R. D. Laing

From New World Encyclopedia

R.D.Laing. © Robert E. Haraldsen

Ronald David Laing or R.D. Laing as he was known professionally, (October 7, 1927 @ndash; August 23, 1989), was a British psychiatrist who wrote extensively on mental illness and particularly the experience of psychosis. The development of his unorthodox views stemmed from early professional outrage with some of the practices he considered inhumane, and looked for other ways to reach patients. Influenced by phenomenology and existential philosophy on the causes and treatment of mental illness, his views went against the psychiatric orthodoxy of the time by taking the expressions or communications of the individual patient or client as representing valid descriptions of lived experience or reality rather than as symptoms of some separate or underlying disorder. He is often associated with the anti-psychiatry movement although, like many of his contemporaries also critical of psychiatry, he himself rejected this label. He made a significant contribution to the ethics of psychology.

Biography

Ronald David Laing was born at 21 Ardbeg Street in the Govanhill district of Glasgow, Scotland as the only child of David Park McNair Laing and Amelia Elizabeth Laing. They were a quiet, Presbyterian, lower middle class family.

From his own autobiography, he had few friends as a child (Laing, 1985). The tensions in his family were monumental. Both his parents openly detested their own fathers. His father, David, fought fiercely with his own father, on occasion in front of little Ronald, sometimes causing injury (Laing, 1976, pp. 4-5). David’s relatives never approved of Amelia.

His mother, Amelia, was a complex woman, with very odd behaviors. For an unknown reason, she seems to have concealed her pregnancy up until the day of Ronald’s birth. Laing wrote that after his birth her decline was rapid. Observations by Laing and his aunt Ethel, the sister of his father, it seems Amelia was prone to character assassination and quite devious. She would undertake circuitous routes to avoid being in neighborhoods of people unknown to the family, but alleged to have ill-will toward her. When Laing was world famous, for reasons known only to her, she had the tragic habit of sticking pins in her “Ronnie” doll, fashioned after her son.

Laing’s father, David, was more upbeat in comparison. David Laing took great pride in being an engineer in the Royal Tank Corps and Royal Air Corps and worked on various military applications. In later years, David came to loathe the military, but was quite resourceful in creating meaning in his life. He was the principal baritone for the Glasgow University Chapel choir. He had a special love for Italian opera and Victorian ballads and was known to welcome Ronald’s friends during his teens and twenties with various musical singalongs and games. Ronald often played the piano at these gatherings with professional skill, although music remained only a pastime throughout his life. He received his license for piano from the Royal Academy of Music when he was fourteen years old. In that same year he decided to read everything in the encyclopedia from A to Z, and became very widely read, specifically working through Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Jaspers, Wittgenstein|Wittgenstein, and Camus (Laing, 1985).

Laing entered the University of Glasgow when he was seventeen, and later studied medicine, later specializing in psychiatry. He was an army psychiatrist from 1951-1953, where he found he had a particular talent for communicating with mentally distressed people.

The Korean War had scuttled his ideas of studying with Jaspers at Basel, and as an army psychiatrist his chief task was to differentiate the soldiers who were truly disturbed those simply trying to avoid their duty to serve. Some of the policies enraged Laing, who felt they were often cruel, unnecessary and unproductive in healing the patients. In spite of rigid prohibitions on communicating with patients, he found novel ways to develop rapport. He devised a method of sitting quietly with patients in their padded cells, and did not demand anything from the patients, accepting both silence and speech. He did not interrogate them as a conventional psychiatrist would have. He maintained this non-threatening posture in order to allow the patients to open up and express themselves freely. Laing felt that their experiences had validity, and it was important to understand and feel what they were feeling in order to understand their immense fear, misery and confusion. He felt that they could be understood just as they were, and that their self-reports had meaning if given a chance. Thankfully, his superiors took this as a systematic research effort, which is exactly how Laing looked at it.

