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R.D. Laing: A Life
R.D. Laing, author of "The Divided Self and Knots", was the best-known and most influential psychiatrist of modern times. In this remarkable biography, the only one to be written by a close relative, Laing's son tells the story of his father's life and examines the foundations of his pioneering and unorthodox work on madness and the family. R.D. Laing became famous in the mid 1960s when he co-founded the therapeutic community Kingsley Hall and began his experiments with the therapeutic use of LSD. In the 1970s, Laing studied Zen Buddhism, published poetry, recorded an LP and ran rebirthing workshops across the world - activities which turned him into a guru of radical chic. Yet despite his astonishing empathy with the disturbed, Laing failed to address his own family problems and on the professional side, his practices ultimately led to voluntary disassociation from the medical establishment itself. Adrian Laing's biography, fully updated and with a new foreword, is a brutally honest, sensitive and revelatory portrait of his father's life, as well as a balanced, objective portrait of a troubled genius who changed for ever the way in which the insane are viewed by society and the way they are treated.
254 pages, Paperback
First published December 1, 1997
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February 24, 2016
It must be galling to be the (abandoned) son of a cool, pop psychiatrist whose area of expertise was the way (in Philip Larkin’s words) ‘they fuck you up your mum and dad, they may not mean to but they do.’ And certainly the author, Ronnie Laing’s son, Adrian, doesn’t know whether to spitefully criticise his father (implicating question marks over some truths daddy Laing asserted for himself), worship him, or gush with pride over some of the (alleged) anti-psychiatrist’s greatest achievements. The author acknowledges negative feelings he has wrestled with in the introduction to the Second Edition, ‘The original working title for this book… was ‘R.D. Laing: The Rise and Fall of the Guru from Glasgow.’
The result is a book that does feel uneven at times and, rather appropriately, unemotional at others (is that what abandonment ultimately gives birth to?) It is none the less a revealing insight into maverick psychiatrist/guru/poet R D Laing, although there is a feeling it could be more so. You could reasonably argue that the life-long distance between father and son is responsible for this gap of expectation. Adrian Laing seems confused himself as to whether he is writing this as a biographer or as a son.
You can’t argue with the quote on the back of the book. ‘What emerges from this biography is pure Greek tragedy.’ But it also has real moments of humour (inevitable when dealing with a man who was so far out, so outside of the realms of societal tradition, that he was unafraid to reveal any emotion in public, however extreme) and a front cover that is as psychedelic as the substances Laing partook in and encouraged his therapy attendees to take with him.
Laing was an extraordinary figure, seen as a saint by some, and as a dangerous, deluded doctor unfit to practise by others. He certainly had enough negative traits- a longing for success and celebrity; to be the centre of attention at all times; a need for freedom, for nothing to stand in his way, that ostracised his gaggle of kids (he had 10 in all by 4 different women). But for a time he was part of the zeitgeist of liberation that offered the hope of change in the 60s, rubbing shoulders with Timothy Leary, Stokeley Carmichael, Allen Ginsberg and a host of other ‘names,’ conducting sold-out international tours, particularly in the US on the college circuit, and becoming a best-selling writer, philosopher, poet, the enfant terrible of a world of psychiatry that seemed none too keen to analyse itself.
Ronnie was an existentialist and felt it vital that phenomenology, the experience of the individual, be considered in the treatment of schizophrenics and others suffering from mental illness. In fact his grounding in army and municipal psychiatric units in the 50s led him to believe that the treatment forced on schizophrenics was, at best, misguided and, at worst, barbaric. Working alongside other psychiatrists from the UK and US in particular he formulated ideas of treatment that eschewed medication and focused instead on letting patients be. A period of mental illness was, he believed, the healing process after a breakdown (and typically the death of the ego) and could even be perceived as a period of intense spiritual or mystical experience that could enrich a person’s life and make them a more well-rounded and wise individual upon their recovery. And, as long as patients had support, interaction and space in a caring environment, Laing felt they would recover. These beliefs led to the founding of the Philadelphia Association in London and ultimately the most radical experiment he was involved in, the psychiatric house Kingsley Hall. Here, from 1965-70, live-in patients were given the opportunity to explore the state they were in without intervention or hierarchy.
The events at Kingsley Hall are enshrined in legend and seem brushed over here compared to the space given them in Bob Mullan’s outstanding ‘R.D.Laing: A Personal View’ (Mullan’s work is based around interviews with R D Laing himself so it comes across as something of a fanzine at times but is a glorious read) but the patient that perhaps profited the most from her stay there was Mary Barnes, a schizophrenic nurse who moved in to the unit in order to have a breakdown and, following a period of painting with her own excrement, became an artist, thankfully using traditional materials, and co-author of a book of her experiences that was also adapted to become a very successful play.
The interesting thing about Kingsley Hall was the fact that the therapists involved utilised the spirit of anarchic freedom about the place to have their own breakdowns. Communal drug-taking was common, as were fascinated visitors. There seemed to be an air of theatre about the place and this would have certainly appealed to Ronnie Laing, who loved to create a spectacle. As in other experiments of which he took part there were significantly fewer relapses into mental illness by patients who had had the opportunity to be given the new-age Laingian treatment than the traditional, medicalised version.
Experiments such as Kingsley Hall and the mutual drug-taking that was part of Laing’s psychoanalyst practice in Wimpole Street, London, certainly made Ronnie a notorious figure and this detracted from his achievements. Works such as ‘The Divided Self’, ‘Sanity, Madness and the Family’ and ‘The Politics of Experience’ were ground-breaking in their way and his ability to communicate with schizophrenics and offer them empathy was perhaps his greatest gift of all.
