THE VOICE OF EXPERIENCE: Experience, Science and Psychiatry (First edition - first impression)

First impression of the true first edition. ***Very good in red cloth-covered boards with gilt titles to the spine. Boards clean and unmarked, but please note that the bottom corner of the front board is quite badly bumped. No reading lean to the binding. Spine tight. Internally near fine, with a previous owner's name in black fountain pen ink: 'J. W. Raffety' to the top of the front free endpaper. Pages clean. Light crease to top corner of p165, otherwise no creases or tears. ***In a very good pale green, black, red and white printed dustwrapper, which has not been price-clipped, retaining the original publisher's printed price of £7.50 net. With a black and white photographic portrait of R. D. Laing to the back panel. Please note that the bottom corner of the front panel of the dustwrapper is creased where the board is bumped. Light crease to bottom corner of back flap. Red titles to spine of dustwrapper faded. No tears. Dustwrapper clean and bright. ***224mm x 142mm. 179 pages including bibliography to rear. ***Contents: Part One - 1 Experience and Science; 2 The Objective Look; 3 The Diagnostic Look; 4 The Possibility of Experience; 5 Birth and Before 6 The Prenatal Bond. *** Part Two - 7 Embryologems, Psychologems, Mythologems, 8 Dual Unity; 9 The Tie and the Cut-Off; 10 Entry; 11 Egg, Sphere and Self; 12 Recessions and Regressions; Coda; Bibliography. ***'In this major theoretical book, R. D. Laing considers the place and function of the ordinary human world in the objective scientific scheme of things. He extends and deepens the reflections he produced on the themes in his early books, particularly in The Divided Self, The Politics of Experience and The Facts of Life. ***Here he goes on to consider the effect on us when the objective scientific look is brought to bear at birth, at death, and when we become physically or mentally helpless and at the mercy of others. ***His critique of trends in biology, obstetrics, psychiatry and psychoanalysis is often very funny, however painful, and is tellingly documented. He examines various 'checkpoints' where experience and science seem to come into a head-on collision. ***In the second part of this book Laing turns to experience itself and through depictions (some quite extraordinary) and descriptions tries to exemplify and at the same time to discuss a feasible and valid way of communicating about experience. This part of the book is largely based on Dr Laing's thirty years' experience in psychiatry and psychoanalysis, and almost all of it is controversial and challenging. There will be few who will not share his wonder at the correspondence between patterns in the mind, in myths, and in the morphological transformations of embryology, whatever we make of them. ***In this book Laing is having a lively conversation with his contemporaries, and we hear his voice at its best.' (Quotes taken from the dustwrapper flaps). ***First impression of the true first edition, in its original dustwrapper. An uncommon title in first edition. ***For all our books, postage is charged at cost, allowing for packaging: any shipping rates indicated on ABE are an average only: we will reduce the P & P charge where appropriate - please contact us for postal rates for heavier books and sets etc.…