The literature of psychoanalysis contains a number of classical and near-classical works. Freud's Introductory Lectures are still the best introduction, while his Interpretation of Dreams is his masterpiece. I mention these as ways of entering the literature of psychiatry, because I suspect the motives of those who might wish to dabble in the subject. It should be appreciated that the study of human nature at the extremes of experience requires the same sort of serious, committed reader that is demanded by literary criticism. It is at least inconsistent to criticise middle-brow writings for their cultural shallowness and then to pontificate on psychology and the social sciences, having read few or none of the classics in the field.
Psychiatry attracts dilettantes who read in order to find a glib solution to their own problems.
This is just as much a travesty as it is to read a novel and submerge one's critical faculties by identifying wholeheartedly with one character. No more than literature does psychiatry welcome remarks of the ignorant or the self-indulgent. I have said, in effect, that some psychiatric writing is good literature and that it should be read seriously or not at all. One could let the argument rest here, but it would be disingenuous to do so. If one perseveres in reading the book, this claim becomes comprehensible, but it is no use pretending that Laing is entirely free from jargon, even though it be of a different sort from that which he criticises in the writings of traditional psychiatrists.