R.D. Laing: Contemporary Perspectives

This unique volume aims to re-establish R. D. Laing's position, and reputation, as the major critic of orthodox, medically-based, psychiatry. Laing's complex personality enabled powerful figures in the British psychiatric establishment to malign him when he was at the height of his fame, largely because Laing's ideas, and public posture, posed a formidable threat to their medical authority. As critic Peter Sedgwick had observed, Laing's work was capable of considerable further development. He related mainstream psychiatry's indebtedness to Laing to the fact that no rival approach possessed any dynamic or momentum of comparable power. Additionally Laing's theories of schizophrenia had been powerfully aided "by the distinguished cultural and philosophical apparatus in which they reposed". Subsequent events have proved Sedgwick right, and this book is a record of continuing developments (in theory and practice) of the main corpus of Laing's work, and an adumbration of likely future developments.