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Few people have colored the literary landscape of psychiatry in the past 50 years with such feverish intensity as has R.D. Laing, whose rise to international renown, despite or perhaps because of his controversial ideas regarding the treatment of the mentally ill (Laing, 1985), continues to be a part of professional lore. A celebrity on the television and public-speaking circuit, Laing was shunned by many of his cohorts, derided by others for his contentious ideas and finally ostracized by the very community that granted him the training to practice as a physician. His revolutionary ideas of treatment challenged prevailing models of mental health treatment, defied the patriarchs of the analytic community and earned him a dubious, though debatable, reputation of being “anti-psychiatry.” His techniques ranged from the use of psychedelic drugs (by both the doctor and patient during clinical sessions) to a more humanistic approach in treating schizophrenia. His numerous books and other publications bear testimony to his ideas that for several decades proliferated in the mental health field and sparked a literary discourse of considerable proportions. Laing's mesmerizing control over the mental health community, his colorful and controversial life, and his prolific literary contributions enticed many to write his biography over the years (Clay, 1996; Burston, 1996). The biography by his son, Adrian Laing, is, however, perhaps deserving of more attention, in that the author's personal relationship to the subject allows more access to details otherwise unavailable to other scholars of Laing's life and work.
In R.D. Laing: A Life, the author, a solicitor by profession, gives a candid, well researched and well documented, chronological history of his father's life, from his birth and family history to his sudden and untimely death at the age of 62. The book can be roughly divided into three sections.
The first section deals with Laing's traumatic birth history and early childh