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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 many 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, which everyone suspected but needed this disarming Scotsman to show how it was done and for what ends. 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 impact in Europe was reserved for the intelligentsia.
That his influence was more pronounced in academic circles than in psychiatric ones was no doubt a bitter disappointment. 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 his way of thinking instead of the reverse.