In 1953 Laing left the army and worked at Gartnaval Hospital near Glasgow. He worked with the humane psychiatrist, Ferguson Rodger, who was quite interested in new approaches and gave him much encouragement. This is where he started the idea of living together with his patients, and began to get surprisingly good results. During this period he also participated in an existentialism-oriented discussion group in Glasgow, organized by Karl Abenheimer and Joe Schorstein.

During the late 1950s he went on to study at the Tavistock Clinic in London, widely known as a center for the study and practice of psychotherapy (particularly psychoanalysis). At this time, he was associated with D. W. Winnicott and Charles Rycroft, and later John Bowlby, and wrote his first book, The Divided Self.

Due to his frustration with traditional psychoanalysis and his unconventional approach, involving the inclusion of phenomenology and existentialism into psychiatry, Laing's graduation from the London Psychoanalytic Institute was to be delayed one year. However, with intercession from his clinical supervisors, he graduated on time in 1960.

In the 1960s Laing continued his research and wrote his most influential books. During this time he put his theories into practice. His work continued to be unconventional, and he was known to conduct sessions that included LSD therapy. He also became known in the popular media, including several television appearances.

In 1965, Laing started a psychiatric community project at Kingsley Hall. During this period, his first marriage to Anne Hearne disintegrated, leaving him free to further his experiments in which therapists and patients lived together. During this period he became close friends with Norwegian author Axel Jensen, and Laing often visited him on board his ship Shanti Devi in Stockholm.

While still at Kingsley hall, 1967 he wrote his most popular book, The Politics of Experience, which Erich Fromm criticized for considering adaptation to society as a criterion of mental health. Laing attended a two-week conference on the Dialectics of Liberation with most of the contemporary left-wing thinkers and activists. This left him somewhat disenchanted with politics. It is no wonder that in his next book, Knots, he eschewed politics entirely.

After the Kingsley Hall closed in 1970, the next year Laing took his companion Jutta Werner and their two children to Sri Lanka and India to study Theravada Buddhist meditation. Half of that time was spent in the Uttar-Pradesh area of India with Swami Gangotri Baba, who remained largely silent and half naked in a wooded valley. Laing's son, Adrian, recorded this as a time not only spent in meditation but also of increased drinking.

He returned to London, and did a lecture tour of the United States in which he also appeared on television. In trying to work out a new angle on psychology, he ceased to break new ground and rather re-worked current theories of re-birthing from Otto Rank, Elizabeth Fehr and others. His next two books were not as popular. Although Jutta and he married in 1971, by 1981 their marriage was dissolving. He alleged she had had an affair, and a very messy divorce ensued. After the death of a close associate, the next year Philadelphia Association refused to continue endorsing Laing as their chairman, as they felt some of his behavior and his new phase of re-birthing was out of step with their work.

In the 1980s, Laing launched into various auto-biographical works that were often full of omissions and errors. He was troubled by his own personal problems, suffering both from episodic alcoholism and clinical depression, although he reportedly was free of both in the years before his death. In 1985, he joined with his former secretary, Margarite Romayn-Kendon, who remained his companion the rest of his life. They moved to Going, Austria in 1987. In August 1989, on a very hot day, the fiercely competitive Laing succumbed to a massive heart attack while playing tennis. It is rumored that he was winning.

Four of his five children survived him.

Work

Laing's view of madness

Some have speculated that the intense difficulty and animosity he felt from his mother influenced him to develop an oppositional personality. In his later years, this was productively channeled in his championing of the mentally ill.

Laing argued that the strange behavior and seemingly confused speech of people undergoing a psychotic episode were ultimately understandable as an attempt to communicate worries and concerns, often in situations where this was not possible or not permitted. Laing stressed the role of society, and particularly the family, in the development of madness. He argued that individuals can often be put in impossible situations, where they are unable to conform to the conflicting expectations of their peers, leading to a "lose-lose situation" and immense mental distress for the individuals concerned. Laing was familiar with the 1956 theory of Gregory Bateson that articulated a related theory of schizophrenia as stemming from "double bind" situations. Madness was therefore an expression of this distress, and should be valued as a cathartic and transformative experience.

