ABSTRACT
Laing crashed onto the British scene with his book The Divided Self (1959) when he was not much more than 30 years old. He had a tremendous impact across many other fields besides psychiatry and he made many people think again about mental illness. He wrote particularly about the experiences of people who have been labelled mad, or schizophrenic. Though David Cooper actually coined the term anti-psychiatry (Cooper 1967), it was Laing who ended up with the label, even though he was at first sceptical and later very much opposed to using it. The movement of anti-psychiatry became associated with the counter-culture movement of London of the swinging sixties and an international following of curious intellectuals and fascinated individuals gathered around it. Together with colleagues, including David Cooper and Aaron Esterson, he created the Philadelphia Association in 1965, which continues to offer long-stay therapeutic communities. He was to some extent informed by the phenomenological and existential writings of Heidegger, but was most particularly inspired by the existentialism of Sartre. The original ideas of existential philosophies were however mitigated by other ideas, especially those of psychoanalysis. Laing’s work was an uneasy synthesis of object relations theory and existentialism. The ideas of Winnicott, who was Laing’s supervisor, figure prominently in much of what Laing had to say. Rycroft’s ideas were also influential. He was Laing’s analyst. This psychoanalytic influence, as well as his early psychiatric training, hampered Laing’s ability to develop a fully fledged existential approach and he continued to think in medical terms in spite of his increasingly mystical inclination.
