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R. D. Laing meant many things to many people. I will elaborate on some aspects of his thought and practice as I knew them.
What struck me on first meeting Ronnie was his style; he stood out from most people because of his unique way of being. This was not merely a matter of the way he dressed, the music he liked, his conversation, his looks, and his rather dry and sometimes cruel humor; rather, his style conveyed something of great importance. It was crucial in his psychotherapy, and one of the things he can teach us is the vitality of style in the practice of psychotherapy and counseling.
Style conveys something above and beyond what can be explicitly said by means of interpretation and other interventions. For what there is to understand in being human is richer than what it becomes when put into the jargon of therapeutic speech. Intelligibility depends on dialogue, on the way things are said and to whom; there is more to dialogue than what is said.
Style is not just an aesthetic matter. We must distinguish style from stylish; the latter is a matter of aesthetics. A stylish person is consciously concerned about appearance and tends to conform to the latest fashion. Style on the other hand is unconscious; we all have a style, a way of being that is visible to others, and this is what Foucault (1988, p. 6) called ethics, or the practice