The Wing of Madness: The Life and Work of R.D. Laing - Hardcover

Burston, Daniel

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0674953584 ISBN 13: 9780674953581

Publisher: Harvard University Press, 1996

Synopsis

Daniel Burston chronicles Laing's meteoric rise to fame as one of the first media psychogurus of the century, and his spiraling decline in the late seventies and eighties. Here are the successes: Laing's emergence as a unique voice on the psychiatric scene with his first book, The Divided Self, in 1960; his forthright and articulate challenges to conventional wisdom on the origins, meaning, and treatment of mental disturbances; his pioneering work on the families of schizophrenics, Sanity, Madness and the Family (coauthored with A. Esterson). Here as well are Laing's more dubious moments, personal and professional, including the bizarre experiment with psychotic patients at Kingsley Hall. Burston traces many of Laing's controversial ideas and therapeutic innovations to a difficult childhood and adolescence in Glasgow and troubling experiences as an army doctor; he also offers a measured assessment of these ideas and techniques.

The R. D. Laing who emerges from these pages is a singular combination of skeptic and visionary, an original thinker whose profound contradictions have eclipsed the true merit of his work. In telling his story, Burston gives us an unforgettable portrait of an anguished human being and, in analyzing his work, recovers Laing's achievement for posterity.

About this title

About the Author

Daniel Burston is Associate Professor of Psychology at Duquesne University.

Reviews

Laing was the psychologist of the left in the 1960s and '70s, an opponent of the Freudians and behaviorists and of lobotomies, electric shock therapies and the incarceration of psychotics. Like Thomas Szasz, he viewed madness as a social construct, and in The Divided Self, his most widely acclaimed book, he characterizes schizophrenia as a sane response to an insane world. People go mad because they involuntarily repudiate the constriction of their social roles, and in the healing process ("metanoia") a new personality may emerge, anchored in the real self. Burston, a psychology professor at Duquesne University, astutely analyzes this view of psychotic breakdown as ontological crisis. He also selects significant biographical events that helped form Laing's ideas?including his rejection by a disturbed mother who forcefully separated him from whatever he loved. Burston takes us though florid periods of LSD and alcohol, through Laing's neo-Platonism and existentialism, and his superstar identity as therapist, mystic, maverick and guru. He treats Laing's psychological theories respectfully, however, and sees merit in the view that psychotic episodes can lead to a more authentic mode of existence. As Laing wrote: "Madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be breakthrough."
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

This new biography is by far the best account of Laing's life and achievements that I have yet read. Daniel Burston is frank about Laing's many personal failings, but also has an impressive intellectual grasp of Laing's legacy to psychiatry.

Burston's elegant account of [Laing's] early years has a measured thoughtfulness. The Wing of Madness is [a] scholarly and articulate book.

Burston (The Legacy of Erich Fromm, not reviewed) reevaluates the controversial, best-selling ``anti-psychiatrist'' of the '60s, explicating his controversial theories and tracing his deterioration into quackery and alcoholism in the years before his death in 1989. Burston (Psychology/Duquesne Univ.) sets out Laing's confused and miserable life before he tries to reappraise his work. After an unhappy, impoverished childhood in Glasgow, with a distant father and an uncaring mother--apparently a borderline psychotic--the brilliant young Laing flourished at university, eventually choosing psychiatry as his profession. Laing's apprenticeship occurred at a time when lobotomies and insulin comas were applied regularly as treatments for mental problems, and the practices appalled him. Laing became further disillusioned with his profession during his compulsory military service, when he was given the job of determining if soldiers were sane enough to fight in the Korean War. Combining Freudian theories and existentialism, Laing's first works, The Divided Self (1960), Self and Others (1961), and Sanity, Madness and the Family (1964), stressed the burden of insanity on the families of those afflicted and on society, albeit with sympathy, even respect, for the insane. His more strident works, such as The Politics of Experience (1967), which asserted that society itself was dangerously delusional, made him one of the gurus of the rebellious '60s. The following decades, however, brought only personal, professional, and financial setbacks until he finished by espousing prenatal memory and ``rebirthing'' techniques. Burston cogently places Laing among the heated debates and schisms within psychoanalysis, and he offers a careful reading of Laing's theories. As for contributions to psychiatric care, Burston's case for the relevance of Laing's therapy commune for today's community care is less convincing. If the biographical side verges on special pleading, Burston's critique of Laing's writings manages to salvage some philosophical cohesion, though not quite enough to offset the sad record of Laing's peculiar life and headlong decline. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

In the Sixties, works by British psychiatrist R.D. Laing were "required reading" for countercultural types with intellectual leanings. Laing argued that schizophrenia was the result of adaptation to a conflicted family environment and that many schizophrenics would spontaneously recover if provided a supportive but noncoercive environment. Burston (The Legacy of Erich Fromm, LJ 2/15/96) admirably relates the genesis of Laing's ideas, assesses the extent to which they have stood the test of time, and describes Laing's colorful life in straightforward fashion. A good choice for academic libraries, as well as for medium- and larger-sized public libraries serving a clientele interested in the history of ideas.?Mary Ann Hughes, Neill Pub. Lib., Pullman, Wash.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Psychoanalyst R. D. Laing (1927^-89) was not a pleasant person; on this, the women who gave birth to his ten children all agreed. Further, audiences who watched a drunken Laing spewing personal attacks on others in his field were certainly disgusted by him. Nevertheless, his thirst for respect and recognition was insatiable, and as Burston makes clear, Laing was a deep and productive thinker on schizophrenia and other mental illnesses. His explorations of experience in its many forms were of considerable value, for he had an astonishing empathy for the alienated and psychotic. He forcefully pointed out any procedural flaws he discovered in psychiatric thinking and treatment, shook the complacent in psychoanalysis, and attacked practitioners who relied too heavily on machines and drastic operations. Although Laing experimented with therapeutic communities to try out some of his ideas, these attempts fell apart after a short time, since he was not a good administrator. Despite Laing's personal failings, his work, Burston asserts, continues to be worthy of close study. William Beatty

Edition details

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 1996
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0674953584
• ISBN 13: 9780674953581
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 275