“She knows it is all a load of old socks”: Doris Lessing, anti-psychiatry and bodies that matter

In The Golden Notebook (1962), The Four-Gated City (1969) and Briefing for a Descent into Hell (1971), Doris Lessing examines the inadequacies of traditional models of madness and replaces them with an anti-psychiatric model. While ostensibly the three novels strive to conceive of madness in terms of R. D. Laing’s anti-psychiatric theories, this paper will argue that they in fact serve to reveal an impasse between Laing’s “lived body” (but gender neutral) theory of schizophrenia and the discursively constructed, “inscribed” bodies of Lessing’s female characters. Lessing’s madness novels deconstruct Laing’s phallocentric approach to schizophrenia by rewriting his theory of madness as a gendered and embodied experience