ABSTRACT
Ronald David Laing returned to being politely patronised as the naughty, vituperative gadfly who aspired to be a celebrity. The teenage Laing was a keen student of Voltaire, Thomas Reid, S. Freud, K. Marx and F. Nietzsche, but in later years he became increasingly shaped by Sartre, Bateson, E. Goffman and Michel Foucault. The picture that emerges of Laing’s relationship to psychiatry is far more nuanced than the caricature we are usually offered. Laing was proud of his medical background and advocated the judicious use of psychoactive drugs for ‘patients’, a term he redefined as those who patiently bear suffering without complaint. Laing’s therapy took the form of a dialogue with the patient and as such was a unique experience each time. One common journalistic ploy for denigrating Laing is to refer to him as a shaman, especially since to the uninitiated, shamanism and charlatanism are perceived as synonymous.
