David Cooper

David Cooper (1931 – 1986) South African psychiatrist, leader of the anti-psychiatry movement with Ronald Laing, Thomas Szasz and Michel Foucault, he worked in London where  he experimented in a psychotic adolescent unit called Villa 21, a revolutionary ‘anti-hospital’ . He wrote two fundamental books The Language of madness (1967) and The death of the family 1971).

Carlos Sluzki: You may have heard of David Cooper. He deserves our homage… as well as to re-member his many destabilizing enactments in congresses and meetings. Davis was an itinerant, voluminous, red-bearded South African psychiatrist and one of the strong voices of the British anti-psychiatric movement, co-author with Ronald Laing of politically relevant contributions during the early years of development of the family system field. He was also known to drink like a fish –and alcohol facilitated, I believe, his role as an anti-establishment provocateur during congresses and conferences.

Of his many antics, allow me to remember one. It took place in Berkeley, California –where I lived by then—during the late ‘70s. Cooper had been invited to deliver an evening conference and subsequent discussion under the auspices of a local group of progressive psychiatrists, to take place in a beautiful local deconsecrated church (I had seen the announcement but was not a member of that group nor was expecting to be invited to attend.)

At mid-afternoon that day, I received a distressed call from one of the organizers of that conference, who assumed that I knew Cooper because of us being part of the same international family therapy circuit (I did know him, as we shared presentations in congresses and social) and asked me to help them in their predicament: David had collapsed at his house in a post-prandial alcohol stupor and they couldn’t wake him up to deliver his presentation. I recommended they carry him to a bathroom, put him under a cold shower, and give him several cups of coffee while I drove to their house to do whatever I could. So they did, and so did I. Once there, we started chatting a bit laboriously –my efforts focused on reminding him where he was and what for, while offering him more coffee and walking with him in their garden. The organizers, in turn, were making desperate updating calls to those at the church (“He seems to be getting ready!”), that was beaming with an audience complaining because half an hour had passed since the announced time of the presentation. Once Cooper appeared reasonably together, we loaded him in a car, rushed to the place, and helped him walk into the auditorium while pretending we weren’t helping him do it. The public shifted from shouts of complaint to cheers. When we arrived at the altar-made-into-rostrum, he managed to trigger another crisis, very much along the line of similar scandals he had performed at a couple of the mega-Congresses organized by Mony Elkaim in Brussels during that decade: Cooper refused to climb into the podium, arguing that that location, place higher than the audience, implied a position of power that he was reluctant to assume. After a moment of collective distress, I proposed, replicating a move we did once in Brussels, to “level the symbolic field” by inviting whoever wanted from the audience to sit at the podium around him. To everybody’s relief, Cooper liked the idea. One of them took the mike and invited audience members to sit at the podium at will. A number of them did, and Cooper, finally satisfied, climbed to it himself, sat in the only armchair surrounded by fans on the floor, and started his rambling presentation.

I could stop here, but the coda of the story merits also being described. Cooper’s speech began along the lines: “I am just arriving from a long tour of presentations in Latin American countries, some of them so dramatically poor that, imagine, local psychiatrists didn’t even have hot tubs in their houses.”  After a moment of silence, the audience erupted in acknowledging laughter while the organizers, most of them leftist, with their hearts in the right place but enjoying hot tubs in their Berkeley homes, glossed over –as the majority of us do– the inherent contradictions between ideology and practices in our own comfortable daily lives in this world cruel to so many, laughed much more uncomfortably. (I am not even sure whether Cooper himself caught the profound irony of his statement!)