Laing got caught up in the maelstrom of his own ego and had to escape for a year to Sri Lanka and India in order to find some semblance of inner peace. Upon his return there is the suggestion that the world had moved on and he was not the force he once was. You could perhaps argue that the established order, threatened from all sides in the 60s, had prevailed by this time. The 70s and 80s see Laing trying to regain old ground, exploring the concept of rebirthing (the main time Laing became a caricature of himself), publishing poetry, even recording an album (‘Life Before Death’) and indulging more and more completely in drunken benders that led to trouble with the police and, along with other factors, the withdrawal of his right to practise medicine (there is a definite sense that the establishment had been waiting for years for a chance to punish him for his iconoclasm). He was so preoccupied with the link between genius and madness that it is reasonable to suspect that he worried about oscillating between the two.
There is no doubt that it must have been hard to have R D Laing as a parent. But this man questioned the very fabric of madness. He reached out to sufferers when the general concensus was that they should be medicated and ignored. Take what happened during one of his US tours:
‘Before leaving Chicago for San Diego, Ronnie was invited to examine a young girl diagnosed as schizophrenic. The girl was naked and engaged in no activity other than rocking to and fro. The doctors wanted to know what Ronnie thought. Without warning he stripped off naked and entered her room. There he sat with her, rocking in time to her rhythm. After about twenty minutes she started talking to Ronnie- something she had not done since being admitted several months previously. The doctors were stunned. ‘Did it never occur to you to do that?’ Ronnie enquired afterwards, with mischievous innocence.’
The passage sums up the best of R.D. Laing perfectly.
The result is a book that does feel uneven at times and, rather appropriately, unemotional at others (is that what abandonment ultimately gives birth to?) It is none the less a revealing insight into maverick psychiatrist/guru/poet R D Laing, although there is a feeling it could be more so. You could reasonably argue that the life-long distance between father and son is responsible for this gap of expectation. Adrian Laing seems confused himself as to whether he is writing this as a biographer or as a son.
You can’t argue with the quote on the back of the book. ‘What emerges from this biography is pure Greek tragedy.’ But it also has real moments of humour (inevitable when dealing with a man who was so far out, so outside of the realms of societal tradition, that he was unafraid to reveal any emotion in public, however extreme) and a front cover that is as psychedelic as the substances Laing partook in and encouraged his therapy attendees to take with him.
Laing was an extraordinary figure, seen as a saint by some, and as a dangerous, deluded doctor unfit to practise by others. He certainly had enough negative traits- a longing for success and celebrity; to be the centre of attention at all times; a need for freedom, for nothing to stand in his way, that ostracised his gaggle of kids (he had 10 in all by 4 different women). But for a time he was part of the zeitgeist of liberation that offered the hope of change in the 60s, rubbing shoulders with Timothy Leary, Stokeley Carmichael, Allen Ginsberg and a host of other ‘names,’ conducting sold-out international tours, particularly in the US on the college circuit, and becoming a best-selling writer, philosopher, poet, the enfant terrible of a world of psychiatry that seemed none too keen to analyse itself.
Ronnie was an existentialist and felt it vital that phenomenology, the experience of the individual, be considered in the treatment of schizophrenics and others suffering from mental illness. In fact his grounding in army and municipal psychiatric units in the 50s led him to believe that the treatment forced on schizophrenics was, at best, misguided and, at worst, barbaric. Working alongside other psychiatrists from the UK and US in particular he formulated ideas of treatment that eschewed medication and focused instead on letting patients be. A period of mental illness was, he believed, the healing process after a breakdown (and typically the death of the ego) and could even be perceived as a period of intense spiritual or mystical experience that could enrich a person’s life and make them a more well-rounded and wise individual upon their recovery. And, as long as patients had support, interaction and space in a caring environment, Laing felt they would recover. These beliefs led to the founding of the Philadelphia Association in London and ultimately the most radical experiment he was involved in, the psychiatric house Kingsley Hall. Here, from 1965-70, live-in patients were given the opportunity to explore the state they were in without intervention or hierarchy.
The events at Kingsley Hall are enshrined in legend and seem brushed over here compared to the space given them in Bob Mullan’s outstanding ‘R.D.Laing: A Personal View’ (Mullan’s work is based around interviews with R D Laing himself so it comes across as something of a fanzine at times but is a glorious read) but the patient that perhaps profited the most from her stay there was Mary Barnes, a schizophrenic nurse who moved in to the unit in order to have a breakdown and, following a period of painting with her own excrement, became an artist, thankfully using traditional materials, and co-author of a book of her experiences that was also adapted to become a very successful play.
The interesting thing about Kingsley Hall was the fact that the therapists involved utilised the spirit of anarchic freedom about the place to have their own breakdowns. Communal drug-taking was common, as were fascinated visitors. There seemed to be an air of theatre about the place and this would have certainly appealed to Ronnie Laing, who loved to create a spectacle. As in other experiments of which he took part there were significantly fewer relapses into mental illness by patients who had had the opportunity to be given the new-age Laingian treatment than the traditional, medicalised version.
Experiments such as Kingsley Hall and the mutual drug-taking that was part of Laing’s psychoanalyst practice in Wimpole Street, London, certainly made Ronnie a notorious figure and this detracted from his achievements. Works such as ‘The Divided Self’, ‘Sanity, Madness and the Family’ and ‘The Politics of Experience’ were ground-breaking in their way and his ability to communicate with schizophrenics and offer them empathy was perhaps his greatest gift of all.
