R. D. Laing

I would like to say a few words about a recent event. I refer, sadly, to the death of Dr R D Laing. Dr Laing, Ronnie as he was affectionately known, was an inspiration to me personally and had a seminal influence on the founding and development of the Arbours Association. I would not like this occasion to pass without considering the impact of his work.

Ronnie put the person back into patient. He humanised the practice of psychiatry at a time when psychiatry meant constraint and punishment. He allowed us to see that something intelligible and vibrant exists in even the most bizarre, regressed and seemingly ‘crazy’ man or woman. I think, in particular, of Mary Barnes who is here with us tonight. Previously she had been treated, or should I say, mistreated with a bewildering array of medications and incarcerations and was in great danger of being confirmed in the career of a chronic mental patient. Having met Laing, she felt sufficiently understood, and thereby gained the strength to pass through a number of terrifying but ultimately healing regressions.

Ronnie was not the first healer to make madness and the process of going mad comprehensible. One only has to think of Sigmund Freud or Melanie Klein to name but two of his predecessors. Nonetheless Ronnie brought a breath of fresh air to the view prevalent in the 1950's and, unfortunately, still all to prevalent today that severe mental disorders can be ascribed solely to aberrant genes or a bad biochemistry.

One way he accomplished this was by his descriptive brilliance. Like Freud he was masterly in deploying a rich vocabulary to bring to life the dry bones of psychic pain and psychotic states. In other words he could flesh out the existential realities of the most regressed, irrational and, for that matter, irate human being. But more than a great dramatist Ronnie was also a great decoder of the human condition. As the playright David Edgar points out, he was able to make sense of schizophrenia - schizophrenic behavio