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R. D. Laing in Post-Critical Perspective

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 January 2018

Allen R. Dyer
Allen R. Dyer*
Affiliation:
Departments of Psychiatry and Religion, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina 27710, U.S.A.
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Extract

R. D. Laing has offered a challenge to society and to psychiatry which is difficult to accept, for it implies that ‘sane’ society and psychiatry as its instrument actually perpetuate rather than alleviate certain kinds of mental illness. In spite of Laing's growing popularity with the counter-culture, there is a conspicuous lack of consideration of Laing's thought in the psychiatric literature. This may be taken as a rejection of what Laing says, a sort of professional passive aggression. Indeed many would suggest that Laing has passed the limits of sanity; he is certainly deviant. Yet psychiatry's reticence may reflect the difficulty in responding appropriately to Laing's indictment. Apparently there is much truth in Laing's analysis. It is existential, and his considerations involve each of us as persons, not just as members of a corporate group, psychiatrists or sane citizens. Furthermore there is a temptation either to accept or to reject what Laing says as a whole without careful attention to the implications of his arguments.

Type
Research Article
Information
The British Journal of Psychiatry , Volume 124 , Issue 580 , March 1974 , pp. 252 - 259
Copyright
Copyright © Royal College of Psychiatrists, 1974 

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References

Notes

1. Laing, R. D. (1967). The Politics of Experience, p. 67. Penguin Books.Google Scholar
2. Ibid., p. 27.Google Scholar
3. Ibid., p. 44.Google Scholar
4. Ibid., p. 58.Google Scholar
5. Ibid.Google Scholar
6. Laing, R. D. (1960). The Divided Self p. 11. Penguin Books.Google Scholar
7. Laing, Politics of Experience, p. 129.Google Scholar
8. Ibid., p. 133.Google Scholar
9. Ibid., p. 190.Google Scholar
10. Cf. Abraham Maslow (1970). Religions, Values, and Peak-Experiences. New York: The Viking Press.Google Scholar
11. William H. Poteat (1950). Pascal's Concept of Man and Modern Sensibility, p. 121. Ph.D. thesis. Durham, N. C.: Duke University.Google Scholar
12. Binder's four A's are (1) looseness of associations; (2) flat affect; (3) ambivalence; and (4) autism, which he later called dereistic thinking. Google Scholar
13. Laing, The Divided Self, p. 65.Google Scholar
14. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962). The Phenomenology of Perception, p. 355. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.Google Scholar
15. Andersen, H. C. ‘The Emperor's New Clothes’, in Hans Christian Andersen's Fairy Tales, vol. 1, p. 171. Flemsted, Odense, Denmark.Google Scholar
16. Merleau-Ponty, , loc. cit.Google Scholar
17. Le sens, which Merleau-Ponty and other Frenchmen use, loses its useful multiplicity in translation. In the French it may be ‘sense’, ‘meaning’, or ‘direction’.Google Scholar
18. Laing, Politics of Experience , loc. cit.Google Scholar
19. Laing, The Divided Self, p. 11.Google Scholar
20. Laing draws extensively on Sartre both implicitly and explicitly throughout his work. He has written a book with D. G. Cooper called Reason and Violence; A Decade of Sartre's Philosophy: 1950–1960. New York: Vintage Books, 1971. It does not seem pertinent in a paper of this scope to document Sartre's influence on Laing. Attention should be called, however, to a scintillating article by Marjorie Grene, ‘Tacit knowing and the pre-reflective cogito’, in Intellect and Hope; Essays on the Thought of Michael Polanyi (ed. Langford, Thomas A. and Poteat, William H.). Durham, North Carolina, U.S.A.: Duke University Press, 1968.Google Scholar
21. Michael Polanyi (1946). Science, Faith, and Society, p. 10. Chicago: Phoenix.Google Scholar
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23. Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, p. 264.Google Scholar
24. Ibid., p. x.Google Scholar
25. Ibid., p. 264.Google Scholar
26. Ibid., p. 265.Google Scholar
27. Ibid., p. 265.Google Scholar
28. Ibid., p. 268.Google Scholar
29. Ibid., p. 266.Google Scholar
30. Ibid., p. 266.Google Scholar
31. Polanyi (1968), p. 34.Google Scholar
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