Levy, Martin. 2024. Roundhouse: Joe Berke and the 1967 Congress on the Dialectics of Liberation. 1st edit. Hannover; Stuttgart: ibidem.
Janina Klement (UCL)
With Roundhouse, Martin Levy offers the first monograph on the International Congress ‘Dialectics of Liberation’, one of the most significant cultural symposia of the sixties held in London during July 1967. For two extraordinary weeks, it transformed Camden’s Roundhouse (an old Victorian train garage repurposed as event space) into a crucible of social utopias, drawing hundreds of participants from across the globe who engaged in extensive seminars, happenings and demonstrations and attracting over a thousand attendees to some of its most significant public keynote addresses. Promoted around the more abstract goals of debating freedom’s dialectics and demystifying violence, the Congress pursued the concrete aim of developing critical perspectives on contemporary society and pathways toward social change.
Despite its exceptional duration and breadth, the ‘Dialectics of Liberation’ was one among several similar gatherings that took place during this period with parallel cultural and socio-political ambitions. Other notable examples include the 1968 ‘Cultural Congress of Havana’, where hundreds of intellectuals and activists convened to discuss their role in revolutionary movements across the Global South, and Bertrand Russell’s ‘International War Crimes Tribunal’, founded in 1966, which brought together public intellectuals to deliberate and render judgments on the Vietnam War and other human rights violations. Principal participants at the ‘Dialectics of Liberation’ included the philosophers Herbert Marcuse, Lucien Goldmann and Gajo Petrović, economists and anthropologists Paul Sweezy, John Gerassi, and Gregory Bateson, social critics and activists Stokely Carmichael, Tariq Ali, C.L.R. James, Thich Nhat Hanh and Paul Goodman, writers Allen Ginsberg, Simon Vinkenoog and Alexander Trocchi as well as experimental artist Carolee Schneemann – with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir among the many notable invitees who were unable to attend.
Yet, and perhaps most intriguing, the Congress was organised by four psychiatrists – or more accurately, ‘antipsychiatrists’: R. D. Laing, David Cooper, Joseph (Joe) Berke, and Leon Redler, bringing to the foreground the fact and extent to which psychiatric critique functioned as a generative source of countercultural activity and New Left movements. These radical practitioners deliberately sought to expand their practice beyond the confines of the clinical environment and into the political sphere, recognising that individual psychological transformation was inseparable from broader social and political change. Berke and Redler had recently relocated from the United States to London specifically to collaborate with Laing at his therapeutic community Kingsley Hall, established in 1965. Asking ‘Where did the Congress come from?’ Levy’s narrative challenges the more common assumption that Laing was its driving force, instead arguing that it was the lesser-known Berke who primarily organised the event. Berke’s deep engagement with educational politics and countercultural movements in the US is indeed essential for understanding the genesis of the Congress and why it positioned itself as an ‘Anti-Congress’ against traditional academic gatherings – to transcend what Levy characterises as ‘trivial diversions for the educationally moribund’ (12). The Congress thus brought together not only academics but also students, activists, workers, autodidacts, artists, psychiatric patients, and all kinds of vagabonds.
Methodologically, Roundhouse is a hybrid of biography and history, alternately highlighting Berke’s background and contribution to the Congress and examining the ‘Dialectics of Liberation’ as a historical event. Significantly, Levy draws on personal interviews with Berke, rare books and journals, and most importantly, a wealth of previously untapped archival material. This includes the congressional archives that Berke personally compiled and donated to the Planned Environment Therapy Archives in the 1990s, as well as the ‘Joseph Berke Papers’ – a still uncatalogued collection that Levy himself discovered in Berke’s garage and helped to preserve and prepare before it was ultimately transferred to the Wellcome Collection.
Even though Berke is a prominent name among Britain’s therapeutic community movement of the 1960s and ‘70s, little has surfaced about his personal background and development. Unlike Laing, he did not write an autobiography (except the semi-biographical Two Accounts of a Journey Through Madness [1971], co-written with his patient Mary Barnes) and gave few interviews, his early texts and poems dispersed in rare underground publications such as Peace News, Fire, and his edited volume Counter Culture (1969). Carving new paths by positing Berke’s biography as ‘back-story to the Congress’ (17), Levy draws the picture of a multifaceted figure who challenged academic compartmentalisation and disciplinary boundaries, forged meaningful connections between people and ideas across nations, acted in solidarity with radical causes, embraced new experiences, and consistently transformed his theoretical convictions into practical action. Growing up outside New York, the experience of difference defined Berke’s formative years; unathletic and physically distinctive due to congenital deformities of his fingers and toes he was a magnet for bullies. His mother cast him as ‘Messiah’ and ‘wonder child’, a replacement for his deceased father. Berke retreated into intellectual pursuits and nerdiness; a ‘voracious reader’ (19) he collected stamps and carnivorous plants. Later, at New York’s Einstein College of Medicine he specialised in psychiatry – to focus on ‘the ‘person’ rather than the ‘organism’’ (20) – and sought mentorship from the distinguished yet unconventional psychiatrist John Thompson who specialised in medical ethics, phenomenology of mental illness and the physician-patient relationship. Part of Thompson’s influence on Berke’s development was to encourage his political activism, so he often stayed away from classes to take part in peace strikes and demonstrations against nuclear testing. The years 1963-1965 were spent between Manhattan’s Lower East Side bohème and ‘swinging London’ (38) – where Berke co-created two of the counterculture’s most eminent physical landmarks: London’s therapeutic community of Kingsley Hall and the Free University of New York (FUNY). By linking these contexts, Levy illuminates their combined relevance for the emergence of the ‘Dialectics of Liberation’.
