Customer Reviews

The politics of the family and other essays (World of man)

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The modern day psychotherapist is no longer a "psychologist," or one who studies and understands the mind in great depth. He or she is a mechanic with a toolbox of mostly behavioristic and cognitivistic wrenches and screwdrivers. He or she is often no better than the majority of medical model folks who knee-jerk a particular pill for a particular diagnosis. (Depression? Zoloft sertaline. Anxiety? Celexa citalopram. PTSD? Seroquel quetiapine. Bipolar? Lamictal lamotrigine.)

The prescriptions may even work. But the patient never comes to terms with who he or she is. And when the patient's ship of (emotional) states hits the next hurricane, he or she is too often no better prepared for it than the last one.

Laing was gone before SSRI's, atypical anti-psychotics and third-generation anti-convulsants hit the market. His passing also predated the revolutions lead by Skinner, Foa, Ellis and Beck. But he understood the "material" patients need to identify and "work on" at least as well as Erik Erickson, Jules Henry, Stephen Karpman, Eric Berne, Alice Miller, Gregory Bateson, Don Jackson, John Clausen, Theodore Lidz, Murray Bowen, John Weakland and Jay Haley.

Moreover, his verbal finesse was the stuff the "classics" were made of. Few writers in any literary domain can match his metaphors. The "tennis game" on page 15 ranks with the famed "knots" he uses again here. His explanation of Bateson's "double-bind" and Watzlawick's "paradoxical injunction" (pp. 106-109) is far easier to grasp than either Bateson's or Watzlawick's.

And no one among the several hundred authors I've encountered in this field has ever edified the secret rules of the games we play with family members and later projections thereof more elegantly -- and usefully -- than Laing.

Regardless of the truly wonderful techniques we have today (including values clarification, critical thinking skills and mindfulness meditation), I'm forced by a quarter century of experience to blame the rather sorry state of psychotherapy on the following: Most therapists don't know what the problems really are. They may know =what= the patients think, but not truly =why= they think it.

A course in Laing's works will clear that up in a hurry. And this one is =not= an "elective."

RG, Psy.D.

This book is strange of his writings. It is composed simply of interviews about patients and their families. These interviews were recorded by the tape recorders or the hidden observers. It's all of this book. All conversations or their situations, however, talk something important to us silently. No theoretical comments are added, but only the fact. Let the theoretical considerations trusted to others in other places. By understanding the malicious situations of the patients, it will show us the important method of the observation about our unconscious situations of conflicts.

This book is strange of his writings. It is composed simply of interviews about patients and their families. These interviews were recorded by the tape recorders or the hidden observers. It's all of this book. All conversations or their situations, however, talk something important to us silently. No theoretical comments are added, but only the fact. Let the theoretical considerations trusted to others in other places. By understanding the malicious situations of the patients, it will show us the important method of the observation about our unconscious situations of conflicts.

I could never get this book. It took my twenty years of reading the Divided Self to fully understand this author. This book was also titled the bird of paradise, but is not the book the other reviewer thought it was, that was also a book by RD Laing but with another author and also had the word *family* in the title. This book originally was not like an accounting of families but philosophical and psychiatric speculation. This book is all fine for someone studying psychology or psychiatry but for fellow consumers of mental health or their families I would say avoid this rather weighty tome.