R D Laing and his legacy

In August of this year, it will be twenty years since the death of Ronald David
Laing (the ‘ai’ is pronounced as it would be in ‘Paine’). Whilst there may be
argument about the nature and scope of his ‘legacy’, no-one, I hope, would deny
his impact on the field of psychotherapy. But what, twenty years after his death,
is this legacy - if any?

I claim no special authority to speak about Ronald Laing. I have returned to my

native Scotland after many decades away, and am interested in Laing as an exile,
and a prophet without honour in his own land. I have always found him to embody
many admirable (and not-so-admirable) characteristics of the Scot – and, I would
argue, specifically of the Glaswegian – in both his life and in his brilliant and not-
so-brilliant career. Gavin Miller (2004) reclaims Laing for Scotland as a fine
example of the ‘democratic intellect’, who with the Scots poet Tom Leonard,
‘attempt[s] to restore dignity and intelligibility too those who are invalidated and
demeaned because (in the broadest sense) of the way they communicate’ (p.
136).

The psychiatric establishment, with (at least until recently) its insistent
investment in and defensive adherence to a reductionist scientific /biological
/pharmacological worldview, has generally found it hard to listen to psychiatric
patients. The whole thrust of psychiatry over the last hundred or so years has
been founded on the biological aspects of ‘madness’, on the ‘mad’ person as
‘Other’, who must be persuaded of the errors in his thinking, who can be
categorised in accordance with the provisions of the DSM…… It has been
unthinkable to propose the speech or the thinking of the ‘mad’ Other as
meaningful. As Miller (2006) points out, Laing, from the outset, requires that ‘the
therapist [be] an exegete, making sense of a puzzling and baffling text by
drawing on the possibilities of being that he shares with the patient’.

Laing devoted his life and his energies to do nothing less than change the way we
think about ‘madness’:

‘he was very plastic and mimetic, so he could imitate and get into
other people's moods, thoughts, language, and world, including those
of so-called ‘mad’ people. And he was able to bring back and speak of
what it was like to be ‘mad’ (more or less). This gave ‘mad’ people an
enormous sense of relief. Someone heard them. They were not alone.
Madness was not unreason, a total unintelligibility, a total difference
between the sane and the insane. Ronnie showed that we're all in it
together (Gans 2001).

In his first book, The Divided Self, (1959, 1990) Laing sought to re-personalise a
‘scientific’ view of ‘the person liable to “madness”’, as an ‘alienated’ being-in-the-
world. He identified for me the notion of ontological insecurity – the sense of not
being able to trust my-self as the subject of my own experience, of not being able
to take for granted that I have a place in the world, such that I felt able to
understand, for myself as well as for others, how it is that I sometimes feel I have
to expend precious energy in the struggle just to attain and maintain some
degree of ‘at-home-ness’ in the world.

In Self and Others (1961, 1990) he elucidated, with simplicity and clarity, the
‘nuts and bolts’ of how individuals are formed through the interaction with others
who, by virtue of being parents or caregivers, have power over the being of the
person; through confirmation, disconfirmation and collusion, we shape each other
and are shaped by our personal relations. I found no discontinuity in his
emphases in these two books, in that I can understand how a lack of experience
of ‘confirmation’, of being met as a person by significant others in the years of my

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early ‘formation’, may foster an insecurity that renders me less able to hold my
own over against the Other.

I was delighted to meet, in Laing’s work, the under-reported Scottish philosophical

tradition. Laing, following Hume, argued that the human world is understood
through social participation in contrast to the world of the physical sciences which
we learn about by limiting ourselves to observation and theorising. Macmurray’s
philosophical emphasis was on The Self as Agent (1957, 1991) and on Persons in
Relation (1961, 1991), which emphasis was shared in Scottish psychoanalysis by
Fairbairn (1952) in his insistence that the individual is always and everywhere
object-seeking, that is, in-relation-with- and acting in respect of that relation-with-
another, and by Suttie (1988).

Laing’s work prefigured for me the subsequent research of Stern (1985), Schore
(1994), Trevarthen (1998), and many others, into the permeability of the infant in
interaction with care-givers, and the reciprocity of the mother-infant relationship.
From these, and learning from the work of the Americans Fromm-Reichman
(1950) and Searles (1986) in the Sullivanian tradition and, independently of this
thread, the revolutionary ideas of Langs (1992, 1995), it followed for me that the
therapeutic relationship should be based on the principle of mutual influence: you
influencing me, and I influencing you, and so on. Both Langs and Laing saw
whatever the patient or client brought as evidence of her adaptive capacity: that
the behaviour of both the ‘neurotic’ and the ‘psychotic’ is better understood as a
‘special strategy that a person invents in order to live in an unliveable situation‘
(Laing 1967 p.95), rather than as evidence for a ‘clinical’ diagnosis.

