Preface

At the peak of his fame and popularity R. D. Laing was the most widely read psychiatrist in the world. Arguably the most controversial psychoanalyst since Freud, his meteoric rise in the 1960s catapulted Laing into the vanguard of intellectual debate concerning the nature of sanity and madness and the methods employed to relieve mental suffering. His rare ability to make complex ideas accessible inspired a generation of psychology students, intellectuals, and artists to embrace his radical message in such best-selling classics as The Divided Self (1960), Sanity, Madness and the Family (Laing & Esterson, 1964), The Politics of Experience (1967), Knots (1970), and The Politics of the Family (1971).

Yet by the time of his untimely death in 1989, Laing's influence had all but disappeared in America, even though he continues to be admired abroad. His writings fell out of favor with the times, and on many occasions in the last decade of his life he showed up for public lectures (which were always well attended) drunk or, when sober, arrogant and rude. What are we to make of a man who had the world in the palm of his hand yet apparently despised his notoriety and even the fans who accounted for it, a man who both courted fame and disavowed it? Although several biographies have recently appeared attempting to address this very question (most of them written by people who barely knew him), Laing continues to be an enigma shrouded in mystery. Even his closest friends found him a bewildering and oftentimes exasperating contradiction of character traits. Capable of great warmth and sensitivity-the basis of his extraordinary clinical success-Laing could be painfully provocative and delighted in upsetting people's most cherished perceptions of themselves, sometimes to shattering effect. Who was