Who is rd laing

I read one case history of a member of the psychiatric staff who shared a room with one patient who defecated in the room and often screamed apparently uncontrollably.

Laing's approach took the existential view that each person, including the schizophrenic is ultimately responsible for his or her own behavior, and ultimately his or her own recovery. He viewed his role as that of providing conditions that would facilitate that recovery. For a time there were a number of treatment facilities around the world that followed the Laingian model.

To the best of my knowledge, today it has been largely abandoned, both because it is very expensive in terms of professional time and effort and drugs are cheaper and can be administered by poorly paid ward personnel, and because the psychiatric establishment is committed to a medical model rather than an existential model.

The situation has to be discovered: "We can never assume that the people in the situation know what the situation is. There is no a priori reason to believe or disbelieve a story anyone tells us. Different people usually have different stories about a situation. A psychiatric "history" of the situation is a sample of the situation. It is a story, one person's way of defining the situation. They are experts in construing situations of a few standard psychiatric myths. Family resistance: Laing notes that he often finds that what he thinks is going on in a family bears almost no resemblance to what anyone in the family expriences or thinks is happening.

Often "there is concerted family resistance to discovering what is going on, and there are complicated strategems to keep everyone in the dark. Metaphors for a family. We may be more aware of our image of the family than of the family itself. Complementarity: "That feature of relatedness whereby the other is required to fulfill or complete the self. Confirmation: Some sign of recognition by another person that is relevant to an evocative act. This may include disapproval.

A person's 'own' identity can never be completely abstracted from his identity-for-others. Acts that masquerade as confirmation, but are counterfeit. For example, I define who you are, then confirm your behavior and being that conforms with my definition. Tangential responses: Those that deal with some aspect of a person's behavior other than those the person is concerned with.

Mystification: Misdefinition of the issues. A plausible misrepresentation of what the exploiters do to the exploited. Ronald David Laing trained and qualified as a doctor, psychiatrist and psychoanalyst.

He was a gifted musician having been elected a Licentiate of the Royal Academy of Music and an Associate of the the Royal College of Music while at secondary school. The Divided Self is required reading on many psychology courses, now published by Penguin as a Modern Classic. Capitalism has such a pervasive grip on people's thinking now, but in the Sixties there was more openness, a more mystical way of thinking that has now been commodified into leisure and lifestyle — a decaffeinated and unleaded version of that vision.

We are so relentlessly solution-oriented now. One of the most pertinent lines from The Divided Self is, 'I'm not an object to be changed, I'm a person to be accepted'. Laing's inspirational influence lives on, not least in the more compassionate way we treat mental-health problems these days — especially in recognising depression, which he himself suffered from at times, as a serious illness.

Such has been the lasting influence of a book that sought to demystify madness that The Divided Self is still read as part of A-level psychology courses and as an existentialism model in universities.

And the Philadelphia Association continues to offer training, affordable therapy and two community houses for those seeking retreat. What naturally flowed from this was a critical stance towards the psychiatric profession, which, for Laing, was at its core dehumanising and oppressive. Where his influence is viewed most negatively is his work with people with schizophrenia, which appeared to blame parents for their children's illness and which discounted other physical, genetic, social and psychological factors.

Later in his writings, he broadened his critique to the whole of medicine and other political structures and again, to some, seemed to romanticise mental disorder. This work now seems very much of its time in the Swinging Sixties — but in my view, his earlier work still has lessons for us today.

Although she also values Laing's pioneering work in talking to patients, Dr Ranjit-Singh is critical of his lasting legacy. A consultant psychiatrist at the Central and North West London Mental Health Foundation Trust, she works in the emerging field of early intervention in psychosis, with an ethnically diverse population in Brent.

She believes Laing became a kind of hostage to his own propaganda about a dysfunctional society sometimes causing madness. But I don't think he was truly mad, just quite hedonistic. According to his friends, colleagues and relatives, Laing was frequently unable to extend the compassion he felt for his patients to his own family. His children were left to grapple with their demons.

Sometimes, as with Adam, it came with tragic consequences. For all his professional benevolence, Laing was a flawed parent. He, too, was capable of unleashing 'these forces of violence called love'.

Ronald Laing was five when his parents told him Santa Claus did not exist. He never forgave them, claiming in later years that the realisation they had been lying to him triggered his first existential crisis. For the rest of his life, his childhood memories were bleak. He told interviewers of an emotionally deprived upbringing in the Govanhill area of Glasgow, with a disciplinarian mother who broke his favourite toys when he became too attached to them.

His background left Laing with an abiding antipathy towards the nuclear family. By the time of his death he had fathered six sons and four daughters with four women over a period of 36 years. His own family was the first casualty of Laing's increasing celebrity. The reissuing in of his most famous work, The Divided Self, led to frequent television and radio appearances.

In many ways his existentialist approach - he believed that social 'sanity' was fabricated by mutual consent; that the mentally ill were as fully human as the medics who were classifying them - captured the countercultural zeitgeist of the s. His radical rejection of convention ensured he became the most famous cult psychiatrist in the country.

Charismatic, darkly handsome and possessed of an innate sharpness of mind, he soon embarked on several extra-marital affairs, spending weeks and months away from the family home in northwest London.

Anne was left behind, treading water in the wake of his success. The marriage finally came to a juddering halt in , by which time, says Adrian, 'my mother had totally lost it. She found it so humiliating because he was becoming so well-known but he wasn't living with us. Laing had already started an affair with Jutta Werner, a German graphic designer who would become his second wife. Despite his burgeoning career, he paid only the legal minimum in child maintenance to his first family.

My mother was furious about it. She had an unfathomable amount of resentment. Her expression for him was "the square root of nothing".

Laing would disappear for months on end, forgetting birthdays before turning up in a blizzard of misdirected anger. In a biography he wrote of his father, Adrian recounts one of Laing's rare visits to their new home in Glasgow when, having argued with Jutta, he took out his anger by beating his daughter, Karen.

He was an unpredictable, occasionally frenzied, father figure who acted with little regard for the consequences. When, in , his second eldest child, Susan, was diagnosed with terminal monoblastic leukaemia, a row broke out between her parents. Anne felt it would be kinder not to tell Susan the diagnosis. Laing disagreed. She said he was going to rot in hell for that. Then, after he told Susie, he went back to London and left us to deal with it. My mother was spitting blood. Susie died, aged 21, in March He would have been aware of the statistics that demonstrate there is a higher chance of dying from that particular disease if you are from a broken family.

A year later, Laing's eldest child, Fiona, had a nervous breakdown and was taken to Gartnavel Mental Hospital, Glasgow.