R.D. Laing's Contribution to Existentialism and Humanistic Psychology

The last five years have produced many books about Laing, replete with anecdotes and information about this brilliant and enigmatic man. Laing certainly merits all this attention. Despite his outsider status in his own profession, at the height of his career in the early 1970s, Laing was the most widely read psychiatrist in the world, reaching people across disciplinary boundaries and in all walks of life. Although trained as a psychoAnalyst, Laing's deepest debt as a psychotherapist, by his own reckoning, was to existentialism. Yet except for an early (and so far) unpublished manuscript, dated 1960, Laing never attempted a systematic and coherent account of existential psychotherapy. To facilitate discussion, a brief description of existentialism follows.

Existentialism holds that despite disparate social and historical situations, differences in age, gender, ability and so on, all people, by virtue of their mortality, partake of the same basic structure of existence, and the need to infuse or confer value and to impart meaning to life through action and decision, and to take responsibility for their personal destiny. The way in which existence is structured into different modes, be they authentic and inauthentic modes of being, as in Kierkegaard and Heidegger, or being “in itself,” “for itself,” and “for others,” in Hegel and Sartre, or into various modes of relatedness, as described by Buber, Binswanger or Fromm, vary from one theorist to another. But the underlying premises about the vicissitudes of the