Table Of ContentR.D. and the Paths of Anti-Psychiatry
In the 1960s and 1970s, the radical and visionary ideas of R.D.Laing
and others associated with the anti-psychiatry movement challenged the
psychiatric establishment, claiming that diagnosis was scientifically
meaningless—that it was simply a way of labelling socially undesirable
behaviour. These ideas revolutionized thinking about psychiatric
practice and the meaning of madness. Laing’s work, from The Divided
Self to Knots, and his therapeutic community at Kingsley Hall, made
him a household name. But after little more than a decade he faded from
prominence as quickly as he had attained it.
R.D.Laing and the Paths of Anti-Psychiatry provides a thorough
reexamination of Laing’s work from a contemporary perspective.
Concentrating on his most productive decade, the author provides a
reasoned critique of Laing’s theoretical writings and investigates the
influences on his thinking including phenomenology and existentialism
in his earlier work, and American family interaction research and Sartre
in his work on interpersonal communication. The book also considers
the experimental Kingsley Hall therapeutic community in parallel with
other anti-psychiatry experiments such as the Socialist Patients’
Collective in Germany and the restructuring of the entire psychiatric
system in Italy.
Zbigniew Kotowicz also focuses on Laing’s contemporary
commentators, from the political right and left, and from feminism,
whose responses were as much a part of the Laing ‘phenomenon’ as he
was himself. Setting Laing’s work in context, he provides a new and
much needed reassessment of its significance for psychotherapy and
psychiatry today.
Zbigniew Kotowicz trained as a psychotherapist with The
Philadelphia Association and has worked as a community therapist and
in private practice. He is now a freelance writer and is also the author of
Fernando Pessoa: Voices of a Nomadic Soul.
The Makers of Modern Psychotherapy
Series editor: Laurence Spurling
This series of introductory, critical texts looks at the work and thought
of key contributors to the development of psychodynamic psychother
apy. Each book shows how the theories examined affect clinical
practice, and includes biographical material as well as a comprehen
sive bibliography of the contributor’s work.
The field of psychodynamic psychotherapy is today more fertile but
also more diverse than ever before. Competing schools have been set up,
rival theories and clinical ideas circulate. These different and sometimes
competing strains are held together by a canon of fundamental
concepts, guiding assumptions and principles of practice.
This canon has a history, and the way we now understand and use the
ideas that frame our thinking and practice is palpably marked by how
they came down to us, by the temperament and experiences of their
authors, the particular puzzles they wanted to solve and the contexts in
which they worked. These are the makers of modern psychotherapy.
Yet despite their influence, the work and life of some of these eminent
figures is not well known. Others are more familiar, but their particular
contribution is open to reassessment. In studying these figures and their
work, this series will articulate those ideas and ways of thinking that
practitioners and thinkers within the psychodynamic tradition continue
to find persuasive.
Laurence Spurling
Also in this series:
John Bowlby and Attachment TheoryJeremy Holmes
Frances Tustin Sheila Spensley
Heinz Kohut and the Psychology of the SelfAllen Siegel
The Clinical Thinking of Wilfred BionJoan and Neville Symington
Harry Stack Sullivan: Interpersonal Theory and PsychotherapyF.Barton
Evans III
R.D.Laing and the Paths of
Anti-Psychiatry
Zbigniew Kotowicz
London and New York
First published 1997
by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005.
“To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s
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Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001
© 1997Zbigniew Kotowicz
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter
invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage and retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Kotowicz, Zbigniew, 1950–
R.D.Laing and the paths of anti-psychiatry/Zbigniew Kotowicz.
p. cm. —(Makers of modern psychotherapy)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Laing, R.D. (Ronald David), 1927– . 2. Antipsychiatry.
3. Psychiatry—Philosophy. I. Title. II. Series.
RC438.6.L34K68 1997
616.89′001—dc20 96–32541
CIP
ISBN 0-203-97872-2 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-415-11610-4 (hbk)
ISBN 0-415-11611-2 (pbk)
Thus it was necessary that every hour in the wards should increase,
together with his esteem for the patients, his loathing of the textbook
attitude towards them, the complacent scientific conceptualism that
made contact with outer reality the index of mental well-being. Every
hour did.