Laing got caught up in the maelstrom of his own ego and had to escape for a year to Sri Lanka and India in order to find some semblance of inner peace. Upon his return there is the suggestion that the world had moved on and he was not the force he once was. You could perhaps argue that the established order, threatened from all sides in the 60s, had prevailed by this time. The 70s and 80s see Laing trying to regain old ground, exploring the concept of rebirthing (the main time Laing became a caricature of himself), publishing poetry, even recording an album (‘Life Before Death’) and indulging more and more completely in drunken benders that led to trouble with the police and, along with other factors, the withdrawal of his right to practise medicine (there is a definite sense that the establishment had been waiting for years for a chance to punish him for his iconoclasm). He was so preoccupied with the link between genius and madness that it is reasonable to suspect that he worried about oscillating between the two.
There is no doubt that it must have been hard to have R D Laing as a parent. But this man questioned the very fabric of madness. He reached out to sufferers when the general concensus was that they should be medicated and ignored. Take what happened during one of his US tours:
‘Before leaving Chicago for San Diego, Ronnie was invited to examine a young girl diagnosed as schizophrenic. The girl was naked and engaged in no activity other than rocking to and fro. The doctors wanted to know what Ronnie thought. Without warning he stripped off naked and entered her room. There he sat with her, rocking in time to her rhythm. After about twenty minutes she started talking to Ronnie- something she had not done since being admitted several months previously. The doctors were stunned. ‘Did it never occur to you to do that?’ Ronnie enquired afterwards, with mischievous innocence.’
The passage sums up the best of R.D. Laing perfectly.
July 26, 2010
Ronnie, Ronald, Laing, RD and R.D.Laing. His son, Adrian, one of Laing's ten children, here presents an account of the man's turbulent life. The Divided Self was almost compulsory reading for my generation and it is a metonym for all the other stuff that was going on in the 60s heads of the privileged western children. Laing comes across here as a sad character, violent, egotistical, highly charismatic and selfish. Gifted certainly, an accomplished musician by the childhood training his parents ensured he received, and very well read in the classics and theology. Much of his own thinking about psychiatry etc. was not original but synthesising currents around, although he had the gift of expressing ideas well. He was a guru to many for a short spell, a reputation he enjoyed living up to, did some good things like anyone else, did a lot of bad, and hit the bottle with a vengeance. Of course, this is a deeply personal account by Adrian, but well researched using some 200 sources, but it throws light on the theories and practices of a man unable to heal himself of what is roughly called lifelong depression nor the many divisions within: as such a case study of a mind not at peace. Of course, Laing's ideas are separate from all this.
September 20, 2021
R D Laing was the chief exponent of radical psychiatry during the 1960s. He is remembered for revolutionising attitudes toward mental health, particularly toward schizophrenia. Although he never used the label of ‘anti-psychiatry’ (the term was coined and popularised by his colleague, David Cooper) he still serves as a useful chapter heading for the label and all the iconoclastic radicalism that went with it, while for those who never joined the revolution, he is equally useful as a cautionary tale - someone whose own mental health suffered as a result of deying sanctioned medical categories.
The selling point of this biography, of course, is that it is written by R D Laing’s son. A more personal take on the psychiatrist’s life then is to be expected. In practice however, the text plots a relatively academic course through Laing’s life and career: the anecdotes are sparse, the insights slim: those picking this up expecting a ‘tell-all’ expose will likely come away disappointed. The firsthand details, where they do intrigue (usually via the interjection of drink) typically fizzle out before they get going. Adrian is far more interested in setting the public record straight than settling old scores.
In any case,Laing didn't make his name by his hellraising. It was his radical approach to mental health treatment that made him famous. The approach can be summarised like this: madness is a natural healing process with an identifiable beginning, middle and end; one that, if allowed to take its course, should return the patient back to normality. Hence, where other psychiatrists of the time believe madness should be treated, Laing insists it should be left alone. But left alone, as his followers were liable to forget, does not mean leaving people to their own devices; rather, Laing advocates placing the patient somewhere neutral, non-judgmental, where they can ‘act out’ their healing process without some whitecoated box-ticking authority figure telling them to sit down and shut up.
The historical context that gave impetus to this radical approach is outlined early on. Earning his first professional placement at the Killearn neurosurgical unit in Scotland (a lunatic asylum in all but name), Laing is presented with a host of mental conditions that confound even the experts. In the absence of any other ideas, psychotics are confined to padded cells and placed in restraints, some in insulin-induced comas, the really unlucky ones receiving lobotomies performed with predictably catastrophic results (although evidently not predictable to those administering them). Such is the near medieval background against which Laing must treat his patients, a situation barbaric enough to drive even the mildest soul to revolt. Laing’s ‘radical breakthrough’ is simply to sit with his patients, on the floor, presenting himself as an equal rather than an authority figure - what he later dubs "deep rapport".
Having gone onto establish his reputation via a string of successful treatments via the deep rapport method, Laing undergoes a swift rise to the top. The next rung on the career ladder is Gartnavel hospital where his treatment is put to the test under controlled, measurably conditions, the result being published in the The Lancet journal. This then leads to a place at the Tavistock clinic where he earns a qualification in psychoanalysis, which in turn enables him to set up a practice in Wimpole street, tantalisingly close to the practice of Dr. Graham Howe, that other exotic counterculturalist who Laing meets only in passing. Suffice to say, it is here, within his own private clinic, that things get more experimental: LSD is added into the mix, and creche-like spaces are prepared where birth regression and various kinds of rolling around and babbling are actively encouraged.
