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Eight years after his death from a heart attack on a tennis court in the south of France, where stands the reputation of Ronald David Laing, psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, psychotherapist, and let's face it, guru? While much of his work is still available, suggesting a continued interest, I wonder who reads them. Laing's fate in so many fields seems to have been that of marginalization - dismissed as a creature of that poor, maligned decade ‘the sixties’ - when he is not ignored altogether. The psychiatrists, with their continued search for chemical imbalances and organic causes, dismiss his work out of hand; his ideas are ignored by the world of psychoanalysis (even a recent book on the ‘independent mind’ in British psychoanalysis found no place at all for this most independent of minds), while he himself, it is sometimes knowingly muttered, was ‘clearly psychotic’. At the level of popular, dinner party discourse he is constantly misunderstood and misrepresented, his reputation formed by gossip and innuendo, usually from people who never even met him, and general ignorance of what he actually wrote and said. Although profoundly critical of psychiatry, Laing was never, as he kept insisting, an ‘anti-psychiatrist’ or part of the ‘anti-psychiatry’ movement, unlike his one-time colleague David Cooper who coined the term (against Laing's advice, Laing claims). Although fascinated by the workings of the families of people labelled schizophrenic, Laing never ‘blamed’ families or mothers for ‘causing’ the condition. Nor did he think that the ‘mad’ were ‘truly sane’ or the sane mad, although he was fascinated too, obsessed perhaps, by the idea that the discourse of those designated ‘insane’ was, or at least might be, intelligible to anyone prepared to listen without preconceptions.
Laing touched a raw nerve, Kotowicz says at the start of his book. He attempted ‘to politicize and spiritualize, so to speak, the discourse of madness and in the process, in a truly anarchic fashion