Like many of his contemporaries, Berke became an adherent of Laing through reading The Divided Self (1960), whose theses resonated with his and Thompson’s conviction that psychiatrists must comprehend their patient’s point of view, and that he found empirically confirmed in his clinical practice with disturbed children. In 1963, Berke interned at Laing’s ‘schizophrenia research unit’, picking up on the method of treating schizophrenic patients at home by interviewing all family members as well as on the unit’s fascination with Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960) that propelled ‘antipsychiatric’ theory and practice. Yet Levy demonstrates that Berke’s attachment to Laing’s network transcended professional interests; importantly, he became embedded in a social scene, bonding with Laing’s family and that of Laing’s research collaborator Aaron Esterson, experiencing LSD for the first time, and collaboratively envisioning radical psychiatric futures that would later materialise as Kingsley Hall. Back in New York, Berke immersed himself in countercultural circles, befriending Beat poet Allen Ginsberg and joining the avant garde movement ‘sigma’, founded by the notorious Situationist publisher Alexander Trocchi. Trocchi’s ‘sigma log’ – a series of manifesto-like booklets advocating for a ‘cultural revolt’ and an ‘invisible insurrection of a million minds’ – further dovetailed the connection between Berke and Laing, kept up by an active correspondence and exchanged visits. While Laing independently contributed essays to Trocchi’s log, Berke linked the nascent FUNY, which drew inspiration from experimental models like Black Mountain College and Paul Goodman’s critique of American higher education in The Community of Scholars (1962), to Trocchi’s vision of a network of ‘spontaneous universities’ for revolutionaries. In collaboration with sociologist Allen Krebs, who had lost his job at Adelphi University following a trip to Cuba, Berke established FUNY in a converted arts studio as a radical alternative to traditional education – a non-hierarchical learning environment mostly offering classes on issues of the day such as Cuba, Vietnam, the sexual revolution, and the intersection of LSD and psychosis. Significantly, when Berke relocated to London in 1965, his main aim was not to settle as a resident psychiatrist at Kingsley Hall; particularly, he sought to transplant FUNY’s alternative pedagogies and education into the therapeutic community setting.
From the ‘Joe Berke Experience’ Levy’s narrative shifts to Kingsley Hall and the eve of the Congress. Levy revisits several familiar aspects about the experimental household – its chaos and dampness, internal and external conflicts, the contrast between an aspired freedom from constraints and a complicated day-to-day including actual and deliberated forced treatments – but resists the reactionary intuition to dismiss the collective desires it unleashed, and that were channelled into the Congress. The central point here is that Kingsley Hall was precisely not a dumpster for ‘crazies’ but that Laing, Berke and the other residents created a ‘groovy scene’ (52), a space for readings, exhibitions, happenings, and film screenings that attracted all kinds of visitors who opened ‘extra dimensions’ (52). However, Levy slightly undermines his own narrative of counter-cultural cross-pollination by fixating on who specifically conceived the Congress, arguing it was Berke’s brainchild. This detracts from his otherwise convincing demonstration that the Congress emerged from multiple sources: strategies borrowed from the American free university movement, a philosophy of violence and dialectics derived from Laing and Cooper’s interpretation of Sartre, and a collective effort to make the ‘Kingsley Hall experience’ accessible for wider audiences. The ‘Pulling the Congress Together’ chapter further reveals the book’s inherent challenge of integrating individual biography with a historical account of a collective event as it becomes clear that the Congress explodes Berke’s personal story while Berke’s life achievements can hardly be reduced to it. While Berke, Laing, Cooper, and Redler were debating invitees and drafting circulars, three women designated as ‘secretaries’ (Diane Dye, Antonia Davy, and Jane Haynes) handled much of the vast correspondence effort with potential participants worldwide; however, we learn nothing about their biographies.
