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Quem Jupiter vult perdere dementat prius.
(Whom God would destroy, he first sends mad.)
The name of R.D. Laing will be familiar to all readers of this Journal though there may be variable knowledge of the content of his work. This is a compelling biography which describes the man and the work and attempts to trace some of the links between the two. It does not attempt a critique of Laing's theoretical contribution, though questions about that are naturally bound to arise. Indeed, this could be a study of one of those exceptional people who achieve guru status in their own lifetime. One consequence of this is that a merger occurs between the person and their work which is at first enjoyed, but eventually suffered, as one sees in the lives of many of our twentieth-century public figures, especially those of a charismatic type.
This biography could be read from many angles: for example, it might be a case study of such a merger and could demonstrate that, when this occurs, the ideas increasingly cannot be heard because of the noise and seduction generated by charisma. When ideas cannot be heard, development cannot take place. A form of leadership which is anti-development triumphs, the very opposite of a psychoanalytic attitude.
A cautionary note before conveying some of the spirit of the book. The dust-jacket refers to the man who ‘became Britain's most famous psychoanalyst’. This seems both misleading and mischievous. It is misleading because, although Laing qualified as a psychoanalyst-contentiously, as Clay clearly documents, because he was so contemptuous of the training organization, he was even then becoming estranged from it. In The Divided Self-written before the age of 30-he avows his debt more to existential philosophy than to psychoanalysis. This theoretical stance was soon to be put into practice in a characteristically uncompromising manner with the foundation of Kingsley Hall. This existential emphasis also ran in tandem with clinical practices, for example,