This was in stark contrast to the psychiatric orthodoxy of the time,and is still contrary to the majority opinion of mainstream psychiatry. Psychiatrist and philosopher Karl Jaspers had previously pronounced, in his seminal work General Psychopathology, that the content of madness, and particularly of delusions, were "un-understandable," and therefore were worthy of little consideration except as a sign of some other underlying primary disorder. Laing was revolutionary in valuing the content of psychotic behavior and speech as a valid expression of distress, albeit wrapped in an unusual personal symbolism. According to Laing, if a therapist can better understand the person they can begin to make sense of the symbolism of their madness, and therefore start addressing the concerns which are the root cause of their distress.

It is notable that Laing never denied the existence of mental illness, but simply viewed it in a radically different light from his contemporaries. For Laing, madness could be a transformative episode whereby the process of undergoing mental distress was compared to a shamanic journey. The traveler could return from the journey with important insights, and may even have become a wiser and more grounded person as a result.

Laing was involved in research linking the development of psychosis to family background. Despite supporting evidence, this generated significant controversy and the influence of parents who felt "blamed" for a child's diagnosis of schizophrenia accounts for much of Laing's unpopularity in many circles. In fact, such blame was an inappropriate attribution by commentators who had not grasped the breadth of his view of the nature of pathogenesis in families. Laing maintained throughout his career that parents are equally mystified, and unaware of the disturbed nature of the patterns of communication.

Laing's most enduring and practically beneficial contribution to mental health, however, is his co-founding and chairmanship, in 1964, of the Philadelphia Association, and the wider movement of therapeutic communities that adopted more effective and less confrontational psychiatric settings.

Laing is often regarded as an important figure in the anti-psychiatry movement, along with David Cooper and Michel Foucault. However, like many of his contemporaries, labeling him as "anti-psychiatry" was a caricature of his stated views. Laing never denied the value of treating mental distress, but simply wanted to challenge the core values of psychiatry, which considered mental illness as primarily a biological phenomenon and that the thoughts and images of patients have no intrinsic value in understanding and assisting the healing process.

Key concepts

Laing developed a phenomenological methodology that involved utilizing rigorous scientific principles in the examination of internal process. In the phenomenological approach, self report is assumed valid and then must be proved through the subsequent events, as opposed to the more materialistic approach of first requiring data that can be measured in the physical world. In The Divided Self, Self and Others (1961) and The Politics of Experience (1967) Laing reproached Freud and his followers for aligning psychoanalysis with the natural sciences in order to secure a measure of respectability for the new discipline. In its place, he proposed a rigorous "science of persons,” or an "interpersonal phenomenology" which, while allowing for the existence of the unconscious, owed as much to Hegel, Kierkegaard, Husserl, Heidegger, Buber and, above all, Sartre, as it did to Freud and his followers.

Ontological insecurity

In The Divided Self Laing explained how we all exist in the world as beings, defined by others who carry a model of us in their heads, just as we carry models of them in our heads. Our feelings and motivations derive very much from this condition of "being in the world" in the sense of existing for others, who exist for us. Without this we suffer "ontological insecurity," a condition often expressed in terms of "being dead" by people who are clearly still physically alive. In later writings he often took this to deeper levels, laboriously spelling out how A knows that B knows that A knows that B knows ....! This may explain why in some biographical material Laing said his mother died when he was fifteen, as she did not die literally at that time.

Family nexus

In “Sanity, Madness and the Family” Laing and Esterton give accounts of several families, analyzing how their members see each other and what they actually communicate to each other. Laing uses the term 'family nexus' to describe the consensus view within the family that is very powerful in individual mental health. The startling way in which lies are perpetuated in the interest of family politics rings true to many readers from "normal" families, and Laing's view is that in some cases these lies are so strongly maintained as to make it impossible for a vulnerable child to be able to determine what truth actually is, let alone what the truth of their situation is.

This was the basis for his approach to psychotherapy, as in the case of his most famous 'patient' Mary Barnes. Mary Barnes entered Kingsley Hall in 1965, and her case seemed to prove the importance of family nexus. As a professional nurse, she was exceptionally articulate and helpful in substantiating Laing's claims.