The vast part of Roundhouse is devoted to event proceedings, drawing extensively on Berke’s Congress archives. Through his ‘tell-all’ approach, Levy performs a kind of compensatory justice in response to the selectivity for which the original 1968 conference volume was criticised, as it only includes ten speeches of prominent participants from among dozens of talks, panels, and seminars that were given. Roundhouse deserves praise for this meticulous documentation of the Congress – comprehensively summarising its two weeks of speeches, events, and daily happenings while incorporating perspectives from participants and media coverage. Levy’s retelling particularly shines when capturing the Congress’s evolving atmosphere and dynamics that unfolded on its ‘unconscious’ stage, including elements that may have seemed subliminal at the time but gain significance in historical perspective. This includes the Congress’s transformation: beginning with rigid structures, it gradually evolved towards cooperation and self-governance with ideological conflicts and personal disagreements openly argued out. Yet the Congress also produced abysses: for instance, the experimental artist Carolee Schneemann, the only principal female participant to take the main stage, was misogynistically assaulted by Paul Goodman when presenting the concept for the happening she was to stage at the last evening. Later, Goodman himself was sexually harassed by a woman who physically accosted him while sleeping, with the purported goal to ‘cure’ him of his homosexuality. These incidents, somewhat casually presented by Levy, could raise profound questions about a gathering ostensibly dedicated to uncovering structural and political violence, while itself, at least in part, reproducing it. Though Levy does contextualise the Congress – particularly Stokely Carmichael’s interventions on the Black civil rights struggle that animated his parallel activism in London and informed the founding of the Universal Coloured People’s Association under Obi Egbuna’s leadership – his narrative could have been enhanced by bridging its lived realities with the theoretical positions proclaimed from its podiums. Through its exhaustive chronicling of the Congress, Roundhouse risks to overshadow Levy’s own analytical voice and ultimately neglects to analyse the curious role of Berke who despite being so central for its coming-into-being remained seemingly peripheral during the Congress itself.
In the book’s latter half, Levy then somewhat abruptly advances the thesis that the Congress served as a turning point toward ‘the age of identity politics’ (198) in Britain. Carmichael’s advocacy for the necessity of militant resistance and refusal to include non-Black people in the struggle against racism and Herbert Marcuse’s call for revolutionising education to unleash imagination for a new society is juxtaposed with Goodman’s defence of ‘professionalism’ directed against both technocratic conformity and bureaucratic management as well as FUNY subjects like ‘psychedelic drugs and Cuba’ (212). One gets the impression that a personal feud is being waged here, reinforced by the book’s coda which sees an ‘infernal nexus’ (267) connecting the Congress’s ‘identity politics faction’ – that allegedly forced out the ‘conservative faction’ – and contemporary EDI initiatives that would represent indoctrination rather than education. While the relationship between EDI and left-wing politics is already not as symbiotic as Levy seems to believe (after all, affirmative action in the United States was introduced by the Republican Nixon administration), I find it misleading – even based on reading Roundhouse itself – to declare the ‘Dialectics of Liberation’ as the primal scene of today’s so-called culture war. Levy himself demonstrates that the perception of the Congress was diverse, acknowledging both some people’s frustration and confusion over its perceived intellectualism as well as moments where participants forged surprising connections and found profound meaning in mingling and debating (249). I think what actually emerges from Roundhouse is not a binary conflict but rather a complex scene where diverse interests, expectations, and desires collided and interacted. As for the political conflicts that played out, existing first-hand reports of conference participants differ from Levy’s assessment that ‘identity politics’ was primary. For example, Croatian philosopher Gajo Petrović, who wrote about the Congress in the journal Praxis, described a ‘framework of dynamic work’ that changed daily, with the first week being dominated by ‘revolutionary political extremism and Marxist dogmatism’ and the second week by ‘ideas of democratic socialism and creative Marxism’. Jacques Leenhardt, a congress participant whom I interviewed a few years ago, again offered me a different perspective. According to him, the fundamental tension existed between the practices of the ‘antipsychiatrists’ and the ‘open Marxism’ espoused by both the Yugoslav anti-Stalinist faction and, in different ways, Black Power – suggesting a serious debate about British antipsychiatry’s political positioning. Furthermore, radical psychiatrist Giovanni Jervis’s published reflections on the Congress reveal, if anything, its lack of ‘identity politics’ (a term that did not yet exist in 1967), or more precisely, its emphasis instead on different understandings of class politics. Jervis criticised the Congress for embracing a politics of accommodation that prioritised mutual respect over the Marxist imperative of class struggle culminating in the defeat of the oppressor. When we consider Laing and his network’s substantial engagement with Sartre’s Marxist phase of the 1960s, what emerges is a gathering grappling fundamentally with competing ‘Marxisms’ and the practices that follow from them. I too remain uncertain about the Congress’ contemporary significance, but I do think that Levy missed an opportunity to reflect on this question in a more faithful engagement with the presented historical sources. Nevertheless, I would recommend the book to anyone with an interest in the ‘Dialectics of Liberation’, as it contains a wealth of documentation that has thus far not been as easily accessible.