For the next few years Laing commutes to and from his suburban home, where he eventually sets up with his wife and kids, imported down from Scotland. Although this signals stability and a final coming to maturity, it is also here that the signs of alcoholism begin to show, or at least grow too acute to ignore any longer. Laing frequently shows up at odd hours, usually having been in another woman's bed, with all the predictable arguments you can imagine. His wife eventually breaks with Ronnie and the whole family - minus her husband - is relocated to Scotland. But it is also around this time, unsurprisingly, that Laing’s career gets going. He writes another book with colleague David Cooper - 'Reason and Violence' - and a blueprint is set out for what will eventually become their own treatment centre.
Villa 21, a radical ‘anti-hospital’ initially set up by David Cooper, is where Laing's imagining of psychiatric care done humanely and correctly begin to take shape. Here people are treated on a ‘live in’ basis, existing in, rather than visiting, a therapeutic environment, and there’s proof this non-systematic system works: several people manage to get flats and enter gainful employment after their brief stay, effectively achieving full rehabilitation. Yet Villa 21 is essentially no more than a rented house. Laing wants to transfer the concept to a larger venue, what turns out to be an old children’s hospital in London's East End with a prestigious past, having been opened by HG Wells in the 20s, made famous by Gandhi in the 30s. Many of the original staff, including Cooper, make the move with Laing to the new site.
From the start, however, Kingsley Hall causes a stir. It is now the mid-6os and the counterculture is keen to seek confirmation of any new alternative. Soon Timothy Leary and Alan Ginsberg are checking in to look around, as are the press and even 'straight' psychiatrists from the US, eager to witness the cutting edge firsthand. Yet in the rush toward the daringly au courant one thing seems to have been overlooked: the patients aren’t getting better, in fact they're getting worse, much much worse: a schizophrenic woman in the basement smearing excrement over herself, members of staff have gone native, slinging shit with them, and there has developed that awful thing in communes of an unspoken, informal pressure to be eccentric at all times - a tyranny in many ways worse than the old one, which was at least explicit and could therefore be directly disobeyed.
On the cultural conditions that would allow such a place to exist in plain sight, Adrian is very good. In the relentlessly empowered atmosphere of the late 60s, everything has become a political act, from not attending a lecture to refusing to cut your hair. Kingsley Hall exists within the same framework of coded disobedience and, perhaps unsurprisingly, Kingsley Hall’s provocations grow ever more extreme as the calling out of chaos becomes the one form of political dissent no one wants to imagine. At one point Laing punches out a colleague for disagreeing with one of his pronouncements (an incident which occurs amongst other instances of bullying) while other, more troubling, episodes spill out into the street - as when a founding member of the hall becomes suicidal and is chased by Laing and co. into Bayswater where he is temporarily sedated with a syringe.
Synchronistically, Kingsley Hall winds down in the early months of 1970, neatly booking-ending the decade of radical dissent. The breakup is very much like the breakup of a band: a member of the original lineup goes off to write a book on his experiences called Zone of the Interior (a thinly-disguised satire on Laing's anti-hospital that Laing manages to keep suppressed up until his death), David Cooper goes off to write about the family, Joe Berke and Morty Schatzman go off to form their own tribute act, Arbours, while the diehards follow Laing into a new, ideologically less fractious ventures which culminate in a project called the PA community - a small progressive practice based around yoga and meditation, what we’d now call an alternative treatment centre.
Yet it is at PA that Laing’s currency begins to decline: the books aren’t selling anymore, the treatments don't quite seem as trendy as they used to, and the radical concepts now seem stale in an atmosphere where rule-breaking has become the norm. Thankfully, his ideas are not outdated everywhere. America has been slow to catch up on anti-psychiatry movement but is keen to learn and internalise all the jargon: Life magazine decides to run a feature on him, his last best-selling book, The Politics of Experience, is still a campus favourite, while there is a general push amongst TV execs to get him on screen. All the signs seem to point towards a lucrative US tour, lecturing to eager undergrads.
This phase in Laing’s career, however, sees him begin to resemble something more akin to a guru than a psychiatrist, as the fame denied to him at home finally takes hold abroad. Footage of the tour, which can be found on Youtube as 'R. D. Laing In The USA', confirms the worst of what's related in the text. Laing presents a chaotic figure, rambling, unprepared at the lectern, hectoring, prattling and high-handed in person. It's easy to see how he wound so many up. He comes across as the infuriating sort of person who has to leave his mark on even the most fleeting encounters, with a gnawingly tedious need to be the most provocative person in the room at all times. There’s a good clip, if you can find it, of Laing doing primal scream therapy with Alan Watts, which looks less like therapeutic workshopping as one guru's attempt to out-psyche a rival.
The tour brings something else to the surface that might have otherwise passed unnoticed. Laing has a serious drink problem, so serious even outsiders and peripheral players are starting to notice. But it's worst for those closest to him. He again punches out one of his colleagues; flights are missed or cancelled, getting out of bed is getting harder, and, perhaps worst of all, he’s becoming less and less coherent, a slight problem when you're in the public speaking business. About the alcoholism, Adrian is suitably unimpressed: a childhood of missed birthday parties and embarrassing public displays leave little sympathy. The author makes quite an emphatic case (one of the few times we're reminded of his connection to the subject of the book in fact) that, rather than having been the victim of childhood neglect and abuse as Laing always claimed, that Laing was in fact the centre of attention at home, mollycoddled and swaddled - a paradigmatic case of parental overindulgence.