In some of Laing's writing, he seems to extend the concept of family nexus to the society as Andrew Collier has pointed out in The Philosophy and Politics of Psychotherapy. One strand of Laing's thinking, in his earlier career is traceable to Marx and Sartre. Laing condemns society for shackling mankind against its will, taking away individual freedom. Left to his own devices, man is healthy, and the mad are just trying to find their way back to their natural state. Laing does not develop this societal continuation of family nexus in his later work, so it is unclear what his ultimate view of the impact of the greater society is in psychosis.

Double bind

In "The Divided Self", Laing correctly exposes the family nexus as often places children in a 'double bind'where they are unable to obey conflicting injunctions from family members. Yet it is the very need for ontological security that should come from within the family that is the driving force that builds societies. Laing he does not 'blame' family members, pointing out that they are in turn victims of their own family. He fails, however to get to the bottom of the problem and find a way out for his patients. Freud, by comparison, recognizes the repressive effect of society, especially in his later works like 'Civilization and its Discontents', but seeks to strengthen the patient's ability to cope with this. Laing introduced the role of the larger society on the individual but failed to develop it. Neither he nor Freud appeared willing to tackle the issue of the good and bad family, or societal, nexus.

The real double bind, Collier seems to suggest, is that we all need to exist in a nexus, but sometimes the only one we've got is not one we can continue to exist with.

Critique

R. D. Laing's work over the years changed as his interests led him from one aspect to another of the problem of personal happiness or mental health. One could say that this was his response to his difficult early family life. It probably helped him form his views and in rejection to dogmatically following a dysfunctional status quo, to be open to innovate with less than orthodox methodology.

His advocacy of empathy with those with psychosis and inclusion of the necessity of kindness and authenticity from the therapist included a realm of emotional intelligence that was not recognized fully until the 1990's. The innovation of his methods of non-demanding observation as a valid source of information put so much more responsibility upon the therapist, one he seemed to shoulder with great personal courage.

He remained very opposed to the over-extensive usage of surgical and electro-shock treatments. His publicizing the possibility of other treatments helped research into other, more humane treatments. He did however, support the usage of various pharmacological treatments to help patients recover and no doubt influenced the increased usage of this therapy in psychosis.

He connected the importance of personal thought and mental illness, which influenced the development of trends in psychological therapies that include life-coaching, marriage education (as opposed to therapy), and various short-term behavior education programs(this is not the behavior modification espoused by Skinner and others, these changes occur through personal choice not physiology). Although usually not applied in the extreme cases Laing worked with, these methodologies rely of the personal choices and behaviors of the "patient". Laing's personal search in meditation and eastern philosophy also provided an exploration into other methodologies in the improvement of thought and well being.

Legacy

R. D. Laing was and still is extremely controversial. Many wanted to dismiss him as being as crazy as his patients, yet others still defend him to the end. Some of his defenders are other respected professionals. The quality of his work in the later part of his life was simply odd. His personal problems and usual biographical statements such as omissions,errors and oblique references that were very hard to understand undermined his previous credibility. His lack of innovation toward the end of his career also diminished his reputation, as his eastern philosophy stage didn't yield contributions of note nor did his re-birthing stage of thought that was more of a re-hash of other people's ideas. Still, he has a substantial legacy and significant impact on psychology.

The necessity of empathy and involvement from the therapist continues to impact psychological thought and practice. This has been a drastic change from the previous view of "scientific" distance and impartiality as necessary. Laing would advocate that a therapist must be unequivocally in favor of the well-being of the patient and that the patient must recognize this in order for any therapy to be effective.

Although this empathy is necessary, Laing's view that the patient is qualified to discern his or her own happiness, and needs not depend upon the therapist's view is a major shift in orientation away from the therapist centered traditional Freudian psychotherapy. This patient driven modus operandi continues to influence therapy.

