The Legacy of R. D. Laing

An appraisal of his contemporary relevance

M. Guy Thompson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317532460
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The name R. D. Laing continues to be widely recognized by those in the psychotherapy community in the United States and Europe. Laing's books are a testament to his breadth of interests, including the understanding of madness, alternatives to conventional psychiatric treatment, existential philosophy and therapy, family systems, cybernetics, mysticism, and poetry. He is most remembered for his devastating critique of psychiatric practices, his controversial rejection of the concept of 'mental illness,' and his groundbreaking center for people in acute mental distress at Kingsley Hall, London.

Most of the books that have been published about Laing have been written by people who did not know him personally and were unfamiliar with Laing the man and teacher. The Legacy of R. D. Laing: An appraisal of his contemporary relevance is composed by thinkers and practitioners who knew Laing intimately, some of whom worked with Laing. This collection of papers brings a perspective and balance to Laing's controversial ideas, some of which were never addressed in his books. There has never been a collection of papers that address so thoroughly the question of who Laing was and why he became the most famous psychiatrist in the world.

As M. Guy Thompson's collection illustrates, there are now a number of alternatives to psychiatry throughout the world, and much of this can be credited to Laing's influence. The Legacy of R. D. Laing will ensure the reader has a keen grasp of who Laing was, what it was like to be his patient or his friend, and why his thinking was far ahead of its time, even in the radical era of the 1970s. It is timely to appraise the nature of his contribution and bring Laing back into contemporary conversations about the nature of sanity and madness, and more humane approaches to helping those in profound mental distress. This book offers an in-depth insight into the work of R.D. Laing. It will be a must read for psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, family therapists, psychiatrists and academics alike.

M. Guy Thompson, PhD is a Personal and Supervising Analyst at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California and Chairman of Free Association, Inc., a non-profit organization devoted to the dissemination of Laing's ideas, in San Francisco. Dr. Thompson received his psychoanalytic training from R. D. Laing and associates at the Philadelphia Association and is the author of numerous books and journal articles on psychoanalysis, phenomenology, and schizophrenia. He currently lives in San Rafael, California.

1
Who was R. D. Laing?

Peter Mezan, PhD^*

I met R. D. Laing the end of 1970, beginning of 1971. This was around six months after Kingsley Hall shut its doors and shortly before he closed his Wimpole Street psychoanalytic practice, packed up his family, and went off to Ceylon and India to study yoga and meditation. I don’t know how many of you remember 1970. How many of you were even born in 1970? That was 43 years ago – 43 years! Wow, it makes me want to keel over right here and now.

By 1971, Laing had become a major culture hero and the most famous living psychiatrist in the world. To explain how that happened, let me give you a brief reminder of what was going on in those days. Revolution was in the air, everywhere you looked. The political culture, the social culture, the artistic culture, the intellectual culture – all of it was in an uproar. In this country, there’d been the unthinkable assassinations, the Vietnam War was raging, there was the civil rights movement, the women’s rights movement, protests everywhere you turned.

All this was following an era of social and political conformity, or what I would call the culture of “Because I Say So”: because the president said so, because the generals and politicians said so, because the local draft board said so, because the police said so, because the doctors and the psychiatrists said so, because the teachers and professors said so, because everybody’s parents said so. The assumption was that power and authority were benign and could be trusted to be more or less looking after your best interests. And suddenly it seemed they weren’t.

Nothing seemed to be working the way it was supposed to. Police who were supposed to be protecting you were beating up students who were protesting the war, civil rights marchers were being beaten and killed on the orders of governors and sheriffs, and the soldiers, who were no more than kids themselves, were either being slaughtered in Vietnam or shooting and killing college students at Kent State, right here at home. And everyone was watching in horror and confusion as all of this played out right in front of them every night on their TVs. It was not very hard to feel as though either the world had gone crazy or you had.

Enter R. D. Laing.

I was living in London at the time. I was an editor of Nature, the British science journal, and commuting to Cambridge where I was teaching literature. Somehow I got it into my head that I wanted to try writing for a living and thought I’d start by doing some freelance journalism for American magazines. I had no idea how to go about this, so in a burst of preposterous optimism and naiveté I wrote a letter to Tom Wolfe, one of my literary heroes ever since I’d read The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, and asked him what I should do. Amazingly, he wrote back. He said all you have to do is get something published in one of the following five magazines, and you’ll have a career: The New Yorker, Esquire, The Atlantic, Harper’s or Playboy. No problem.