True or not, what is remarkable is how long Laing manages to get away with it. Although the tour is not a complete disaster, the questions it raises about Laing’s behaviour are left to linger. His name carries cache, and those making money off it are willing to turn a blind eye, making his team look less like colleagues and more like the self-serving enablers of popular entertainment. But as the years progress and the reputation diminishes, even the diehards disappear. Bad poetry and irregular bouts of work at his private practice take up the remainder of the 80s as the last years of his life take on the tell-tale trajectory of a slow decline. The final nail in the coffin comes when one of Laing’s clients makes a complaint about him to the General Medical Council for being drunk and incapable. The Council, keen to get rid of him, strike him off the register, despite the original complaint being so time ago retracted. Like many well-to-do retirees, Laing ends his days on tennis courts and in club lounges, recounting the little he remembers of the good old days. He finally succumbs to a heart attack while playing a game of doubles, his final words and response to the request "Do you want a doctor" being the excellent riposte: "What fucking doctor?"
It is difficult, more so than I expected, to appraise Laing life and work: the worst of his exploits might be seen as a kind of Discordian theatre, exposing the absurdity of our institutions - where anti-hospitals are no less chaotic than real ones, where even someone as sick as Laing can gain access to the levers of power, exposing their innate susceptibility to strong, willfully misguided individuals; or it may be that there was no real method to his madness, that his understanding of madness was no more than an extrapolation of his own bouts of borderline psychosis, typically brought on by drink. A better use for Laing would perhaps have been in some sort of theoretical wing of the psychiatric ward, brainstorming ideas for sanctioned use by those capable of putting them into practice without punching out staff or raiding the medicine cabinet. As is often the case with social reform, we got the right results only with methods that look rather questionable in hindsight.
Of the long-term benefits of these reforms, however, there is little doubt: there is now nothing 'weird' about yoga and meditation, or utilising hallucinogens as an aid or alternative to talk therapy, all of which Laing helped in one way or another to establish. On the other hand, many of the sacred cows of the 60s are arguably now even less acceptable: the current ruling ontology rules out a social causation theory of mental illness, thereby denying any possibility of
a political, or anti-capitalist, critique of mental health; while neurology seems to be slowly chipping away at the childhood trauma explanation of psychosis, thus eliminating Laing's double bind theory as a partial explanation of schizophrenia.
But of all the aims central to Laing's programme, it is the idea that institutions not only manage mental illness, but invent it - manufacturing the disorders with which employees can claim time off and convicts can wangle an appeal, that has dated most noticeably. Apart from psychiatrists like Oliver James, who now is willing to argue that mental disorders are socially constructed? In a climate where psychiatric labeling has become the norm, there seems little appetite for challenging the philosophical basis of mental illness. But such resistance, I suspect, indicates not so much a renewed faith in institutions, as a renewed vigor for definitions, which bureaucracies just so happen to monopolise. A brief perusal of Twitter confirms that bipolar disorder or autism spectrum disorder perform much the same function that self-ascribed labels like 'Black Panther' or 'Marxist' did in the 60s, a way of standing out from the crowd, asserting one's autonomy, albeit this time using the very same terminology as the established order might well use to supress it. Thus in a strange reversal of individualism, the average person now asserts their individuality via the very tools of standardisation the counter culture sought to reject. The old conservatism perhaps has returned, only this time the public - empowered by social networks - are the enforcers, diagnosing one another in a virtual panopticon where no one can see who is administering the electric shocks.
If there's any great lesson to be learned, it's that institutions are now stronger than ever, fortified against radical change and outsider tinkering. No one today would get away with a tenth of what Laing managed in his heyday; if there is to be any 'alternative' approach to mental health, much like homeopathy treatment in hospitals, it will be safely and quietly subcontracted out, thus keeping the overall integrity of the system intact. But I dont think this means we're now a more conservative society, keen to protect our sacred institutions, rather it seems to indicate we're a much more diverse and interconnected society, struggling to maintain order and a sense of proportion. Growing urban populations, with expanding reserves of transient, polyglot workers, means that statistics and standardised tests are more expedient than ever, with claims to authentic experience largely performative and online. There is clearly an expedient, in other words, to systemise treatment that goes beyond the preservation of the system itself. Standardisation is as much a consequence of a society becoming overwhelmingly complex, and things have obviously grown a lot more complicated since the advent of the counterculture.
What we probably need is a new R D Laing, someone to come and shake things up in a way that is fully integrated by our institutions, not simply neutered and farmed out to private practices. But he would have to meet bureaucracy head on, conceding that psychiatric labelling will exist so long as we retain our obsession with forms and box-ticking, effectively, so long as we are committed to living in large overcrowded cities, where it will always be more expedient to put a label in a box than to talk, where it will inevitably be easier to caricature than to understand, promoting a dogma of averageness and treatable discrepancy that limits the individual and celebrates the citizen. Because Laing was right about one thing: diagnosis is a political act, laden with unconscious assumptions, necessarily discriminating and exclusionary; dehumanising and presumptuous; but then so is opening an East London anti-hospital, where the locals could hardly afford the treatment, nevermind the time off work; and so is positioning yourself as guru, lecturing almost exclusively on campus, ignoring the vast swathes who might be just as interested, even if not half as educated; and so is surrounding yourself with an enlightened caste of special thinkers, cut off from the mainstream of thought. There is no escaping it. Laing's radicalism was very much a product of its time, where revolution was in the air and everywhere encouraged, just as we are a product of our own, it's just that our particular revolution doesn't seem to have come yet.
