R. D. Laing

Ronald David Laing(7 October 1927 – 23 August 1989), usually cited asR. D. Laing, was a Scottishpsychiatristwho wrote extensively onmental illness—in particular,psychosisandschizophrenia.
Laing's views on the causes and treatment of psychopathological phenomena were influenced by his study ofexistential philosophyand ran counter to the chemical and electroshock methods that had become psychiatric orthodoxy. Laing took the expressedfeelingsof the individual patient or client as valid descriptions of personal experience rather than simply as symptoms of mental illness. Though associated in the public mind with theanti-psychiatrymovement, he rejected the label.Laing regardedschizophreniaas the normal psychological adjustment to a dysfunctional social context.
Politically, Laing was regarded as a thinker of theNew Left. He was portrayed byDavid Tennantin the 2017 filmMad to Be Normal.
Laing was born in theGovanhilldistrict ofGlasgowon 7 October 1927, the only child of civil engineer David Park MacNair Laing and Amelia Glen Laing (née Kirkwood).Laing described his parents — his mother especially — as being somewhat anti-social, and demanding the maximum achievement from him. Although his biographer son largely discounted Laing's childhood account, an obituary by an acquaintance of Laing asserted that about his parents – "the full truth he told only to a few close friends".
He was educated initially at Sir John Neilson Cuthbertson Public School and after four years transferred toHutchesons' Grammar School. Described variously as clever, competitive or precocious, he studiedclassics, particularlyphilosophy, including through reading books from the locallibrary. Small and slightly built, Laing participated in distance running; he was also a musician, being made an Associate of theRoyal College of Music. He studiedmedicineat theUniversity of Glasgow. During his time in Glasgow, he set up a "Socratic Club", of which the philosopherBertrand Russellagreed to be president. Laing failed his final exams. In a partial autobiography,Wisdom, Madness and Folly,Laing said he felt remarks he made under the influence of alcohol at a university function had offended the staff and led to him being failed on every subject including some he was sure he had passed.  After spending six months working in a psychiatric unit, Laing passed the re-sits in 1951 to qualify as a medical doctor.
Laing spent a couple of years as a psychiatrist in theBritish ArmyPsychiatric Unit at Netley, where, as he later recalled, those trying to fakeschizophreniato get a lifelongdisability pensionwere likely to get more than they had bargained for asinsulin shock therapywas being used.In 1953, Laing returned to Glasgow, participated in an existentialism-oriented discussion group, and worked at theGlasgow Royal Mental Hospital.The hospital was influenced byDavid Henderson's school of thought, which may have exerted an unacknowledged influence on Laing; he became the youngestconsultantin the country.Laing's colleagues characterised him as "conservative" for his opposition toelectroconvulsive therapyand the new drugs that were being introduced.
In 1956, Laing went to train on a grant at theTavistock Clinicin London, widely known as a centre for the study and practice ofpsychotherapy(particularlypsychoanalysis). At this time, he was associated withJohn Bowlby,D. W. WinnicottandCharles Rycroft. He remained at theTavistock Clinicuntil 1964.
In 1965, Laing and a group of colleagues created thePhiladelphia Associationand started a psychiatric community project atKingsley Hall, where patients and therapists lived together.The Norwegian authorAxel Jensencontacted Laing at Kingsley Hall after reading his bookThe Divided Self, which had been given to him byNoel Cobb. Laing treated Jensen, and subsequently, they became close friends. Laing often visited Jensen on board his shipShanti Devi, which was his home inStockholm.
In 1967, Laing appeared on the BBC programmeYour Witness, chaired byLudovic Kennedy, on which, alongsideJonathan Aitkenand G.P. Ian Dunbar, he argued for the legalisation ofcannabisin the first live television debate on the subject.In the same years, his views were explored in the television playIn Two Minds, written byDavid Mercer.
In October 1972, Laing metArthur Janov, author of the popular bookThe Primal Scream. Although Laing found Janov modest and unassuming, he considered him a "jig man" (someone who knows a lot about a little). Laing sympathized with Janov but regarded hisprimal therapyas a lucrative business—one which required no more than obtaining a suitable space and letting people "hang it all out".
Inspired by the work of American psychotherapist Elizabeth Fehr, Laing began to develop a team offering "rebirthing workshops" in which one designated person chooses to re-experience the struggle of trying to break out of the birth canal represented by the remaining members of the group who surround him or her.Many former colleagues regarded him as a brilliant mind gone wrong but there were some who thought Laing was somewhat psychotic.
Laing was seen as an important figure in theanti-psychiatrymovement, along withDavid Cooper, although he never denied the value of treating mental distress.
He also challenged psychiatric diagnosis itself, arguing that the diagnosis of a mental disorder contradicted accepted medical procedure: the diagnosis was made on the basis of behaviour or conduct of an examination and ancillary tests that traditionally precede the diagnosis of viable pathologies (like broken bones or pneumonia) occurred after the diagnosis of mental disorder (if at all). Hence, according to Laing, psychiatry was founded on a falseepistemology: illness diagnosed by conduct but treated biologically.
Laing maintained thatschizophreniawas "a theory not a fact"; he believed leading medical geneticists did not accept the models of genetically inherited schizophrenia being promoted by biologically based psychiatry.He rejected the "medical model ofmental illness"—according to Laing, diagnosis of mental illness did not follow a traditional medical model—and this led him to question the use of medication such asantipsychoticsby psychiatry. His attitude to recreationaldrugswas quite different; privately, he advocated an anarchy of experience.