The ability to measure results in the physical world had become the mantra of all science in the 20th century. Thus,the anecdotal methodologies of phenomenology were dead in modern intellectual circles until his rigorous personal methodology and application of scientific principles brought the substantiation necessary to keep this methodology viable within psychology.

His empathetic understanding of the importance of the complex network of human relationships struck a chord and was completely the right thought at the right time. Many websites, books and journals still reference and discuss his work more than twenty years later.

Selected bibliography

  • Laing, R.D. (1960) The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
  • Laing, R.D. and Esterson, A. (1964) Sanity, Madness and the Family. London: Penguin Books.
  • Laing, R.D. and Cooper, D.G. (1964) Reason and Violence: A Decade of Sartre's Philosophy. (2nd ed.) London: Tavistock Publications Ltd.
  • Laing, R.D., Phillipson, H. and Lee, A.R. (1966) Interpersonal Perception: A Theory and a Method of Research. London: Tavistock.
  • Laing, R.D. (1967) The Politics of Experience and the Bird of Paradise. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
  • Laing, R.D. (1969) Self and Others. (2nd ed.) London: Penguin Books.
  • Laing, R.D. (1970) Knots. London: Penguin.
  • Laing, R.D. (1971) The Politics of the Family and Other Essays. London: Tavistock Publications.
  • Laing, R.D. (1976) Do You Love Me? An Entertainment in Conversation and Verse New York: Pantheon Books.
  • Laing, R.D. (1976) Sonnets. London: Michael Joseph.
  • Laing, R.D. (1976) The Facts of Life. London: Penguin.
  • Laing, R.D. (1977) Conversations with Adam and Natasha. New York: Pantheon.
  • Laing, R.D. (1982) The Voice of Experience: Experience, Science and Psychiatry. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
  • Laing, R.D. (1985) Wisdom, Madness and Folly: The Making of a Psychiatrist 1927-1957. London: Macmillan.
  • Mullan, B. (1995) Mad to be Normal: Conversations with R.D. Laing. London: Free Association Books.

Books on R.D. Laing

  • Barnes, M. and Berke, J. (1971) Two Accounts of a Journey Through Madness. London: MacGibbon and Kee. (Personal Report from a Kingsley Hall patient and her therapist)
  • Boyers, R. and R. Orrill, Eds. (1971) Laing and Anti-Psychiatry. New York: Salamagundi Press.
  • Burston, D. (1996) The Wing of Madness: The Life and Work of R. D. Laing. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
  • Burston, D. (2000) The Crucible of Experience: R.D. Laing and the Crisis of Psychotherapy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
  • Clay, J. (1996) R.D. Laing: A Divided Self. London: Hodder & Stoughton.
  • Collier, A. (1977) R.D. Laing: The Philosophy and Politics of Psychotherapy. New York: Pantheon.
  • Evans, R.I. (1976) R.D. Laing, The Man and His Ideas. New York: E.P. Dutton.
  • Friedenberg, E.Z. (1973) R.D. Laing. New York: Viking Press.
  • Kotowicz, Z. (1977) R.D. Laing and the Paths of Anti-Psychiatry. London: Taylor & Francis.
  • Miller, G. (2004) R.D. Laing. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
  • Laing, A. (1994) R.D. Laing: A Biography. New York: Thunder's Mouth Press.
  • Mullan, B. (1999) R.D. Laing: A Personal View. London: Duckworth.
  • Mullan, B., Ed. (1997) R.D. Laing: Creative Destroyer. London: Cassell & Co.
  • Raschid, S., Ed. (2005) R.D. Laing: Contemporary Perspectives. London: Free Association Books.
  • Russell, R. and R.D. Laing (1992) R.D. Laing and Me: Lessons in Love. New York: Hillgarth Press.

Films on R.D. Laing

  • Asylum (1972). A documentary directed by Peter Robinson showing Laing's psychiatric community project where patients and therapists lived together. Laing also appears in the film.
  • Did You Used to be R.D. Laing? (1988). A documentary by Tom Shandel and Kirk Tougas mainly consisting of a series of lectures and interviews conducted at Simon Fraser University in Canada.

External links


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