The selling point of this biography, of course, is that it is written by R D Laing’s son. A more personal take on the psychiatrist’s life then is to be expected. In practice however, the text plots a relatively academic course through Laing’s life and career: the anecdotes are sparse, the insights slim: those picking this up expecting a ‘tell-all’ expose will likely come away disappointed. The firsthand details, where they do intrigue (usually via the interjection of drink) typically fizzle out before they get going. Adrian is far more interested in setting the public record straight than settling old scores.
In any case,Laing didn't make his name by his hellraising. It was his radical approach to mental health treatment that made him famous. The approach can be summarised like this: madness is a natural healing process with an identifiable beginning, middle and end; one that, if allowed to take its course, should return the patient back to normality. Hence, where other psychiatrists of the time believe madness should be treated, Laing insists it should be left alone. But left alone, as his followers were liable to forget, does not mean leaving people to their own devices; rather, Laing advocates placing the patient somewhere neutral, non-judgmental, where they can ‘act out’ their healing process without some whitecoated box-ticking authority figure telling them to sit down and shut up.
The historical context that gave impetus to this radical approach is outlined early on. Earning his first professional placement at the Killearn neurosurgical unit in Scotland (a lunatic asylum in all but name), Laing is presented with a host of mental conditions that confound even the experts. In the absence of any other ideas, psychotics are confined to padded cells and placed in restraints, some in insulin-induced comas, the really unlucky ones receiving lobotomies performed with predictably catastrophic results (although evidently not predictable to those administering them). Such is the near medieval background against which Laing must treat his patients, a situation barbaric enough to drive even the mildest soul to revolt. Laing’s ‘radical breakthrough’ is simply to sit with his patients, on the floor, presenting himself as an equal rather than an authority figure - what he later dubs "deep rapport".
Having gone onto establish his reputation via a string of successful treatments via the deep rapport method, Laing undergoes a swift rise to the top. The next rung on the career ladder is Gartnavel hospital where his treatment is put to the test under controlled, measurably conditions, the result being published in the The Lancet journal. This then leads to a place at the Tavistock clinic where he earns a qualification in psychoanalysis, which in turn enables him to set up a practice in Wimpole street, tantalisingly close to the practice of Dr. Graham Howe, that other exotic counterculturalist who Laing meets only in passing. Suffice to say, it is here, within his own private clinic, that things get more experimental: LSD is added into the mix, and creche-like spaces are prepared where birth regression and various kinds of rolling around and babbling are actively encouraged.
For the next few years Laing commutes to and from his suburban home, where he eventually sets up with his wife and kids, imported down from Scotland. Although this signals stability and a final coming to maturity, it is also here that the signs of alcoholism begin to show, or at least grow too acute to ignore any longer. Laing frequently shows up at odd hours, usually having been in another woman's bed, with all the predictable arguments you can imagine. His wife eventually breaks with Ronnie and the whole family - minus her husband - is relocated to Scotland. But it is also around this time, unsurprisingly, that Laing’s career gets going. He writes another book with colleague David Cooper - 'Reason and Violence' - and a blueprint is set out for what will eventually become their own treatment centre.
Villa 21, a radical ‘anti-hospital’ initially set up by David Cooper, is where Laing's imagining of psychiatric care done humanely and correctly begin to take shape. Here people are treated on a ‘live in’ basis, existing in, rather than visiting, a therapeutic environment, and there’s proof this non-systematic system works: several people manage to get flats and enter gainful employment after their brief stay, effectively achieving full rehabilitation. Yet Villa 21 is essentially no more than a rented house. Laing wants to transfer the concept to a larger venue, what turns out to be an old children’s hospital in London's East End with a prestigious past, having been opened by HG Wells in the 20s, made famous by Gandhi in the 30s. Many of the original staff, including Cooper, make the move with Laing to the new site.
From the start, however, Kingsley Hall causes a stir. It is now the mid-6os and the counterculture is keen to seek confirmation of any new alternative. Soon Timothy Leary and Alan Ginsberg are checking in to look around, as are the press and even 'straight' psychiatrists from the US, eager to witness the cutting edge firsthand. Yet in the rush toward the daringly au courant one thing seems to have been overlooked: the patients aren’t getting better, in fact they're getting worse, much much worse: a schizophrenic woman in the basement smearing excrement over herself, members of staff have gone native, slinging shit with them, and there has developed that awful thing in communes of an unspoken, informal pressure to be eccentric at all times - a tyranny in many ways worse than the old one, which was at least explicit and could therefore be directly disobeyed.
On the cultural conditions that would allow such a place to exist in plain sight, Adrian is very good. In the relentlessly empowered atmosphere of the late 60s, everything has become a political act, from not attending a lecture to refusing to cut your hair. Kingsley Hall exists within the same framework of coded disobedience and, perhaps unsurprisingly, Kingsley Hall’s provocations grow ever more extreme as the calling out of chaos becomes the one form of political dissent no one wants to imagine. At one point Laing punches out a colleague for disagreeing with one of his pronouncements (an incident which occurs amongst other instances of bullying) while other, more troubling, episodes spill out into the street - as when a founding member of the hall becomes suicidal and is chased by Laing and co. into Bayswater where he is temporarily sedated with a syringe.
