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R.D. Laing, although granted the rituals accorded to an honoured son of Scotland, where he still has mythical status - portrait in the National Gallery, Edinburgh, funeral service and burial at Glasgow Cathedral - with his reputation already tarnished by his terminal decline, disappeared from public view until the publication of this book. Headline writers then took him up with a vengeance: ‘Doomed guru of the divided self’ Financial Times); ‘Psychiatrist, heal thyself (Glasgow Herald); ‘Drunk in charge’ (Times Literary Supplement). ‘Ronnie’ Laing made the headlines in the mid-to late-sixties; his rise to fame was meteoric - but so was his fall from grace.
Adrian Laing, the second of R.D. Laing's six sons, a lawyer, not a therapist, told his father before he died in 1989 that he intended to write this account; the book obsessed him for four years prior to its publication; he consulted and interviewed widely and had access to very extensive archives. Illuminated by personal anecdotes, which can offer comic relief from sometimes painful content, it is not a memoir but an official biography, an authentic account of the one British psychiatrist of the past 40 years who became a prominent star in the North Atlantic firmament.
The author carefully plots Laing's course from modest lower-middle-class family, extraordinarily gifted musically and medically, apprenticeships in Glasgow and the R.A.M. C., Tavistock-based research, authorship and public lectures, to the creative ferment and group work which formed the base from which he launched himself into fame. The Divided Self, still in the view of some his greatest book, was by contrast the result of a solo effort in Laing's mid to late twenties, solo with this proviso: before publication he had passed the manuscript around the senior colleagues who constituted until then the ‘containing environment’ of his ‘Tavi’ and psychoanalytic training institutes. These included Sutherland, Bowlby, Winnicott, Marion Milner and Charles Ry