Politically, Laing was regarded as a thinker of theNew Left.
In his early life, Laing's father, David, an electrical engineer who had served in theRoyal Air Force, seems often to have come to blows with his own brother, and had a breakdown himself for three months when Laing was a teenager. His mother Amelia, according to some speculation and rumour about her behaviour, has been described as "psychologically peculiar".
Laing was troubled by his own personal problems, suffering from both episodicalcoholismandclinical depression, according to hisself-diagnosisin a BBC Radio interview withAnthony Clarein 1983,although he reportedly was free of both in the years before his death. These admissions were to have serious consequences for Laing as they formed part of the case against him by theGeneral Medical Councilwhich led to him ceasing to practise medicine.
Laing fathered six sons and four daughters by four women. After his rise as a celebrity, Laing left his first wife Anne Hearne, a former nursing student (m. 1952–1966), and their five children. Subsequently, he married German graphic designer Jutta Werner (m. 1974–1986) with whom he fathered three children. His ninth child, Benjamin, with German therapist Sue Sünkel, was born in 1984. In 1988 Laing's partner until his death, Marguerite, gave birth to his tenth child, Charles. Laing died 19 months later of a heart attack at the age of 61 while playing tennis.
His son Adrian, speaking in 2008, said, "It was ironic that my father became well known as a family psychiatrist, when, in the meantime, he had nothing to do with his own family".His oldest child Fiona, born in 1952, spent years in mental institutions and was treated for schizophrenia.His daughter Susan died in 1976, aged 21, ofleukaemia.Adam, his oldest son by his second marriage, who had been in an increasingly melancholic and fragile state of mind, was found dead in May 2008 in a tent on the island ofFormentera. He had died of a heart attack, aged 41.
In 1913, psychiatrist and philosopherKarl Jaspershad pronounced, in his work,General Psychopathology, that many of the symptoms of mental illness (and particularly ofdelusions) were "un-understandable", and therefore were worthy of little consideration except as a sign of some other underlying primary disorder. Then, in 1956,Gregory Batesonand his colleagues,Donald Jackson, andJay Haleyarticulated a theory of schizophrenia as stemming fromdouble bindsituations where a person receives different or contradictory messages.The perceived symptoms of schizophrenia were therefore an expression of this distress, and should be valued as acatharticand transformative experience. Laing argued a similar account for psychoses: that the strange behavior and seemingly confused speech of people undergoing apsychoticepisode were ultimately understandable as an attempt to communicate worries and concerns, often in situations where this was not possible or not permitted. Laing stressed the role of society, and particularly thefamily, in the development of "madness" (his term).
Laing sawpsychopathologyas being seated not in biological or psychic organs — whereby environment is relegated to playing at most only an accidental role as immediate trigger of disease (the "stress diathesis model" of the nature and causes of psychopathology) — but rather in the social cradle, the urban home, which cultivates it, the very crucible in which selves are forged. This re-evaluation of the locus of the disease process — and consequent shift in forms of treatment — was in stark contrast to psychiatric orthodoxy (in the broadest sense we have of ourselves as psychological subjects and pathological selves). Laing was revolutionary in valuing the content of psychotic behaviour and speech as a valid expression of distress, albeit wrapped in an enigmatic language of personal symbolism which is meaningful only from within their situation.
Laing expanded the view of the "double bind" hypothesis put forth by Bateson and his team, and came up with a new concept to describe the highly complex situation that unfolds in the process of "going mad" — an "incompatible knot".
Laing never denied the existence of mental illness, but viewed it in a radically different light from his contemporaries. For Laing, mental illness could be a transformative episode whereby the process of undergoing mental distress was compared to ashamanicjourney. The traveler could return from the journey with important insights, and may have become (in the views of Laing and his followers) a wiser and more grounded person as a result (Louis, B., 2006, Moving Beyond Prozac, DSM, and the New Psychiatry).
InThe Divided Self(1960), Laing contrasts the experience of the "ontologically secure" person with that of a person who "cannot take the realness, aliveness, autonomy and identity of himself and others for granted" and who consequently contrives strategies to avoid "losing his self".This concept is used to develop apsychodynamicmodel of the mind to explain psychosis and schizophrenia.Laing's theories resemble later ideas aboutself-disorderas a core characteristic of schizophrenia.
InSelf and Others(1961), Laing's definition of normality shifted somewhat.
Laing also wrote poetry and his poetry publications includeKnots(1970, published byPenguin) andSonnets(1979, published byMichael Joseph).
Laing appears, alongside his son Adam, on the 1980 albumMiniatures – a sequence of fifty-one tiny masterpiecesedited byMorgan Fisher, performing the song "Tipperary".
In 1965 Laing co-founded the UK charity thePhiladelphia Association, concerned with the understanding and relief of mental suffering, which he also chaired.His work influenced the wider movement oftherapeutic communities, operating in less "confrontational" (in a Laingian perspective) psychiatric settings. Other organizations created in a Laingian tradition are the Arbours Association,the New School of Psychotherapy and Counselling in London,and the R.D. Laing in the 21st Century Symposiumheld annually atEsalen Institute, where Laing frequently taught.
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