R.D. Laing and the Paths of Anti-Psychiatry

by Zbigniew Kotowicz

In the 1960s and 1970s, the radical and visionary ideas of R. D. Laing revolutionized thinking about psychiatric practice and the meaning of madness. His work, from The Divided Self to Knots , and his therapeutic community at Kingsley Hall, made him a household name. But after little more than a decade he faded from prominence as quickly as he had attained it.
R.D.Laing and the Paths of Anti-Psychiatry re-examines Laing's work in the context of the anti-psychiatry movement. Concentrating on his most productive decade, the author provides a reasoned critique of Laing's theoretical writings, investigates the influences on his thinking such as phenomenology, existentialism and American family interaction research, and considers the experimental Kingsley Hall therapeutic community in comparison with anti-psychiatry experiments in Germany and Italy. The book provides a much needed reassessment and re-evaluation of Laing's work and its significance for psychotherapy and psychiatry today.

Genres: Psychology

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1997

Reviews

[Durakov · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've read too many things about Laing over the last five years, so most of this is not new to me. But, judged on its own merits and purposes, Kotowicz R.D. Laing and the Paths of Anti-Psychiatry is probably the best little introduction to his work you could ask for. It's short, clear, fair, and (unlike so many) sympathetic without fawning over his work.

It's focused on his clinical period between The Divided Self and his trip to Sri Lanka, which is the period the vast majority of people are interested in. I got the most out of the analysis of the shift in perspective between that first, mostly clinical and grounded, major book and his next few: Self and Others, which suspended madness in communication networks; and The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise, which are his "voyage of madness" books. The comparison and accounts of relations with other figures of anti-psychiatry are OK, if a bit meager and lacking footnotes. Short snippets of Laing's clinical behavior mostly endears one to him. At one point, some doctors sent him to talk to a patient who rocked back and forth naked in a cell all day, and Laing removed most of his clothes and just rocked there too until they got to talking. It's hard not to like him for the humbleness and decency that shone through. Even in his sort of wishy-washy, vague "mystic" phase, I can understand where he was trying to go even if I think he failed.

If it was possible to dislike Szasz more than I already did, this did it for me by making me aware of the most ridiculous anti-Communist article focusing on Laing, of all people. Laing was hardly a devoted political militant (probably the most waffly of them all), but all Szasz does is embarrass himself by, for example, using Chile as an example of how socialists can have natural wealth but only real capitalists know how to exploit it: "In this anti-capitalist, anti-colonialist perspective, riches flow from natural resources without human intervention. Such intervention only confiscates and corrupts. The Chilean sitting on top of a mountain of unmined copper is ‘rich’. The child left alone with his uncorrupted self is ‘sane’. Each becomes a ‘victim’ through plunder." CHILE! After Pinochet! Are you kidding me? Disgusting and just so, so stupid. I can forgive a lot of the discusive excesses of this period, but I cannot understand why Szasz was tolerated at all, let alone idolized as some master thinker. But that's neither here nor there, since this is not the focus of the book, but it does provide a nice contrast right at the end.

[Autumn · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a retrospective compendium of Laing's work, with discussion about his early difficulties with the reflective self and power-over in psychiatry- especially personality disorders such as schizophrenia and bi-polar in the early days of psychiatric interventions that mainly consisted of medical restraints.

I particularly enjoyed this novel because I can read Laing's path so clearly...first with his very Foucaultian notions that "madness" is simply being the person who does not fit in or cannot function within their family unit as the family unit would like them to, then in his work with Kingsley Hall. Kingsley Hall was way ahead of it's time in terms of Western psychology, where patients and residents there were truly treated from where they ARE, rather than an imagined endpoint. It appears to me from Kotowicz's work that Laing put his whole heart into Kingsley, and pure exhaustion lead him to travel East.

After his break from Kingsley and his move into the dharma, Laing is portrayed as having lost some of his passion for his earlier work. Kotowicz describes this as Laing just having burned out from the work, but I wonder if Laing didn't instead experience acceptance and compassion for those he was working against (i.e., others in psychiatry that did not share his methods or beliefs about human behaviour). My perception is that Laing experienced an opening-up from his time in the east and his connection with the dharma and, although what would appear to an outsider that he lost his earlier passion, what he replaced that passion with was acceptance and lovingkindness. I like to think if Laing had lived, he would have been at the forefront of DBT research and interventions, and some might say he started the stone path that lead to this integration between acceptance, compsasionate awareness of the self, and challenging social dogmas that perpetuate behaviours that are considered anti-social.

I would love to see pieces of this work integrated into Clinical Psychology curriculums, first because it offers a platform to develop awareness and exploration of the future practitioners attitudes, values and beliefs about persons considered "mad," and also because it is a great portrait of a practitioner on the path of social justice and advocacy, what he was able to do with his calling and how we as practitioners can learn from him.