So I wrote to the editors of all five magazines, told them a little about myself, said I’d be in New York in a couple weeks and had some ideas about articles that I was sure would be perfect for them. All five said great and gave me appointments to meet when I was in the city. I made up a list of subjects I wanted to write about – one of them was to do a profile of R. D. Laing.

Here’s one reason I was interested in R. D. Laing. When I was a Harvard medical student, a professor from the psychiatry department took a bunch of us on a tour of the Metropolitan State Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts. It was reputed to be one of the worst state mental hospitals in the country. I think it was ranked 43rd or 44th. After we spent a couple hours roaming in and out of the wards filled with chronic schizophrenics, some of whom had been there for years, I remember there was a long hallway down in the basement, and three lines of patients quietly waiting. One line was waiting for electroconvulsive therapy, one for insulin coma therapy, and one for a prefrontal leucotomy. As medical students, we were invited to observe each of these treatments in action. By the time I watched some poor woman strapped down and being put into an insulin coma, I was close to throwing up. That was 1966.

Then it was 1968, and I had moved to England, and I came across The Divided Self. Me and everybody else. Out of nowhere, as it seemed to me, everybody was talking about R. D. Laing. Radicals were honoring him as a philosopher of revolution. Intellectuals were coming close to blows about him, unsure whether he was a demagogue or a thinker to be reckoned with. Psychiatrists were going berserk with indignation, feeling as though he was not only attacking what they did but also undermining their authority about mental illness of any kind. And then there were the masses of people who felt he was talking directly to them – that he was expressing something they had been feeling but had never articulated to themselves. People from all over the world were actually picking up and moving their whole families to London to be near him and be part of things.

And, of course, there were all the rumors and opinions about him, that couldn’t help but make me curious. People who had never met him had it on good authority that he was an illuminated saint, a charlatan, a bourgeois revisionist, a dangerous paranoid-schizophrenic who’d had multiple hospitalizations, that he gave all his patients LSD, that he was in the habit of punching some of his patients in the nose (I kid you not), that his once wonderful mind had been ruined by alcohol or mushrooms or what have you and on and on.

Oh, and one other reason I wanted to write about him. I had actually met him once in a shoe store on the King’s Road in Chelsea, and the encounter had stuck in my mind. I recognized him from the spooky cover photograph of The Self and Others – deep-set, shadowy, X-ray eyes beneath a high-angled brow. I was returning a pair of fine Italian footwear that had fallen apart in a week, and R. D. Laing was being extremely patient with a longhaired salesman who kept bringing him the wrong sandals. When the salesman went back to the storeroom for the third time, Laing smiled, hunched his shoulders and walked over to me: “I hope you don’t mind my asking like this, but I was wondering where you got that bush jacket you’re wearing. It’s just the sort of thing I could use – lots of pockets.” I stifled an impulse to just give it to him right off my back, then and there, and explained it came from Africa. He nodded amiably and went back to dealing with the salesman who had reappeared with yet another pair of the wrong sandals. Laing sighed. “I suppose I could go barefoot, but I’m a doctor, you see, and there are some people who might think it a bit odd.”

So fast-forward, and I’m in New York, heading to my appointments with the editors. This was not the New York I remembered from 1966: A computer in Grand Central Station cast my horoscope, people in saffron robes were chanting Hare Krishna in front of my bank, some stockbrokers I knew were playing the market by casting the I Ching (and swearing by it, incidentally), Allen Ginsberg was singing “Om Mani Padme Hum” in a Chicago courtroom and some of the most sober and intelligent of my friends were into the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the Kabbalah and the Tarot.

All five editors were enthusiastic about one subject or another, but the editor of Esquire, Don Erikson, was especially excited about a profile of Laing, because since the demise of Kingsley Hall, Laing had withdrawn from the public eye and refused to give interviews to anybody.

“I guarantee you I can get to him,” I told Erikson.

How hard could it be? I’d already bumped into him in a shoe store, and I’d had no problem getting a quick response from no less a famous writer than Tom Wolfe.

Three months later I was ready to write an article about how I never got to R. D. Laing. For three months I’d written him letters that disappeared without trace – any of you remember how people used to write actual letters? I’d called his Wimpole Street office umpteen times, and either nobody answered, or somebody answered and said they’d give him a message, maybe they did, maybe they didn’t, but I never heard back. Then one day a woman answered who said she was a friend of his who just happened to be in his office and told me she thought Laing probably wouldn’t give anybody an interview – ever.

