3 - Scottish Psychotherapy in the New Age

Summary

The Australian actor, Diane Cilento (1933–2011), records in her autobiography how in 1960s London she met ‘R. D. Laing, an iconoclastic Scottish psychiatrist and author of an astonishingly astute book called The Politics of Experience’ (Cilento 2006: 234). Cilento was at the time married to another Scotsman who had relocated to London, namely the actor Sean Connery (b. 1930), whose fame in the role of James Bond far outshone even Laing's celebrity. Cilento, who came to believe ‘fervently’ in the ideas of Politics (Cilento 2006: 244), was inspired by Laing's therapeutic use of LSD (including allegedly with Connery (Cilento 2006: 235)) to later attempt her ‘first guided LSD trip, which had a profound effect upon me’ (Cilento 2006: 306). This spiritual technology for mystical experience not only effected a deep, personal transformation, it was also to Cilento a ‘sacred matter’ which revealed ‘something beyond this material world’ (Cilento 2006: 306).

This chapter explores the development of a psychotherapeutic ‘New Age’ spirituality from the earlier discourses and practices of Scottish Christian psychotherapy. (The term ‘New Age’, denoting an eclectic, mobile and subjectively authorised contemporary religiosity, is admittedly problematic (e.g. Chryssides 2012: 247–8), and a number of difficulties with it will be explored.) Laing's trajectory illustrates well the popularisation of a narrative of breakdown and breakthrough (or metanoia) as a means to the discovery of an authentic, self-directed life. But there are also significant New Age discourses and practices in the later work of Winifred Rushforth, as well as in the early ideological co-ordinates of the Wellspring Centre in Edinburgh, a successor organisation to the Davidson Clinic. While the model of ‘Self-spirituality’ is useful to understanding these varied phenomena, there are diverse trends and currents, which complicate any attempted univocal account of the psychotherapeutic spirituality which grows out of Scottish Christian psychotherapy.

R. D. Laing's mystical Self-spirituality

Laing's personal library demonstrates his interest in contemplative, mystical experience, with titles such as Daniel Goleman's The Varieties of Meditative Experience (Sp Coll Laing 565), or Robert E. L. Masters's The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience (Sp Coll Laing 402).