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He who calls to mind the ills that he has incurred and those that have threatened him, and the trivial occasions that have moved him from one state to another, thereby prepares himself for future changes through the examination of his condition.
—Montaigne, Of Experience
R. D. LAING WORE MANY ROBES in his career—psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, philosopher, social critic, author, poet, mystic—and at the peak of his fame and popularity in the 1970s he was the most widely read psychiatrist in the world. Renown of that magnitude is dependent on the happy coincidence of a multitude of factors, including the right message at the most opportune time. This was no doubt true for Laing, when the student unrest of the Vietnam War intersected with his impassioned critique of a society intent on subverting the minds of its youth for unforeseen purposes. At a time when authority figures of every persuasion were suspect, the so-called counterculture embraced this disarming Scotsman and trusted him to explain how they were being mystified and why. Perhaps the war explains why Americans were especially drawn to Laing’s message, making him a social icon for a generation of psychology students, intellectuals, and artists, while his influence in Europe was reserved for the intelligentsia.
That his impact was more pronounced in academic circles than in psychiatric ones was no doubt a bitter disappointment to him. The (albeit reluctant) “father” of antipsychiatry could hardly expect his psychiatric colleagues to embrace someone whose goal they saw as undermining their best efforts. Laing—like Freud before him—wanted it both ways: to thumb his nose at convention while enlisting society to adopt