obvious to the protagonists...The man at the bottom of the heap may be being crushed and suffocated to death without anyone noticing, much less intending it". Collier's criticism Andrew Collier has commented on Laing's dilemma, which Laing himself seemed never to properly identify. In much of his writing Laing assumed an uncorrupted natural state for the human mind, and tended to condemn society for causing mental illness, in rather (early) Marxist terms. He saw schizophrenia as a possible healing process, a way of working through things, back to normality. Collier suggests that there is no uncorrupted state, no normality; rather that as social animals we all need to incorporate others into a nexus in order to "be". We must all perhaps be "mad" to some extent if we are to function in society, rather than as loners, but we must be uniformly mad. The nature of the madman's "must", however, remains unestablished. Therapy Psychotherapy today comes in many forms, following different schools of thought. Psychoanalysis emphasises childhood experience, and left-over feelings, though Freud did point to the role of society in his later works like Civilization and its Discontents. Family therapy concentrates on bringing families together and encouraging them to work out their interactions, but it might (depending on its theoretical orientation) offer little or no support to the victim of family nexus, who may then be punished for anything he dares to reveal or hint at, and (lacking a support network) submit to silent intimidation in family therapy, rather than risk exclusion and the "ceasing to be" that follows. The alert family therapist will however "avoid taking the family's side...Or the scapegoat's. You mustn't take anyone's side because then you'd be joining in the blaming...You've got to treat the family as a system, without blaming anyone...you need to make them all feel supported." See also References Psychosis Family Anti-psychiatry