By this time, I had talked to more than two dozen of his colleagues, friends, patients and acquaintances, all of whom had been interesting to meet in their own right but who brought me no closer to the man. Not to mention that the pictures they gave me of him were hard to reconcile, to the point that sometimes I wondered if they were talking about the same person. I was sure some of these people had known him pretty well, and yet they disagreed about whether he was serene or cruel or reckless or cold or warm or compassionate or manipulative or arrogant or humble.

Then one of the Philadelphia Association therapists (this was the umbrella organization of asylum communities that began with Kingsley Hall) said to me, “Why don’t you go ask some schizophrenics about him.” Okay, I’ll go ask some schizophrenics. I went to visit one of the communities in a condemned row house in North London. Understand that, up until then, my assumption from having been a medical student was that patients are sick, doctors are not – or at least patients are sicker than their doctors. So on my way there, I kept reminding myself, “No doctors, no patients – just people.”

There was no doorbell, so I just walked in. It wasn’t the most welcoming scene. There was none of the social niceties I was accustomed to, which I soon discovered was the norm in the Laing world. No hellos, no good to meet yous, no take a seat, no introductions, so I had to pick up on who everybody was by listening. There was somebody tall by the door sucking like crazy on an unlit pipe, and Mike from Phoenix, and Mary Ann from Kentucky, and Tom from Harvard, and Sadie from Los Angeles, and Gregorio from Buenos Aires and David Bell, a charming schizophrenic gentleman who had formerly been a computer engineer who now went by such names as Little Lamb, My Sweet Blue Angel and Oedipus of the Rex family. The conversation was serious and earnest and like no other conversation I’d ever heard, with a lot of mentions of mystifications and invalidations and reifications, like so many pages out of Laing’s books. This I found a little disconcerting, so at a moment of calm, when someone got up to make brownies, I made a mild comment that everybody was sounding a bit Laingianized. Some didn’t know what I was talking about. Others maybe yes, maybe no. David Bell, who the whole time was quietly muttering to himself about how Oedipus was a man of no social intelligence, suddenly said to me, “Yes, it’s an interesting problem.” It was the only normal, thoughtful response I got.

Finally one day, in a last gasp of hope, I called up Leon Redler, an American psychiatrist who was one of the original people involved with Laing in Kingsley Hall, and asked him the next time he spoke to Laing to please mention that I was still here, still trying and eager to meet him. As an afterthought, I also said maybe tell him that we’d met once before: “Tell him I was the guy with the bush jacket in the shoe store last spring.”

Later the same afternoon a lady called up claiming to be Laing’s secretary: “Dr. Laing will see you tomorrow morning at eleven. Oh, and Dr. Redler said to tell you that the bush jacket helped.”

Laing was smaller and slighter than I recalled and looking that day, a bit like a leprechaun. Under a brown suede jacket he was wearing a green work shirt buttoned up to the neck, partly hanging out of green velvet trousers. I, of course, was wearing the bush jacket. He nodded at the jacket. “I remember,” he said.

We climbed the stairs to his consulting room and sat down and … nothing. He said nothing, waiting for me to begin, watching me from a skew angle, and in a way that let me know he’d be quite content to go right on saying nothing for as long as I cared to be watched.

I knew I had a lot of questions, but I couldn’t think of them. So I said, “Who are you, Dr. Laing?” He looked bored and answered immediately. “What you’re really asking when you ask me who I am, where I’m at, is who are you.”

Uh-oh.

I mumbled something to the effect that anything one asks about anything is in some respect a question about oneself. But I was nervous. I began talking faster and faster, saying god knows what. He was beginning to twitch and roll up his eyes, signs I’d been forewarned ether of impatience or of hard concentration. I was pretty sure it wasn’t the latter. Just please let me not give him an asthma attack, I thought. I had heard that some people bring on his asthma. But I couldn’t think I was up to that yet either.

Finally he made a sweeping motion with his hand. “I’ve done nothing original, nothing that hasn’t been done before, that people don’t already know.”

I was pretty sure he was overestimating what people know, but I said, “Maybe people don’t know they know.”

Finally some kind of agreement, and for a second I felt confident enough to ask if I could turn on the tape recorder. “I don’t think so. I’d rather you didn’t,” Laing said. “I can’t exactly explain why, but it’s just whatever is going to happen between us isn’t going to happen there.” He began fidgeting with some lint on his trouser leg. I was beginning to understand why some people found him a difficult man.

