Abstract
As its title indicates, this co-edited volume marks the half-century since the publication of The Divided Self (1960), the first book by the radical Scottish psychiatrist R.D. Laing (1927–89). Since his death, Laing’s work has undergone re-appraisal by health professionals, academics and service users, as well as by artists and film-makers such as Luke Fowler (short-listed for the Turner Prize in 2012). This volume is a relatively late arrival in the process of sifting through Laing’s legacy. It consists of four loosely categorized sections: ‘Conversations’, ‘Praxis and Process’, ‘Reflections and Theories’, ‘Echoes’. These contain respectively: interviews and conversations with Laing; a number of often autobiographically inflected reflections on Laing’s therapeutic methods and personality; a series of more theoretical or philosophical analyses of Laing’s legacy; and a miscellany of late reviews and correspondence, accompanied by some aphoristic quotations from the man himself.
Some of the more valuable contributions to the volume recover Laing’s own words in unfamiliar contexts. A lengthy transcribed conversation between Laing and Phyllis Chessler shows the former talking intelligently and respectfully with a leading feminist critic of psychiatry, and a similar dialogue between Laing and Manfred Bleuler provided by Theodor Itten also shows a high degree of thoughtful engagement. Both these conversations demonstrate that Laing was capable of far more than the agonistic intellectual combat with which he is too often associated.
The more theoretically orientated contributions are not of a uniformly high quality or significance. They contain rather too much recapitulation of familiar observations about Laing’s life, methods, ideas and activities – issues that have been more thoroughly and professionally explored in the existing literature. However, a strong, albeit previously published, contribution is David Abrahamson’s sceptical historical investigation of Laing’s involvement with the so-called ‘Rumpus Room’ therapeutic experiment at Gartnavel Royal Mental Hospital. The most interesting and sustained original contributions come from Ron Roberts. The first, ‘Sanity, madness and memory: R.D. Laing and the post-modern’, is a robust Marxist-Laingian critique of prominent contemporary formations such as post-psychiatry (or critical psychiatry) and trans-cultural psychiatry. According to Roberts, ‘It is not post-psychiatry, or trans-cultural psychiatry, that is needed, but no psychiatry’ (p. 206). The second of Roberts’s contributions, co-authored with Itten and entitled ‘Laing and Szasz revisited’, provides a sustained critical comparison of these two critics of psychiatry, challenging Szasz’s work for its fundamentally atomistic model of morality, responsibility, and agency.
A distinctive feature of this volume is the number of contributions it contains that mix reflections upon Laing’s life and work with autobiographical narrative. Sometimes Laing himself is known to the contributor and is present within the narrative (e.g. Chris Oakley’s first-hand testimony to Laing’s counter-cultural rise and fall, or Mina Semyon’s account of her intense therapeutic relationship with Laing). In other contributions, Laing’s presence is mediated; this is typically through his published works, but in one narrative, by Philadelphia Association therapist Bruce Scott, Laing appears in a life-changing dream (pp. 109–10). (The dream-Laing also briefly appears in Itten’s theoretical-historical contribution, ‘From The Divided Self to The Voice of Experience’.) Some readers may find these narrative contributions frustratingly oblique, or even self-indulgent. However, such accounts shed light on Laing’s legacy by revealing how his personality and ideas have entered into the lived experience of therapists and clients, alongside their intellectual affiliation to his work. Young’s contribution, ‘The “Divided Self”: A very personal account’ is highly digressive (the author’s problems with domestic flooring appear at one point), but shows how Laing’s work can function as an autobiographical narrative template. Young’s search for his ‘true Self’ (p. 135) behind the ‘false self’ as described by Laing propels him on a partly therapeutic, partly spiritual ‘seeking’ that takes him into (and out of) the New Age community at Findhorn in the north-east of Scotland. Young’s narrative may seem unusual, and at times bathetic (at one point, a sexual-cum-spiritual ecstasy is interrupted by the police breaking in to arrest a murder suspect; p. 126), but it poses indirectly a serious question that psychiatry may wish to reflect upon. How many psychiatrists – including those who might repudiate Laing’s psychiatry – are in fact living and understanding their lives according to a post-1960s narrative template of the search for selfhood, one so eloquently developed and popularized by Laing?
As is often the way with edited volumes, where viability depends upon a critical mass of contributors, the essays in this book vary in quality. Nonetheless, there are a number of interesting contributions, particularly those which explore Laing’s relevance for contemporary left-wing politics, and those which give a sense of his impact on biographical meaning-making.