Mad to Be Normal is a splendid contribution to the growing literature on the maverick Scottish psychiatrist/psychoanalyst Ronald Laing. It consists chiefly of conversations between Mullan and Laing in Kitzbühel (Austria), London, and Glasgow from early 1988 to August 1989, shortly before Laing's death. Mullan does a skillfull job of organizing, introducing, and contextualizing this material around different periods of Laing's life, following him from his childhood in Glasglow in the 1920s and ′30s to London in the early ′80s, and numerous points in between (Paris, Palo Alto, New York, Baltimore, Patmos, India, etc.). Mullan bills this book as Laing's final testament, as a sequel to Wisdom, Madness and Folly (Laing, 1984), and “the memoir he never lived to write.” And rightly so, I think.

In response to Mullan's skillful and sympathetic questioning, Laing delves more deeply into subjects discussed in his earlier memoir, and opens