A biography of Britain's most famous and controversial psychoanalyst. The book traces Laing's colourful life from his childhood in Glasgow to the heights of fame. It also charts the evolution of his ideas and influence on psychiatry.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
The Scottish therapist R.D. Laing (1927-1989) is a biographer's dream. A multifaceted character who can legitimately be described as both creative and self-destructive, inspiring and dangerous, compassionate and vain, he was tortured and perverse, a gifted healer whose intellect and empathy eventually overwhelmed him. Clay, a psychologist himself, recounts the events in Laing's life that were emblematic of his personality. Beginning with his mother's manipulative double-binds, Clay takes readers through Laing's schooling, medical training at Glasgow and subsequent career in psychiatric hospitals. From the first, Laing questioned the distinction between sanity and madness on which his teachers relied, feeling that, by diagnosing rather than listening, they only made their patients worse. His disenchantment with authority is evident in his epigram: "We don't have fathers any more, we just have brothers." Laing's scholarship is not always consistent: he often rejected the reality of schizophrenia, deeming it socially constructed, but also criticized the family for causing it. As his life progressed, though, he probably fell victim to the disorder. In fact, Clay treats Laing's description in The Divided Self of the three states of schizophrenia (implosion, engulfment and petrification) as a projection of his own inner state. Some of Clay's other psychologizing is strained, however, as when he argues that since Laing got stuck in the birth canal (which he claimed to remember!), he never trusted relationships to last. Laing certainly is a compelling character in his own right, and Clay's insights only enhance his fascination. (Dec.) FYI: This season saw the publication of another book on Laing, The Wing of Madness by Daniel Burston (Harvard Univ.; see Forecasts, June 3).
Copyright 1996 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
love and destruction,
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This review is from: R.D. Laing: A Divided Self : A Biography (Paperback)
This is an excellent, thorough biography about a very enigmatic person, Scottish psychoanalyst R.D. Laing. Laing, having been raised in a family with a mentally ill mother and inattentive father, showed exceptional skill in communicating with people labeled schizophrenic. He seemed able to access them with a compassion rarely shown by his colleagues, who tended to be more interested in exerting power over them, an ultimately unsuccessful way to get along with others whether they're schizophrenic or not. Yet Laing was also a very angry man, often prone to being abusive, not only toward his colleagues, family and friends, but sometimes toward his patients, who in the end he admitted resenting because they filled his life with their misery.
Laing was an icon for many who were struggling with society's expectations and trying to figure out how they fit in the world, and was especially popular with college students. People labeled schizophrenic followed him around as though he was the Pied Piper. Laing helped create treatment centers for people labeled schizophrenic where they were treated like people, not looked down on as defective inferiors. To great extent, most of these places were much more successful treating these people, as shown by lack of recidivism. (Soteria House in San Jose, California, which was ultimately closed after staff allowed violence resulting in death of two persons in a misguided, if not psychotic, effort to put Laing's theories into practice, remains the exception.) R.D. Laing came up with a revolutionary theory that love of a parent was an ultimately destructive force that stole the self from a child. He seems to have viewed the world in the most negative of terms. He himself suffered one bad marriage after the other, and had a lot of problems dealing with his own children, some of whom grew up despising him. For Laing, love was something he desperately wanted, yet feared. He drove those who loved him away from him by behaving abusively toward them. He seemed unwilling to accept the fact that humans are imperfect, and rejected them for their imperfections. Their love, to him, was always tainted with poison that could destroy his perhaps very fragile sense of self. In the end, he killed himself in a way. He knew he had heart trouble and played tennis as hard as he could until he had a heart attack and quickly died. Laing is a fascinating character, a creative destroyer, a man of contradictions. He started an important revolution in psychiatry. He was brilliant but tortured, full of anger and perhaps rage as well. This book is well worth reading, and exceptionally honest and well done.
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