Synchronistically, Kingsley Hall winds down in the early months of 1970, neatly booking-ending the decade of radical dissent. The breakup is very much like the breakup of a band: a member of the original lineup goes off to write a book on his experiences called Zone of the Interior (a thinly-disguised satire on Laing's anti-hospital that Laing manages to keep suppressed up until his death), David Cooper goes off to write about the family, Joe Berke and Morty Schatzman go off to form their own tribute act, Arbours, while the diehards follow Laing into a new, ideologically less fractious ventures which culminate in a project called the PA community - a small progressive practice based around yoga and meditation, what we’d now call an alternative treatment centre.
Yet it is at PA that Laing’s currency begins to decline: the books aren’t selling anymore, the treatments don't quite seem as trendy as they used to, and the radical concepts now seem stale in an atmosphere where rule-breaking has become the norm. Thankfully, his ideas are not outdated everywhere. America has been slow to catch up on anti-psychiatry movement but is keen to learn and internalise all the jargon: Life magazine decides to run a feature on him, his last best-selling book, The Politics of Experience, is still a campus favourite, while there is a general push amongst TV execs to get him on screen. All the signs seem to point towards a lucrative US tour, lecturing to eager undergrads.
This phase in Laing’s career, however, sees him begin to resemble something more akin to a guru than a psychiatrist, as the fame denied to him at home finally takes hold abroad. Footage of the tour, which can be found on Youtube as 'R. D. Laing In The USA', confirms the worst of what's related in the text. Laing presents a chaotic figure, rambling, unprepared at the lectern, hectoring, prattling and high-handed in person. It's easy to see how he wound so many up. He comes across as the infuriating sort of person who has to leave his mark on even the most fleeting encounters, with a gnawingly tedious need to be the most provocative person in the room at all times. There’s a good clip, if you can find it, of Laing doing primal scream therapy with Alan Watts, which looks less like therapeutic workshopping as one guru's attempt to out-psyche a rival.
The tour brings something else to the surface that might have otherwise passed unnoticed. Laing has a serious drink problem, so serious even outsiders and peripheral players are starting to notice. But it's worst for those closest to him. He again punches out one of his colleagues; flights are missed or cancelled, getting out of bed is getting harder, and, perhaps worst of all, he’s becoming less and less coherent, a slight problem when you're in the public speaking business. About the alcoholism, Adrian is suitably unimpressed: a childhood of missed birthday parties and embarrassing public displays leave little sympathy. The author makes quite an emphatic case (one of the few times we're reminded of his connection to the subject of the book in fact) that, rather than having been the victim of childhood neglect and abuse as Laing always claimed, that Laing was in fact the centre of attention at home, mollycoddled and swaddled - a paradigmatic case of parental overindulgence.
True or not, what is remarkable is how long Laing manages to get away with it. Although the tour is not a complete disaster, the questions it raises about Laing’s behaviour are left to linger. His name carries cache, and those making money off it are willing to turn a blind eye, making his team look less like colleagues and more like the self-serving enablers of popular entertainment. But as the years progress and the reputation diminishes, even the diehards disappear. Bad poetry and irregular bouts of work at his private practice take up the remainder of the 80s as the last years of his life take on the tell-tale trajectory of a slow decline. The final nail in the coffin comes when one of Laing’s clients makes a complaint about him to the General Medical Council for being drunk and incapable. The Council, keen to get rid of him, strike him off the register, despite the original complaint being so time ago retracted. Like many well-to-do retirees, Laing ends his days on tennis courts and in club lounges, recounting the little he remembers of the good old days. He finally succumbs to a heart attack while playing a game of doubles, his final words and response to the request "Do you want a doctor" being the excellent riposte: "What fucking doctor?"
It is difficult, more so than I expected, to appraise Laing life and work: the worst of his exploits might be seen as a kind of Discordian theatre, exposing the absurdity of our institutions - where anti-hospitals are no less chaotic than real ones, where even someone as sick as Laing can gain access to the levers of power, exposing their innate susceptibility to strong, willfully misguided individuals; or it may be that there was no real method to his madness, that his understanding of madness was no more than an extrapolation of his own bouts of borderline psychosis, typically brought on by drink. A better use for Laing would perhaps have been in some sort of theoretical wing of the psychiatric ward, brainstorming ideas for sanctioned use by those capable of putting them into practice without punching out staff or raiding the medicine cabinet. As is often the case with social reform, we got the right results only with methods that look rather questionable in hindsight.
Of the long-term benefits of these reforms, however, there is little doubt: there is now nothing 'weird' about yoga and meditation, or utilising hallucinogens as an aid or alternative to talk therapy, all of which Laing helped in one way or another to establish. On the other hand, many of the sacred cows of the 60s are arguably now even less acceptable: the current ruling ontology rules out a social causation theory of mental illness, thereby denying any possibility of
a political, or anti-capitalist, critique of mental health; while neurology seems to be slowly chipping away at the childhood trauma explanation of psychosis, thus eliminating Laing's double bind theory as a partial explanation of schizophrenia.