I took another stab at trying to find out how he came to be whoever he is.

“Look,” he said, his eye rolling flipping into a higher gear, “in a sense I am whoever people observe me to be. I talk with a Scots accent, I wear these clothes, I work here” – gesturing at the analytic couch – “I’m a householder in Belsize Park Gardens with my wife and two children. And also there’s my presence – whatever I communicate to people physically.”

Suddenly I saw an opening and reminded him of what I’d overheard him telling the shoe salesman about the requirements of acting like a doctor – for instance, not going barefoot, and a passage in The Self and Others about a little boy pretending that he was an explorer, then a lion, then a sea captain, then simply himself, just a little boy. And some years later, that he is a grown-up, and some years later, that he is an old man, when suddenly he remembers that it had all been a game of pretend from the start. Laing’s point was that we take on different roles and are taught to pretend that we are not pretending and then to forget that we are only pretending that we are not pretending. So I suggested to Laing that, in a sense, he too is pretending – to be a doctor, a householder, a Scotsman, the lot. “So who,” I ask, holding my breath, “is doing the pretending?”

Laing’s eyes stopped rolling, and he flashed me a smile. “Your diagnosis of my metaphysical disease is very astute.” He laughed. I exhaled. And he went over to pick up a fat book with a gray cover. “Let me tell you where I am,” he said. And for the next hour and a half, he read me passages from the Brahma-Sutra-Bhasya of Sri Sankaracarya, and we talked about such lighthearted subjects as the nature of mind and the phenomenology of experience. Of course, since he hadn’t allowed me to turn on my tape recorder, I had to go right out afterward and find a copy of the Brahma-Sutra to find the passages he’d been reading to me.

He seemed tired. I’d heard he was a bit disillusioned and depressed about Kingsley Hall and about all the rumors and distortions and misunderstandings about what he’d written and said and thought, including by his fans. This was partly why he was going to India and Ceylon, to take a break, collect himself, get away from all that.

Before we parted, he asked if he could try on the bush jacket. It was a loose fit.

The Esquire article came out in January 1972.

Given the things I’d heard about Laing’s capacity to suddenly turn on people, it was a little worrying how he’d react to whatever I wrote about him. But his only objections to the Esquire article were that I had gotten certain facts, certain concrete observations, wrong – like the color of the paint on the walls (it was not the shade of green I said it was) and the location of his desk in the room (it was not by the windows facing some backyards).

When he got back from India, he seemed rejuvenated and agreed to do a coast-to-coast tour of America to straighten people out. I was asked to cover the New York leg of the tour. Laing joked that I was becoming his Boswell. He said that in a way Boswell was more famous than Dr. Johnson, cleverly appealing to my vanity.

I asked him what he was going to say in America.

“I really have no idea at all,” he said.

I was hoping it would go better than the first time he’d gone to New York, when he flew out again two hours later, having decided that was an environment he was just not at all ready to enter.

The New York tour headquarters was Suite 608 at the Algonquin Hotel. Aside from the big public talks and lectures and the television interviews, this was where all the one-on-one interviews took place, with Laing usually lounging on the sofa, barefoot (I guess doctors didn’t need shoes after all). There was a camera crew filming every moment of the tour, publicists, tour promoters, various other members of his entourage and an endless parade of reporters coming to interview him.

The young woman reporter from Newsweek started like this: “This is going to be very superficial, Dr. Laing, because I don’t know anything about your work. All we’d like, really, is something witty or shocking, so maybe you could just say what y...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• Contributors
• Introduction
• 1 Who was R. D. Laing?
• 2 Laing and the myth of mental illness redux
• 3 Laing’s The Voice of Experience and the emerging science of consciousness
• 4 On R. D. Laing’s style, sorcery, alienation
• 5 Laing beyond words: antipsychiatry as performance
• 6 Laing’s The Divided Self and The Politics of Experience: then and now
• 7 R. D. Laing: premature postmodern psychoanalyst
• 8 Awakening to love: R. D. Laing’s phenomenological therapy
• 9 R. D. Laing’s existential-humanistic practice: what was he actually doing?
• 10 Psychotherapeutic compassion in the tradition of R. D. Laing
• 11 A note on living in one of R. D. Laing’s post-Kingsley Hall households: Portland Road
• 12 “Human, all too human”: the life and work of R. D. Laing interview
• Index