"This will be the definitive biography of Laing for years to come, and by far the most learned exposition of his thought."
-- Anthony Storr
" The Wing of Madness reminds one of the good old days before the word 'biography' implied a hostile deconstruction of a famous person's hypocrisies and sexual skeletons in the closet . . . Above all, Burston is intent first on mapping how Laing was able to turn his own background and psychiatric experience into an original philosophy of mind . . . Then he distills Laing's ideas from their milieu to set them in historical and critical perspective . . . Burston's biography reminds us that to ignore so inventive a thinker because of changes in fashion is to impoverish our knowledge of ourselves."
-- Michael Vincent Miller, The Boston Sunday Globe
" His timely contribution is a superb intellectual biography whose breadth, balance and depth is not likely to be eclipsed soon . . . His . . . reconstruction of Laing's thought requires more than a passing knowledge of complex traditions in psychiatry, psychology, psychoanalysis, philosophy, sociology, cybernetics and mysticism, both Christian and Oriental. Yet Burston's exposition is always clear enough for the general reader to follow. . .
-- Charles Levin, The Globe and Mail
" . . . a serious and very fair account of R.D. Laing's intellectual development, and very clearly set out."
-- Phil Virden, Asylum: A Magazine for Democratic Psychiatry
Ronald David Laing was born on October 7, 1927, in the Govanhill district of
Glasgow. He was the only child of David Park McNair and Amelia Elizabeth (nee
Kirkwood), a quiet Presbyterian couple of the lower middle class. At school,
Laing excelled in classics. However, the normal school curriculum did not
satisfy his intellectual hunger, and at age 14, he resolved to read everything
in the local library from A to Z, and so encountered Kierkegaard, Marx,
Nietzsche and Freud for the first time. At 17, Laing enrolled in Glasgow
University, and reading widely as ever, went on to specialize in medicine. By
the age of 22, he was deeply immersed in Continental philosophy, working his way
through Nietszche, Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Jaspers,
Wittgenstein and Camus.
After a brief apprenticeship in neurosurgery at the Glasgow and Western Scotland
Neurosurgical Unit at Killearn in 1950, Laing decided to specialize in
psychiatry. He spent 1951-1953 as an army psychiatrist, whose chief task was to
differentiate those soldiers who were truly disturbed from malingerers. Despite
rigid prohibitions on communicating with patients, unless absolutely necessary,
Laing found ways of developing a rapport with inmates by sitting quietly with
them in their padded cells. Laing was anxious to discover how these miserable,
frightened and deeply confused people experienced the world, and how they would
respond given the chance to communicate freely, in their own way and at their
own pace.
Laing left the Army in 1953, and went to the Royal Gartnavel Hospital and
Southern General Hospital, where he worked under Dr. Angus McNiven, a humane
psychiatrist, and Dr. Ferguson Rodger, who was keen to try innovative
approaches. In 1954, Rodger brought Laing to the attention of an Edinburgh
colleague, Dr. J.D. Sutherland, who was then Director of the Tavistock Clinic in
London. With the help of Sutherland, his successor Dr. John Bowlby, and Dr.
Charles Rycroft, Laing came to London in 1956 to train as a psychoanalyst.
During his analysis with Rycroft, he worked as the Registrar of the Adult
Services Section at the Tavistock Clinic, and completed his first book, The
Divided Self, which was published in 1960 In this book, and in Self and
Others (1961) and The Politics of Experience (1967) Laing reproached
Freud and his followers aligning psychoanalysis with the natural sciences to
insure a measure of respectability for his new discipline . In its place, he
proposed a rigorous "science of persons", or an "interpersonal
phenomenology" which, while allowing for the existence of "the
unconscious", owed as much to Hegel, Kierkegaard, Dilthey, Husserl,
Heidegger, Buber and, above all, Sartre, as it did to Freud and his followers .
In 1958, while working at the Tavistock, John Bowlby introduced Laing to Gregory
Bateson's double bind theory of schizophrenia. Intrigued, Laing engaged another
Glaswegian, Dr. Aaron Esterson, in an intensive phenomenological study of more
than 100 families of diagnosed schizophrenics in the London area. In 1962, Laing
traveled to meet Bateson and his co-workers in Palo Alto (and elsewhere across
the U.S.A.) In 1964, Laing and Esterson published the results of their study in
a brilliant and deeply disturbing book, Sanity, Madness & The Family
, which John Bowlby described to me as the most important book about families in
the 20th century.
That same year, Laing published another book, Reason & Violence: A Decade
of Sartre's Philosophy, with South African psychiatrist Dr. David Cooper,
who later coined the term "anti-psychiatry" . Laing always rejected
the "anti-psychiatry" label, but regrettably, it stuck, and in the
ensuing years, friends and detractors alike would think of him as one.