The nature of outer reality remained obscure. The men, women and
children of science would seem to have as many ways of kneeling to
their facts as any other body of illuminati. The definition of outer reality,
or of reality short and simple, varied according to the sensibility of the
definer. But all seemed agreed that contact with it, even the layman’s
muzzy contact, was a rare privilege.
On this basis the patients were described as ‘cut off’ from reality,
from the rudimentary blessings of the layman’s reality, if not altogether
as in severer cases, then in certain fundamental respects. The function
of treatment was to bridge the gulf, translate the sufferer from his own
pernicious little private dungheap to the glorious world of discreet
particles, where it would be his inestimable prerogative once again to
wonder, love, hate, desire, rejoice and howl in a reasonable manner, and
comfort himself with the society of others in the same predicament.
Samuel Beckett, Murphy
Contents
Acknowledgements vii
Abbreviations viii
1 Introduction 1
2 The world of a psychotic 10
3 Knots 30
4 The dialectics of liberation 55
5 Psychiatry and freedom 72
6 Response and legacy 91
Chronology 123
Bibliography 125
Index 130
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the following who have read parts or all of this
text in its earlier stages and gave their helpful comments: Madelyn
Brewer, Duncan Brewer, Aldous Eveleigh, John Heaton, Lucy King,
Anthony Rudolf and Laurence Spurling. I would also like to thank
Sabine Cornille, former lecturer at Paris VIII (Vincennes), for her help
in preparing an account of the activities of Sozialistisches Patienten
Kollektiv, as well as Professor Alec Jenner and David Hewison for
supplying me with various bits of information about the patients’ self-
help groups.
The author and publishers thank the Samuel Beckett Estate and The
Calder Educational Trust, London, for permission to quote from
Murphy by Samuel Beckett, published by Calder Publications Limited,
London. Copyright © Samuel Beckett 1938, 1963, 1977 and the Samuel
Beckett Estate 1993. Published by Grove/Atlantic, Inc. in the US and
Canada.
Abbreviations
DS The Divided Self
SO Self and Others
RV Reason and Violence. A Decade of Sartre’s
Philosophy. 1950–1960
SMF Sanity, Madness and the Family
IP Interpersonal Perception
PE The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise
PF The Politics of the Family
K Knots
WMF Wisdom, Madness and Folly. The Making of a
Psychiatrist
(Publication details can be found in the Bibliography.)
Chapter 1
Introduction
I
It is rare for an intellectual to gain celebrity in such a short period as did
Ronald D.Laing. And when this intellectual happens to be a psychiatrist
then we are dealing with a very rare phenomenon indeed. His public
presence was such that he became a household name. He was read
widely by professionals and lay persons alike. Books were written
about him, interviews with him were conducted and published,
references to his works could be found everywhere. His works were
almost immediately translated into major foreign languages and he
became a voice heard throughout Europe and across the Atlantic.
Laing touched a raw nerve. To put it briefly, he attempted to
politicize and spiritualize, so to speak, the discourse of madness and in
the process, in a truly anarchic fashion, he questioned, doubted, Laing
sought passages between the so-called normal and the insane; he
fervently believed that the language of madness is a human language
and that it can only be understood if it is accepted as part of the human
experience. Laing was the celebrated psychiatrist, the visionary, the
savage iconoclast who questioned the values of the developing
capitalist society in general and the role of psychiatry in particular. He
attempted to bring madness back to the public space, where it once was,
before it was separated off, incarcerated, confined in lunatic asylums on
the outskirts of the great conglomerations where normal citizens conduct
their daily affairs.
And then, just as quickly as he rose to prominence, Laing faded away.
A generation later he is a distant, almost irrelevant figure, and he needs
to be introduced anew. It is quite amazing to think that had he been
alive he would be, at the time of writing these lines, only sixty-nine.
Description:In the 1960s and 1970s, the radical and visionary ideas of R. D. Laing revolutionized thinking about psychiatric practice and the meaning of madness. His work, from The Divided Self to Knots, and his therapeutic community at Kingsley Hall, made him a household name. But after little more than a deca
