May all Be Shattered into God Mary Barnes and Her Journey through Madness in Kingsley Hall.
Contributing to renewed scholarly interest in R. D. Laing and his circle, and in the radical therapeutic community of Kingsley Hall, London (1965-1970), this article offers the first article-length reading of Mary Barnes and Joseph Berkes Mary Barnes Two Accounts of a Journey through Madness. This text offers views of anti-psychiatry on the ground that critique the 1960s utopianism of Laings championing of madness as a metanoic, quasi-psychedelic voyage. Barnes story, too, reveals tensions within the anti-psychiatric movement. Moving beyond existing criticism of the text, Barnes, it is argued here, emerges as far more than an exemplary patient, victim or anti-psychiatric puppet. Particular attention is paid in this reading of Two Accounts to the following the ways in which the spiritually inclined Barnes and the psychoanalytic Berke differ in this dual narrative text the ways in which each differs from Laing the metaphor of the journey and the setting of Barnes story in the often conflicted, experimental household of Kingsley Hall.