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This is a personal account of life in the Philadelphia Association from the late 1960s to the 1990s when some of the ideas of Basaglia, Cooper, Deleuze, Esterson, Fanon, Foucault, Guattari, Laing and Szasz were put into practice. Cooper's Psychiatry and Anti-psychiatry (1967) was the inspiration for what appeared as an international movement within psychiatry, influenced, among other things, by Foucault's Madness and Civilization (1967). Szasz believed mental illness to be a myth created by society; Cooper believed that the family was an instrument of oppression perpetrating psychological violence on its members; Laing believed that if one studied the specific forms of communication within families of schizophrenics one could make madness intelligible and therefore amenable to some form of psychotherapy. The paper highlights the evolving understanding of psychosis within the Philadelphia Association and the relationship of psychosis to psychoanalysis. It suggests that far from being a misguided blip in the history of psychiatry, ‘anti-psychiatry’ could be seen as having revolutionized our discourse in relation to psychosis in a way which has left a worthy and lasting legacy, linking treatment to how we treat one another.