ABSTRACT
Ronnie Laing offered a radical vision of psychiatry in the 1960s. He argued that schizophrenia was not really an illness like cancer or the measles, but a desperate attempt to deal with conflicts, usually in the family. His first book, The Divided Self, was a brilliant attempt to understand the minds of schizophrenic patients. He then co-authored Sanity, Madness and the Family: Families of Schizophrenics, a detailed study of 12 families which showed that complicated and poisoned family relationships often led to one member of a family not so much becoming mad as acting mad. In an interview with the Sunday Times, R.D. Laing’s daughter, Karen, revealed that her father once beat her so viciously that her brothers had to intervene to save her from serious injury. Laing, the author of three important books on psychiatry, subjected his children to a reign of terror, she claimed. ‘I was injured after it but it was also the impact that it had on me emotionally and psychologically that was very damaging. It wasn’t just myself – there were other incidents’, she said. Her father was a Jekyll and Hyde figure, Karen Laing said, compassionate and caring towards his patients but cruel and abusive to his own family. ‘I have sat in on sessions with my father while he was working with clients and experienced his genius as a man who could relate to another human’s pain and suffering’, she said. Her brother Adrian also experienced the wild side of their father. As far as I can tell Laing is the only father of the psychologists herein who had to be rescued from a police station by one of his children. Adrian became a barrister and Karen became a psychotherapist. Both are struck by the differences between Laing the theorist and Laing the father. Karen Laing said:
There seems to me to be a huge void and contradiction between R.D. Laing the psychiatrist and Ronnie Laing the father. There was something he was
searching for within himself and it tortured him. It makes me feel very sad that he could relate to other people but he couldn’t relate to people in his own family and see what was happening within the family network.