Laing followed Buber in viewing the human being as a relating being made up of ‘I
and Thou’. If the individual is treated as a separate mental apparatus he can then
only be treated as the object or the ‘it’ of the psychiatrist’s medical concerns.
And, with Foucault, he saw the power imbalance in the psychiatric intervention,
influenced and encouraged by political forces and policies which have been
shaped around our irrational fear of ‘madness’. He was always concerned by the
social injustice inherent in a psychiatric service organized on the basis of
Cartesian diagnostic categories that remove the individual’s humanity and make
of him an ‘it’. He spoke for the importance of common sense and the ordinary.
Most importantly he spoke for the ‘humane’ 'treatment' of schizophrenic people in
small communities where the ordinary difficulties of living together can be met
and discussed as people together, rather than being pathologised and medicated
out of awareness.

I, with others, took as my guiding principle for how I should conduct myself in
respect of the psychotherapeutic relationship, Laing’s plea that ‘[p]sychotherapy
must remain an obstinate attempt of two people to recover the wholeness of
being human through the relationship between them’ (Laing 1967: 45). He goes
on to note that

Any technique concerned with the other without the self, with
behaviour to the exclusion of experience, with the relationship to the
neglect of the persons in relation, with the individuals to the exclusion
of their relationship, and most of all, with an object-to-be-changed
rather than a person-to-be-accepted, simply perpetuates the disease it
purports to cure (ibid).

I also note that Laing’s ‘legacy’ has been marred by his inability to ‘follow
through’ his own ideas – to ‘walk the talk’. In his restless exploration of his own
boundaries, he was unable fully to consider the Other in his own life and day-to-
day interactions. He seemed unable to care for his biological and intellectual
children: unwilling to do the boring academic work of building on his reflections, of

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making connections with or critiquing existing ideas. He disappointed many who
were willing to learn from him. He was, despite the ‘legacy’ of the Philadelphia
Association, not a builder, but an iconoclast, even of his own work.

I suggest that this tendency was rooted in the shaping of his personality in
childhood, when his problematic relationship with his parents fostered a profound
sense of mistrust, of himself as well as others. When Laing described ontological
insecurity and the schizoid patient’s fear of authentic self-disclosure in The
Divided Self, he described his own experience. I suggest that he was shaped also
by his experience of growing up in Glasgow, where emotional reticence, male self-
destructiveness, iconoclasm and the ‘Caledonian Antisyzygy’1 are still pervasive
social characteristics. Laing’s directness and abhorrence of ‘bullshit’ were ‘very
Glasgow’!

Laing was criticised for ‘blaming the parents’, and I would argue that his
adversarial style, for example, in The Politics of Experience, as he sought to show
that madness did not only arise within the individual, but as part of a social
mechanism, engendered a defensive reaction that facilitated the joining together
in common cause of ‘biologically-minded’ psychiatrists and the families of those
diagnosed as ‘schizophrenic’. His style of communication by that stage was more
determinedly outrageous, more Billy Connolly, more ‘Glasgow’, than serious-
minded ‘mental-health professional’. And so, to many of these latter, he became
the transgressive Other, and his ideas were rejected along with his outrageous
behaviour.

As I write, I am very much aware of the ‘ontological insecurity’ of the profession of

psychotherapy, as it struggles to find its place in the world. As psychotherapists,
we are orientated towards privacy and anonymity, and have perhaps contributed
to the rejection of Laing because of his determined publicity-seeking and
disregard of ‘appropriate’ professional boundaries whilst at the same time we are
excited by his ‘obstinate attempt …. to recover the wholeness of being human’.

References

Fairbairn (1952) Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality. London: Routledge &

Kegan Paul.
Fromm-Reichman (1950) Principles of Intensive Psychotherapy. Chicago: Chicago
University Press
Gans, S (2001) In Redler, L, Gans, S and Mullan, B ‘Remembering Ronnie’
http://www.janushead.org/4-1/index.cfm
Laing, R D (1959, 1990) The Divided Self. London: Penguin.
Laing, R D (1969, 1990) Self and Others. London: Penguin.
Laing, R D (1967) The Politics of Experience. Harmondsworth: Penguin
Langs, R J (1992) Science, Systems and Psychoanalysis. London: Karnac.
Langs, R (1995) Clinical Practice and the Architecture of the Mind. London:
Karnac.
Macmurray, J (1957, 1991) The Self as Agent. London: Faber
Macmurray, J (1961, 1991) Persons in Relation London: Faber
Miller, G (2004) R D Laing. Edinburgh: Edinburgh Review
Miller, G (2006) ‘R D Laing’s Language of Experience’ PsyArt, December 3, 2006.
http://www.clas.ufl.edu/ ipsa/journal/2006_miller01.shtml
Schore, A (1994) Affect Regulation and the Origin of the Self. Hillsdale, NJ:
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates
Searles, H F (1986) Collected Papers on Schizophrenia and Related Subjects.
London: Karnac.
1
‘The bundle of jostling contrasts, contradictions and cross-currents that lend Scottish
literature its characteristic energy and attitude’
http://www.culturalprofiles.net/scotland/Directories/Scotland_Cultural_Profile/-5392.html

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Stern, D (1985) The Interpersonal World of the Infant. NY: Basic Books.
Suttie, I D (1988) The Origins of Love and Hate. London: Free Association Books
Trevarthen, C (1998) ‘Intersubjectivity’ in R Wilson and F Keil (eds) The MIT
Encyclopaedia of Cognitive Science, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

The Psychotherapist (UKCP) Autumn 2009, Issue 43, 7 – 9.