But of all the aims central to Laing's programme, it is the idea that institutions not only manage mental illness, but invent it - manufacturing the disorders with which employees can claim time off and convicts can wangle an appeal, that has dated most noticeably. Apart from psychiatrists like Oliver James, who now is willing to argue that mental disorders are socially constructed? In a climate where psychiatric labeling has become the norm, there seems little appetite for challenging the philosophical basis of mental illness. But such resistance, I suspect, indicates not so much a renewed faith in institutions, as a renewed vigor for definitions, which bureaucracies just so happen to monopolise. A brief perusal of Twitter confirms that bipolar disorder or autism spectrum disorder perform much the same function that self-ascribed labels like 'Black Panther' or 'Marxist' did in the 60s, a way of standing out from the crowd, asserting one's autonomy, albeit this time using the very same terminology as the established order might well use to supress it. Thus in a strange reversal of individualism, the average person now asserts their individuality via the very tools of standardisation the counter culture sought to reject. The old conservatism perhaps has returned, only this time the public - empowered by social networks - are the enforcers, diagnosing one another in a virtual panopticon where no one can see who is administering the electric shocks.
If there's any great lesson to be learned, it's that institutions are now stronger than ever, fortified against radical change and outsider tinkering. No one today would get away with a tenth of what Laing managed in his heyday; if there is to be any 'alternative' approach to mental health, much like homeopathy treatment in hospitals, it will be safely and quietly subcontracted out, thus keeping the overall integrity of the system intact. But I dont think this means we're now a more conservative society, keen to protect our sacred institutions, rather it seems to indicate we're a much more diverse and interconnected society, struggling to maintain order and a sense of proportion. Growing urban populations, with expanding reserves of transient, polyglot workers, means that statistics and standardised tests are more expedient than ever, with claims to authentic experience largely performative and online. There is clearly an expedient, in other words, to systemise treatment that goes beyond the preservation of the system itself. Standardisation is as much a consequence of a society becoming overwhelmingly complex, and things have obviously grown a lot more complicated since the advent of the counterculture.
What we probably need is a new R D Laing, someone to come and shake things up in a way that is fully integrated by our institutions, not simply neutered and farmed out to private practices. But he would have to meet bureaucracy head on, conceding that psychiatric labelling will exist so long as we retain our obsession with forms and box-ticking, effectively, so long as we are committed to living in large overcrowded cities, where it will always be more expedient to put a label in a box than to talk, where it will inevitably be easier to caricature than to understand, promoting a dogma of averageness and treatable discrepancy that limits the individual and celebrates the citizen. Because Laing was right about one thing: diagnosis is a political act, laden with unconscious assumptions, necessarily discriminating and exclusionary; dehumanising and presumptuous; but then so is opening an East London anti-hospital, where the locals could hardly afford the treatment, nevermind the time off work; and so is positioning yourself as guru, lecturing almost exclusively on campus, ignoring the vast swathes who might be just as interested, even if not half as educated; and so is surrounding yourself with an enlightened caste of special thinkers, cut off from the mainstream of thought. There is no escaping it. Laing's radicalism was very much a product of its time, where revolution was in the air and everywhere encouraged, just as we are a product of our own, it's just that our particular revolution doesn't seem to have come yet.
January 20, 2019
I've just read this biography of R.D. Laing by his son, Adrian, originally published in 1994. It was a vivid reminder of the brilliance, originality and compassion Laing brought to the treatment of schizophrenia, at a time when his own medical training in psychiatry included lobotomy, insulin shock and ECT -the consequences of a totally biologically based view that completely excluded family,interpersonal and social factors. Laing saw the madness of his patients as resulting from the hidden madness of their families and society and had the intuition that allowing people to go through their breakdowns in a safe containing environment, freed from the label of mental illness and constraints and expectations of treatment, would permit them to emerge with a new found authenticity and personal freedom. But in retrospect his greatest gift was the ability to empathize and engage with deeply disturbed individuals, to see them as having something they were trying to communicate through their symptoms and to demonstrate the value of personal connection.
I met him once in the 80's , after years of fame had taken their toll. He was very subdued and matter of fact, talking about how revolutionary it was when he sat down and smoked a cigarette with a schizophrenia patient and just talked. I suggested that so much of what he accomplished involved stripping off theory and labels and returning us to ordinary empathic relating. He took mild umbrage,..I now can imagine how bored he must have been taking his show on the road year after year, trying to maintain that fame once it began to wear thin, famous for books written decades previously, notorious for his personal excesses, by then an object of curiosity as much as respect...
His story ended sadly and badly; too much fame, too many drugs, and especially too much alcohol. But a legacy that survives his own personal failures....
I met him once in the 80's , after years of fame had taken their toll. He was very subdued and matter of fact, talking about how revolutionary it was when he sat down and smoked a cigarette with a schizophrenia patient and just talked. I suggested that so much of what he accomplished involved stripping off theory and labels and returning us to ordinary empathic relating. He took mild umbrage,..I now can imagine how bored he must have been taking his show on the road year after year, trying to maintain that fame once it began to wear thin, famous for books written decades previously, notorious for his personal excesses, by then an object of curiosity as much as respect...
His story ended sadly and badly; too much fame, too many drugs, and especially too much alcohol. But a legacy that survives his own personal failures....
April 6, 2010
An interesting look in to the life of RD Laing - but I had hoped for a little more personal insight especially as this was written by his son.
August 5, 2012
A fascinating and informative, as well as very moving read about a twentieth century icon. There is poignancy in the paradoxical mix of both sadness and joy, anger and admiration in this portrayal, which of course reflects the enigma of R. D. Laing as both compassionate genius and angry maverick. Someone else once said that despite the extreme nature of some of Laing's views and practices, it is still important to consult one's 'inner Laing' at appropriate junctures in life. I found this book helped to consolidate the good things Laing left us and to understand the reasons behind the more destructive aspects of his personality. Ultimately, since it is 'Ronnie's' son who is writing, it is perhaps the most important perspective on Laing we have today. Thoroughly recommend it.
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