ABSTRACT
The theoretical landscape of Scottish psychiatrist and psychotherapist Ronald David Laing’s written work appears as a complex weave of ideas from phenomenology, existentialism, psychoanalysis and humanism, knotting them in intricate and unusual ways. Laing has been declared, since his death in 1989, a “divided self ” (Clay 1996), a “trickster” (Westcott in Mezan 1972), an acid Marxist (Mullan 1997) and, alongside Foucault, Szasz and Goffman, one of the four horsemen of the anti-psychiatric apocalypse (Sedgwick in Clare 1982). His life and work nonetheless remains underexplored in the geographical literature to date. Born in Glasgow in 1927, Laing became fascinated with the intricate connections between body and mind. Studying medicine at Glasgow University in the late 1940s, and training in psychiatry in Army facilities and NHS long stay mental hospitals across Britain during the early 1950s, Laing became entranced by the patients who he encountered – particularly those diagnosed with psychotic disorders – and disturbed by the care that many of them were receiving. Laing moved to London to train in psychoanalysis at the Tavistock Clinic of Human Relations in 1956, under the supervision of Marion Milner and Donald Winnicott, beginning a highly influential period of his life when key texts such as The Divided Self (1960), The Self and Others (1961), and Sanity, Madness and the Family (1964) were drafted (during or shortly after his time there). Intriguingly, it appears that his time at the Tavistock, rather than enticing him further into psychoanalytic thought and practice, turned his attention back to the “psychotic” patients who he had met in psychiatric practice, but also to the existential and phenomenological insights that inspired his earlier thinking, causing an interesting fusion to emerge.
