Zone of the Interior Paperback – 10 November 2005

The 60s as it was! It was a time that "you had to have been there" to know what it was really like. Sigel saw it and captured the spirit!

Clancy Sigal, in an effort to escape McCarthyism, arrived in 1950s London and soon fell into the arms of Doris Lessing and under the spell of the anti-psychiatrist R D Laing. Zone of the Interior is Sigal's semi-autobiographical account of his experiences with anti-psychiatry in the sixties. Sid Bell (Sigal) breaks with his lover Coral (Lessing) and embarks upon a mystical journey into madness with his therapist Dr Last (partly modelled on Laing). 'Assisted' by LSD, yoga, meditation and vegetarianism, Bell and Last journey back into their past lives, enact battles, and wrestle naked on the floor. Bell, in an effort to better understand the 'schizophrenia' he is attempting to 'ascend' to, visits Conelly House, an asylum where Dr Dick is attempting to blur the boundaries between patient and staff, insane and sane, to enable the residents to heal themselves. Outside of Con House, Bell and Last attempt to establish their own anti-institute and form the 'scared seven'. Eventually they find 'Meditation Manor' (Kingsley Hall) and an influx of (middle-class American) schizophrenics move in, including Bell.Sigal's novel is reminiscent of Kerouac's On the Road and Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, those other spaced-out sixties anti-establishment novels. The 'professional's' psycho-babble is suitably bizarre and barely distinguishable from the ramblings and poems of the shizophrenic patients of Con House. Sigal's tone is, on the whole, blackly comical though there are touching sections. Sigal, while ultimately discarding the radical anti-psychiatry of Last/Laing and the spiritual and mystical potential of self-induced madness, does condone the attempt to revolutionise mental health nursing and does call into question the boundaries between those labelled sane and those labelled insane.I recommend Zone of the Interior to anyone interested in mental health care, sixties beat/counter-culture literature, and anti-psychiatry. It is a compelling read.