ABSTRACT
Most of the opinions that caused R.D. Laing to be included under the banner of ‘antipsychiatry’ are not only mainstream today but were already shared by many of his contemporaries: they concerned the purposeless and infinite detention of the mentally ill in institutions and harmful experimentations with their bodies and minds that ultimately put their lives at risk. Laing, however, rejected the label ‘anti-psychiatrist’ and devoted much of his career to reforming institutional care and establishing community sanctuaries. This chapter examines Laing’s psychiatric practices to uncover what strategies he developed to help the severely ill patients he was working with. Trained as a psychoanalyst in the orbit of object relations theory, Laing maintained psychoanalysis’ focus on the family but neglected the importance of unconscious fantasy. Instead, he centred the question of whether schizophrenia was more socially intelligible than previously presumed, ultimately proposing that schizophrenia itself was a social event. Tracing Laing’s strategies, this chapter examines three therapeutic practices that he developed in independent work while employed at the Tavistock Clinic in London: phenomenology of social relations, systemic intervention in families, and community therapy. It finally argues that Laing’s shift to the therapeutic community coincided with his increasingly outward-facing role of a public intellectual relating the question of liberation to society more broadly. But his practice cannot solely be explained by his involvement with revolutionary politics. In fact, his therapeutic community project was anchored in a Christian interpretation of therapy, seeking to restore a lost sense of commonality through the spiritual experience of camaraderie.
