laing's case studies, the heroine, Janice, in double bind She parents, the be "good" on their terms that she — while expressing maturity have the baby, they When insist caught is and discredited by her — sexless, de- dissatisfaction with her lack of she becomes pregnant and wants to upon an They abortion upon also insist mental hospitalization, and require that the doctors provide "discipline" and "control." When Janice, a voluntary patient, attempts to leave still com- the hospital with her boyfriend, the parents intervene to have her mitted under a special provision of the Mental Health Act of the film, up trying to she is indeed broken and have a Family Life makes film uses — brilliant has given use of visual techniques to bring out the Mercer particularly admired images of mass transit, is an Underground their way Laing's work in mass production, and mass medi- cine to capture the sense of social alienation Janice on the Tube; she back and forth on who a person the end self political implications that The "mad" By Woman to meaningless jobs candy factory, where chocolates rush by on a down breaks first watching people rush Her own job conveyor is belt like muters, and plunge into boxes of various sizes and shapes As in a com- in similar scenes in Chaplin's Modern Times, or Peter Sellers 's I'm All Right, Jack (1959), the assembly line becomes metaphor a and depersonalization of human beings The for the mechanization identical houses in Janice's neat working-class community, endless rows of interchangeable roofs, chimneys, and cure little gardens, reproduce the mental conformity of inse- men and women, and banal as their locked into a system of values as homes When Janice paint the family's garden blue, gnomes and familiarity of material objects that has decency, marriage, and The therapeutic filial tidy, uniform, and her art-student lover spray- its all, they threaten the safe parallel in rigid views of obligation community that Janice enters is an alternative to this dehumanizing sameness The highly individualized young patients support each other, and are supported in finding the strength to way But the hospital board decides devastating scene, we by the Laingian psychiatrist Mike, confront their families and to go their own to discontinue the experiment In a see Janice herded with a group of other women mental patients to be processed for ECT Protesting the whole time, she in is anaesthetized, shocked by a her mouth, rolled into a ward male doctor, and with full a wooden gag women, of unconscious shocked