Putting the Questions Differently

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Lessing: There are hundreds of thousands of people who have been tortured by doctors and psychiatrists in a way which they regard as so barbarous. The whole range of treatments used in mental hospitals are savage and cruel and terrible and destroy people.

Terkel: It’s as though we’re in Neanderthal times at this moment in treatment.

Lessing: Yes. Why is it that we have allowed to come about the state of affairs where a human being sits behind a desk and says, “Such-and-such is wrong with you,” and we believe him? Why do we allow this kind of thing to be done to us? Now that’s a much more interesting question, because the history of medicine is not one that encourages us to believe that they are likely to be right. Putting it at its mildest, they are extremely conservative and inflexible and unimaginative and continually damning new ideas; but in spite of the fact that psychiatry is a new and very feared thing, we will take their word, we allow them to slap a label on this – why do we?

Terkel: Do you know R. D. Laing?

Lessing: Yes, I do, and his work. I think he hasn’t gone far enough. I admire him because he has battled with the English medical establishment and changed the plan so as to make it possible to ask questions in a way it simply wasn’t possible before.

Terkel: You mention the psychiatrist who is detached, who has this patient on the couch, whereas Laing is saying he must also adhere to his own vulnerability. I think he uses the phrase “fellow passengers.”

Lessing: I once saw on television Laing and some other doctors of his school who have had a great influence, contrasted with the old-fashioned kind, and what came out was the marvelous compassion of one and the cold violence of the other.

Terkel: So it brings us back again to …

Lessing: Oh, I wanted to say something very interesting. In The Four-Gated City I imagined that there were doctors tucked away in health services, psychiatrists working on these capacities; I hadn’t finished that section before I started hearing of doctors who, in fact, keeping their mouths shut, are working away in your country and in Britain and in the Soviet Union; using the whole facade of what they have to work with, they are researching extrasensory perception and schizophrenia. So it’s happening! These doctors, who at the moment have to keep quiet because they’d lose their jobs, are going to make a very great difference.

Terkel:The Four-Gated City has an appendix which I would describe as apocalyptic. An event occurs, the exact nature you don’t describe – perhaps a plague – I assume it’s many things. You’re implying that unless the imagination is used we face disaster. Is that it?

Lessing: Well, I’m a bit gloomy about the future. I don’t see a big shooting war because they say they’ve too much to lose, but some kind of accident is inevitable, because it’s happening now, some smaller thing going wrong all the time. I think parts of the world will be damaged so badly that they can’t be lived in for a while, and there will be a very great deal of various poisons in the atmosphere, and we don’t know the effect this will have on the human organism. We can imagine it. Like everything else, it will have good effects and bad effects. Everything always goes in double harness: there’s no such thing as a totally bad thing or a totally good thing; they always go together.

Terkel: Do you see any way in which this could be prevented? I’m not asking you for a panacea now, or a nostrum. You just see it as inevitable?

Lessing: You can’t pick up a newspaper without reading warnings from scientists about what we’re doing. I can’t remember the name of this bloke who said that there is a very fine layer of substance around our earth on which the whole of life depends. We’re pumping so much rubbish up there that we’re changing that layer. The forecasts are various, because after all nobody knows very much, even scientists. We could destroy all organic life.

Terkel: If this is likely to happen, we come back to lack of imagination again, don’t we? Through these characters, Martha and Lynda, you’re saying that there’s something in the human psyche not yet explored?

Lessing: It couldn’t be with human beings as they are now; I think we’re evolving into better people perhaps. As a part of this vortex we’re in, it’s possible that we’re changing into people with greater capacities for imagination, and that we are going to be regarded as the “missing link,” the transition people, and we’ll have much better people.

Terkel: You know that old Chinese curse that the science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke uses: may you live in interesting times.

Lessing: Yes, indeed, we are living in interesting times.

Terkel: Let me ask you a question, which I know has become increasingly tiresome, yet being in America you’ve been asked it so often. To many militant women in America, you are the Simone de Beauvoir of Britain, particularly because of The Golden Notebook. I suppose you encounter this very often, because you’re laughing. Now this always throws you, doesn’t it?

Lessing: No, I’ve got terribly bored with it – that’s the truth – because I don’t think The Golden Notebook is about what they say it was about. Now I can modestly say that it has a large variety of themes, one of them being the sex war; but I now find myself, because I’m overreacting and impatient, in what sounds like a lack of sympathy for women who I know are often under very heavy pressure. But I think this whole trouble between men and women is a symptom of something very much bigger. We’re not going to solve what’s wrong between men and women by handing insults to each other. Something else has to be put right.

The climate has changed in Britain very sharply, and you’ll find there’s very much less tension between the younger generation, men and women, and people in my age group. Why? There are always physical things which change these emotional reactions, which people tend to forget. If you get a balance between the sexes, a lot of tension goes out. You should provide day nurseries and equal wages for women. My personal bias is not to sit around discussing psychology; one should be out battling for better nurseries and equal wages. That’s where this battle has to be fought.

Terkel: So you see this quote, unquote Women’s Liberation as not unrelated to the human battle itself; that is, not something separate and apart?

Lessing: I think people are scared stiff and they’re beating hell out of each other, that’s all, in one way or another. I can’t find anything helpful to say about this, you see, because I think it’s a minor thing – the cause of great unhappiness, but it’s not the most important thing.

Terkel: You happen to be a writer who is a woman. These characters, Lynda and Martha, could’ve as easily been two men, couldn’t they?

Lessing: Yes.

Terkel: You deal with many fascinating aspects of the contemporary world, but we come back to this theme that man has not yet discovered his possibilities.

Lessing: No, I think they’re just beginning. We’re on the threshold. We should be alert all the time for what we’re overlooking. You see, I don’t think some things are going to happen; they’re happening now. We should try to be more awake to what’s happening in our friends and ourselves because even just slightly more awake we could begin to see things happening. We always talk as if things are going to start happening in fifty years’ time. But we overlook what’s happening now. Will you name me a society ever that hasn’t had great blind spots that afterwards people look backward on and wonder how it’s possible that those people were so blind? What are our blind spots?

Terkel: So it’s asking the impertinent question, the hitherto unasked question?

Lessing: Yes, it’s always a good idea in any set-up where there’s that question or that idea which seems most stupid and ridiculous to ask whether it really is so stupid and ridiculous.