In 1965, Laing, Esterson, Cooper and a group of friends founded the Philadelphia
Association, a charitable foundation for the creation of therapeutic communities
which was committed to the idea that professional and patient roles, as
implemented and understood in mainstream psychiatry, are not conducive to
genuine cure. In fact, they often preclude a genuine understanding of the
psychotic as a person, and tend to confirm patients in their sense of
powerlessness and isolation. To remedy this situation, Laing and associates set
up therapeutic households that provided those suffering acute distress and
disorientation asylum from the world outside, free from the stigma of diagnosis
and the traumas of involuntary treatment. The most famous (and infamous) of
these households was Kingsley Hall, in London's East End, which ran from 1965 to
1970.
In 1967, Laing published The Politics of Experience. Though not his best
book, perhaps, it was the most popular, selling more than six million copies in
the United States alone. At the risk of oversimplifying somewhat , Laing argued
that mad people have regressed to a level of experience that precedes the
acquisition of rudimentary distinctions between inner and outer, past and
present, real and imaginary, good and bad, etc., but that their anguish and
confusion may herald an inner voyage termed metanoia which
under optimal circumstances, can result in the emergence of a more authentic and
integrated way of being-in-the-world.
From about 1965 until his untimely death on August 23, 1989, Laing was
frequently reproached with romanticizing schizophrenia, a charge he steadfastly
denied. "Yes, he denied it," people ask, "but did Laing
romanticize schizophrenia?" If we are asking whether Laing ever minimized
the anguish associated with schizophrenia, the answer is a simple and
unqualified "no".
Experientially, Laing never depicted psychosis as anything but a state of
chronic fear, confusion, isolation and despair, punctuated, on occasion, by
lucid or ecstatic intervals of relatively brief duration. However , Laing also
recalled that when he was training in psychiatry circa 1950, many senior
psychiatrists (e.g Angus MacNiven) insisted said that if they were cared for
respectfully in good-enough surroundings, one quarter to one third of all
schizophrenic patients would eventually recover without the benefits of shock,
drugs or lobotomy.
Later, while training as an analyst, Laing came across numerous instances of
spontaneous remission in which subjects were not merely restored to their so
called pre-morbid condition, but emerged more integrated, insightful and
grounded than before at least by their own reckoning. People like these
invariably experienced the symptoms of their disorder as the outward stigmata of
a radical inner transformation, a tortured epiphany whose symbolic and
existential significance registered only after the fact, or as their crisis was
beginning to abate.
Basing himself on numerous case histories and first person accounts, and on the
reports of friends and former patients who had metanoia -type experiences, Laing
concluded that in optimal circumstances, a psychotic interlude can have
potentially positive or redeeming characteristics. To wrestle a redemptive
measure of freedom and insight from a psychotic interlude , and to prevent the
dreaded decline into chronicity, said Laing, the disordered person needs a
perfectly safe, non-coercive environment and the supportive and non-intrusive
presence of others who have also made this perilous inner journey, and can act
as guides, facilitators and protectors.
Unfortunately, Laing's enthusiasm for the metanoia concept was such that during
most of the1960's he supposed that most psychotic disturbances would
follow this pattern, if only the requisite conditions were met . Meanwhile,
though he was guilty of exaggeration and idealization, for a time, by
romanticizing madness in this way, Laing was also trying to humanize it, or
rather, our conception of it, and by implication, to change our approaches to
treatment. He argued consistently that the "abyss of understanding"
between normal or neurotic and psychotic people that was postulated by Kraepelin,
Bleuler, Jaspers, et al. is not a given, but an artifact; a result of the
failure of empathy and understanding. His early work is full of clinical
vignettes in which a schizophrenic's sense of the world and their own bodies as
menacing, uncanny and fragmented becomes readily intelligible, and the seemingly
bizarre delusions of his patients become suddenly fraught with meaning.
Unfortunately, while many of his readers were riveted by his powers of
narration, few were able to get beyond the anecdotal level to grasp the
underlying theoretical orientation Laing was developing. And their difficulties
in this regard where compounded by many latent tensions and contradictions in
Laings evolving body of work that neither his critics nor expositors were
really able to bring to light.
From the mid-sixties to the early seventies, when Laing was at the height of his
fame, he was also angrily opposed to drugs, shock treatments or any surgical
intervention that might cause the metanoia process to abort or misfire in
short, to almost all of mainstream psychiatry. Indeed, though he rejected the
"anti-psychiatry" label that was thrust upon him by David Cooper, he
stated that society has an interest in short-circuiting the metanoia process,
and that psychiatry merely implements this societal agenda.
To be fair to Laing and his followers, Laing never claimed that the onset of
acute psychosis always heralds a metanoic journey. He merely said that it
usually would, or could, during his period of unbridled enthusiasm. And after a
lengthy sojourn in India, from 1969 to 1971, Laing's attitude toward psychosis
was decidedly more cautious. When pressed on this issue in the 1970's, he
estimated the odds of spontaneous recovery, even in optimal circumstances, at 50
per cent or less. And though his opposition to electroshock continued unabated,
Laing was no longer opposed to the use of psychotropic medication, provided the
patient was well apprised of the risks involved in taking it.
