Abstract
R.D. Laing was a radical psychiatrist, and erstwhile anti-psychiatrist, who rose to international fame on the back of the counter-cultural wave of the 1960s. His critiques of psychiatry, society and the nuclear family fascinated, shocked and appalled his contemporaries. This book compiles essays about his life, works and legacies by people who, with one exception, knew Laing. It also includes the text of an interview with Laing himself. The topics of the essays range from Laing’s theories of the self, to his therapeutic practices, and a description of life in a Laingian therapeutic community. In many respects this book covers well-trodden ground about Laing, but it also offers a significant contribution to the literature.
During his life, Laing wrote very little about his therapeutic practice. Consequently, the real contribution of this book is its focus on the intertwining of Laing’s practice and his personality. His ability to be ‘serene or cruel or reckless or cold or warm or compassionate or manipulative or arrogant or humble’ (p. 14), depending on who he was talking to, comes through clearly in other works (notably Adrian Laing’s R.D. Laing: A Biography). However, this collection explores how Laing’s unpredictable character manifested in his therapeutic practice. The writers approach the subject from the point of view of style, love, compassion and even sorcery. Their approaches are illustrated with illuminating personal anecdotes as well as interpretations of Laing’s published work. The reader is left with a sense of why Laing’s therapeutic approach resisted schematization – his ability to comprehend a psychotic patient’s world, his compassion for people in extreme states of mind, his sense of timing, and much more. The subtlety of this is well illustrated by John Heaton’s description of an LSD trip that he took with Laing in the early 1960s to explore the drug’s therapeutic possibilities: After about an hour or so I began to feel depersonalised and began to murmur was I real, was he real, and so on. Ronnie [Laing] said no words but began to slowly and deliberately light his pipe. I watched fascinated and then suddenly everything somehow clicked into place and the rest of the trip was enjoyable. (p. 56)
Heaton concludes that Laing had used his presence in the room and the pre-conceptual Zuhandenheit (Heidegger’s readiness-ready-to-hand) of the pipe to anchor Heaton’s sense of self, allowing him to relax into his altered state.
However, there is also a troubling side to this anecdotal approach. Fritjof Capra’s essay is an extended anecdote about how he got into an argument – about the place of consciousness in science – with Laing at a conference and how Laing became convinced by Capra’s argument. Far from telling us anything about Laing, Capra brags that he once unseated the great man in an intellectual joust. The essay is a reminder of the instability of anecdotal evidence and the risks of relying on it as a historical source. However, the book does mitigate this to some extent by providing numerous authors’ perspectives, and allowing the reader to develop a more gestalt sense of Laing’s practice.
As an assessment of the current state of Laing’s far-reaching legacy, this book is a mixed bag. Martin Schulman draws an interesting comparison between Laing’s approach and America’s postmodern relational psychoanalysis movement; and several contributions, particularly those by Michel Guy Thompson and Steven Gans, engage with Laing’s influence of the independent therapeutic community movement. It also outlines some interesting challenges for historians. For instance, Andrew Pickering’s essay hints at the importance of Laing’s social network and its influence on his work, and Heaton’s essay discusses the influence of Heidegger on Laing; both are subjects which demand further research.
However, although in his introduction to the book Thompson acknowledges the breadth of Laing’s contribution, the essays are limited to Laing’s therapeutic legacy. They fail to account for Laing’s influence on the Mental Patients’ Union and other service-user groups. They avoid his political influence on the counter-culture of the 1960s. They do not explore his influence on popular culture, evident in films from Family Life (1971) to All Divided Selves (2011), which earned Luke Fowler a Turner Prize nomination in 2012.
Above all they focus on the positive aspects of Laing’s legacy, making no attempt to account for the difficulties that his legacy raises. For instance, the risks of a Laingian approach go unmentioned. In one chapter Thompson provides an intriguing description of the life of a man, ‘Jerome’, in a Philadelphia Association community whose unexpressed need to silently count to 1,000,000 and back led to bed-sores, incontinence and starvation. Although Jerome’s story had a positive outcome, it was difficult to read without remembering David Reed’s Anna (1979), which describes his wife’s treatment by a Laingian therapist culminating in her eventual self-immolation and death. Equally the relationship between Laing’s immensely popular critique of psychiatric hospitals and the mixed legacy of neo-liberal deinstitutionalization goes uninterrogated.
In the last few years there has been a resurgence in interest in Laing and his comrades. Metanoia, the film about Laing’s life, will be released in 2016; Anti-University Now! is a project in East London that is exploring the possibilities of reviving the Anti-University which Laing co-founded; and there have been numerous plays, concerts, screenings and events in 2015 marking the 50th anniversary of Laing’s Philadelphia Association. This book is an interesting contribution to the literature on Laing. With few exceptions it is readable, enjoyable and insightful in its discussion of his therapeutic practice and its insights into his theories. However, as an assessment of his legacy this collection can be no more than a starting point and leaves many questions yet to be answered.