Ronald David Laing (7 October 1927 – 23 August 1989) was a Scottish psychiatrist who wrote extensively on mental illness, particularly psychosis and schizophrenia. Politically, Laing was regarded as a thinker of the New Left. He has been theatrically portrayed by Mike Maran, Alan Cox, Billy Mack, and David Tennant in the 2017 film Mad to Be Normal.
Laing's views on the causes and treatment of psychopathological phenomena were influenced by his study of existential philosophy and ran counter to the chemical and electroshock methods that had become psychiatric orthodoxy. Laing took the expressed feelings of the individual patient or client as valid descriptions of personal experience rather than simply as symptoms of mental illness. Although associated in the public mind with the anti-psychiatry movement, he rejected the label. Laing regarded schizophrenia as the normal psychological adjustment to a dysfunctional social context.
Early years Laing was born in the Govanhill district of Glasgow on 7 October 1927, the only child of civil engineer David Park MacNair Laing and Amelia Glen Laing (née Kirkwood). Laing described his parents, particularly his mother, as being somewhat anti-social, and demanding the maximum achievement from him. Adrian, his son and biographer, discounted much of Laing's published childhood account, and an obituary by an acquaintance of Laing asserted that, of his parents, "the full truth he told only to a few close friends".Obituary of R. D. Laing by Joseph Berke; Daily Telegraph, 25 August 1989.
He was educated initially at Sir John Neilson Cuthbertson Public School and after four years transferred to Hutchesons' Grammar School. Described variously as clever, competitive or precocious, he studied classics, particularly philosophy, including through reading books from the local library. Small and slightly built, Laing participated in distance running; he was also a musician, being made an Associate of the Royal College of Music. He studied medicine at the University of Glasgow. During his time in Glasgow, he set up a "Socratic Club", of which the philosopher Bertrand Russell agreed to be president. Laing failed his final exams. In a partial autobiography, Wisdom, Madness and Folly, Laing said he felt remarks he made under the influence of alcohol at a university function had offended the staff and led to him being failed on every subject including some he was sure he had passed. After spending six months working in a psychiatric unit, Laing passed the re-sits in 1951 to qualify as a medical doctor.Beveridge, A. (2011) Portrait of the Psychiatrist as a Young Man: The Early Writing and Work of R. D. Laing, 1927–1960 Oxford University Press
Career Laing spent a couple of years as a psychiatrist in the British Army Psychiatric Unit at Netley, where, as he later recalled, those trying to fake schizophrenia to get a lifelong disability pension were likely to get more than they had bargained for as insulin shock therapy was being used. In 1953, Laing returned to Glasgow, participated in an existentialism-oriented discussion group, and worked at the Glasgow Royal Mental Hospital. The hospital was influenced by David Henderson's school of thought, which may have exerted an unacknowledged influence on Laing; he became the youngest consultant in the country.Mad to be Normal: Conversations with R. D. Laing [Paperback] Laing's colleagues characterised him as "conservative" for his opposition to electroconvulsive therapy and the new drugs that were being introduced.
In 1956, Laing went to train on a grant at the Tavistock Clinic in London, widely known as a centre for the study and practice of psychotherapy (particularly psychoanalysis). At this time, he was associated with John Bowlby, D. W. Winnicott and his training analyst, Charles Rycroft. He remained at the Tavistock Clinic until 1964. In 1965, Laing and a group of colleagues, most notably Sid Briskin, created the Philadelphia Association and started a psychiatric community project at Kingsley Hall, where patients and therapists lived together. The Norwegian author Axel Jensen contacted Laing at Kingsley Hall after reading his book The Divided Self, which had been given to him by Noel Cobb. Laing treated Jensen, and subsequently, they became close friends. Laing often visited Jensen on board his ship Shanti Devi, which was his home in Stockholm.
In 1967, Laing appeared on the BBC programme Your Witness, chaired by Ludovic Kennedy, on which, alongside Jonathan Aitken and G.P. Ian Dunbar, he argued for the legalisation of cannabis in the first live television debate on the subject. In the same years, his views were explored in the television play In Two Minds, written by David Mercer. In October 1972, Laing met Arthur Janov, author of the popular book The Primal Scream. Although Laing found Janov modest and unassuming, he considered him a "jig man" (someone who knows a lot about a little). Laing sympathized with Janov but regarded his primal therapy as a lucrative business—one which required no more than obtaining a suitable space and letting people "hang it all out". Inspired by the work of American psychotherapist Elizabeth Fehr, Laing began to develop a team offering "rebirthing workshops" in which one designated person chooses to re-experience the struggle of trying to break out of the birth canal represented by the remaining members of the group who surround him or her.