In view of the preceding, if the question is framed as follows: "Did Laing
ever, at any time, romanticize schizophrenia, despite the suffering it
entails?", the answer obviously is "Yes". From 1964 to 1969,
Laing was definitely "over the top". But some of Laing's best work
theoretical on schizophrenia was done between 1960 and 1964. Though The
Divided Self, Self and Others and Sanity, Madness and the Family
prefigures his later work somewhat, none of it romanticizes schizophrenia in any
way.
So while Laing did embark on a personal crusade to reframe our concepts of
madness during the mid-1960's, it does not follow that everything he said or
wrote he said or wrote immediately before or after this period is invalid. And
this brings us to his other agenda. In addition to humanizing
schizophrenia, Laing was trying to debunk the myth of normality. For
cultural/historical reasons, we Westerners habitually construe madness in privative
terms, as the loss of reason, of ego functions, relatedness to others,
etc., and regard normality as a state of plenitude, or of robust benefits that
no reasonable person would wish to discard. Strangely enough, Laing maintained
that the reverse is often true as well that normality entails hidden losses.
So unlike the majority of mental health professionals, Laing construed normality
as a kind of deficiency disease, characterized by lack of authenticity, and/or
access to "deeper" levels of the psyche, i.e. the primitive and the
sublime.
Laing's critique unfolded in several stages. In The Divided Self, (1960)
he noted that the "normal" individual is someone who enjoys a
relatively stable and continuous sense of identity, of personal autonomy, of
being comfortable with their bodies, and above all, an ability for authentic
self-disclosure, emanating from a state of primary ontological security.
While Laing made normality sound quite attractive by comparison with the
wretchedness and despair of schizoid and schizophrenic experience, he did not
glamorize it. On the contrary, Laing said that adaptation to society
necessitates acquiescence in the widespread reification of human relationships,
which is overlaid with a layer of unconsciousness, or of false-consciousness
and/or of simple indifference. Mad people, by contrast, are perplexing and often
intolerable to normal folk, but sometimes "apperceive" truths that are
only glimpsed by poets and prophets when the proverbial scales fall from their
eyes, and the wretched truth is laid bare.
In Self and Others, published in 1961, Laing's definition of normality
shifted somewhat. In The Divided Self, Laing equated normality with
ontological security. Now, however, Laing defined normality as a state of
unconscious complicity in "social phantasy systems". This argument was
repeated with even greater emphasis in The Politics of Experience. Now,
instead of stressing what is gained by being normal, as he did in The Divided
Self, Laing totally reversed his initial emphasis and stressed what is lost
to repression here. What is repressed among normal people, said Laing, are not
instincts (Freud), or even specific events or losses, or the feelings and
phantasies engendered by them, but whole modalities and possibilities of
experience and relatedness to others that are proscribed by society as
irrational, excessive, infantile and so on. Yet the self-estrangement inherent
in this process is not a source of consciously experienced suffering, nor of
unconscious conflict, and therefore, of neurotic symptomatology (a la Freud). On
the contrary, it dissipates conflict, conducing to a "conflict free"
adaptation to one's surrounding one that passes for health, more or less.
With so much of ourselves wrapped in obscurity, said Laing, we might at least
honor the mad for gaining intermittent access to domains of experience that we
deliberately shun in the interests of maintaining our pseudo-sane adaptations.
Laing wasn't the only one who viewed normality this way, of course. Many of his
contemporaries, including Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, Paul Goodman, and Jules
Henry took a very similar view. Nowadays, many feel that this widespread
perception was endemic to the 60's and early 70's, and no longer relevant today.
Laing, however, did not think of his view of normality as the expression of a
distinctively 60's sensibility or a trendy, adolescent radicalism, but as an
aspect of what Aldous Huxley termed "the perennial philosophy". In an
interview with Douglas Kirsner, in Feb., 1980, he remarked:
"If we take the world's well-known spiritual teachers from the Buddha to
the Judaeo-Christian tradition, to the Greek tradition and the Islamic
tradition, it is said all over the place that most people by any rigorous
standard are pretty daft . . . (And) any student in a first year philosophy
course is expected to begin to realize that the unreflective ordinary state of
mind, as soon as one looks at it, is practically bound to discover . . . deep
programmed epistemological errors so I don't think I am saying anything
unusual here".
In any case, and in fairness to his critics, Laing did briefly
romanticize madness as a result of his desire to humanize our conceptions of
psychosis , and to debunk prevailing conceptions of normality. However, that
should not obscure or detract from his many other accomplishments, or the
lasting value of his work, which I summarize in "The Crucible of
Experience".
See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._D._Laing
Updated: 11/17/10