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I shall begin this paper with a personal note as to my interest in Laing. Aside from the obvious, the cultural or rather countercul-tural mileau of the 1960's which helped mold my life at that time, and Laing's preeminence within the sterile halls of psychiatry as a voice of reason and justice (“Psychiatry tries to be as scientific, impersonal, and objective as possible towards what is most personal and subjective,” in Mullen, 1995, p. 2) my interest went even deeper. My doctoral dissertation on person perception was one of the first empirical uses of his Interpersonal Perception Scale. The theoretical framework was that of symbolic interactionism (Mead and Cooley) with a touch of Piaget and a tad of Sullivan. The leap to Laing wasn't too great since I saw him then, as now, belonging to the interpersonal perspective, with the caveat that his work was grounded in solid European philosophy, such as Heidegger, Buber, and Sarte, rather than the shallowness of the American empirical tradition.
In rereading Laing, now from the eyes of not a 1960s radical but a confirmed contemporary Freudian, his brilliance, particularly in his early writings (The Divided Self, [I960]; The Self and Others, [1961]; Sanity, Madness and the Family, [1964]), still leaps from the pages, and yet there is a disappointment, a sense that at times he is being too clever or too glib and saying the obvious. On reflection I realize that what seems obvious is not that Laing was trite, but that so much of what followed in the