Laing and anti-psychiatry
Laing was seen as an important figure in the anti-psychiatry movement, along with David Cooper, although he never denied the value of treating mental distress. He also challenged psychiatric diagnosis itself, arguing that the diagnosis of a mental disorder contradicted accepted medical procedure: the diagnosis was made on the basis of behaviour or conduct of an examination, and tests that traditionally precede the diagnosis of such viable pathologies as broken bones or pneumonia occurred after the diagnosis of mental disorder, if at all. Hence, according to Laing, psychiatry was founded on a false epistemology: illness diagnosed by conduct but treated biologically. Laing maintained that schizophrenia was "a theory not a fact"; he believed leading medical geneticists did not accept the models of genetically inherited schizophrenia being promoted by biologically based psychiatry.Mad to be Normal: Conversations with R. D. Laing [Paperback] He rejected the "medical model of mental illness"—according to Laing, diagnosis of mental illness did not follow a traditional medical model—and this led him to question the use of medication such as antipsychotics by psychiatry. His attitude to recreational drugs was quite different; privately, he advocated an anarchy of experience.Obituary of R. D. Laing by Joseph Berke; Daily Telegraph, 25 August 1989 Politically, Laing was regarded as a thinker of the New Left."R. D. Laing", in The New Left, edited by Maurice Cranston, The Library Press, 1971, pp. 179–208. "Ronald Laing must be accounted one of the main contributors to the theoretical and rhetorical armoury of the contemporary Left".
Works In 1913, psychiatrist and philosopher Karl Jaspers had pronounced in his work General Psychopathology that many of the symptoms of mental illness (and particularly of delusions) were "un-understandable", and were therefore worthy of little consideration except as a sign of some other underlying primary disorder. Then, in 1956, Gregory Bateson and his colleagues Donald Jackson and Jay Haley articulated a theory of schizophrenia as stemming from double bind situations where a person receives different or contradictory messages.Bateson, G., Jackson, D. D., Haley, J. & Weakland, J., 1956, Toward a theory of schizophrenia. (in: Behavioral Science, Vol.1, pp. 251–264)
The perceived symptoms of schizophrenia were therefore an expression of this distress, and should be valued as a cathartic and transformative experience. Laing argued a similar account for psychoses: 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" (his term). Laing saw psychopathology as being seated not in biological or psychic organs—whereby environment is relegated to playing at most an accidental role as immediate trigger of disease (the "stress diathesis model" of the nature and causes of psychopathology)—but rather in the social cradle, the urban home, that cultivates it. This re-evaluation of the locus of the disease process, and consequent shift in forms of treatment, was in stark contrast to psychiatric orthodoxy. Laing was revolutionary in valuing the content of psychotic behaviour and speech as a valid expression of distress, albeit wrapped in an enigmatic language of personal symbolism which is meaningful only from within the subject's situation. Laing expanded the view of the "double bind" hypothesis put forth by Bateson and his team, and came up with a new concept to describe the highly complex situation that unfolds in the process of "going mad": an "incompatible knot". Laing never denied the existence of mental illness, but viewed it in a radically different light from his contemporaries. For Laing, mental illness could be a transformative episode whereby the process of undergoing mental distress was compared to a shamanic journey. The traveller could return from the journey with important insights, and may have become (in the views of Laing and his followers) a wiser and more grounded person as a result.
In The Divided Self (1960), Laing contrasts the experience of the "ontologically secure" person with that of a person who "cannot take the realness, aliveness, autonomy and identity of himself and others for granted" and who consequently contrives strategies to avoid "losing his self". This concept is used to develop a psychodynamic model of the mind to explain psychosis and schizophrenia. Laing's theories resemble later ideas about self-disorder as a core characteristic of schizophrenia. In The Self and Others (1961), Laing's definition of normality shifted somewhat. Laing also wrote poetry and his poetry publications include Knots (1970, published by Penguin) and Sonnets (1979, published by Michael Joseph). Laing appears, alongside his son Adam, on the 1980 album Miniatures – a sequence of fifty-one tiny masterpieces edited by Morgan Fisher, performing the song "Tipperary".
The Divided Self was listed by the David Bowie Estate as one of David Bowie's top 100 books he had read.
Personal life In his early life, Laing's father, David, an electrical engineer who had served in the Royal Flying Corps, seems often to have come to blows with his own brother, and had a breakdown himself for three months when Laing was a teenager. His mother Amelia, according to Adrian Laing had "an inability to express affection to... her only child". Laing was troubled by his own personal problems, suffering from both episodic alcoholism and clinical depression, according to his self-diagnosis in a BBC Radio interview with Anthony Clare in 1983, although he reportedly was free of both in the years before his death. These admissions were to have serious consequences for Laing as they formed part of the case against him by the General Medical Council which led him to voluntarily withdraw his name from the Medical Register on 20 May 1987.