Feature

’...Do not adjust your mind...’

In the 1960s one man, R D Laing, was responsible for knocking the psychiatric profession off its pedestal. David Ingleby explains

The death of R D Laing recently was hardly noticed by the press, yet his influence on all of us was greater than this suggests. Back in the 1960s there used to be a slogan: ‘Do not adjust your mind, there is a fault in reality.’ For the hard-working, clean-living, post-war generation this was a hard thought to think. Laing was one of a handful of people able to convince others that there might be something in it.

Ronnie Laing was brought up in Glasgow, where he acquired his wry sense of humour and his ‘gift of the gab’. Not even his worst enemies could deny that he was extremely talented. By the age of 24 he was a psychiatrist in the British Army, and four years later he wrote the book The Divided Self, which was to put him on the map as an authority on certain kinds of mental suffering. By this time he was fully persuaded that classical psychiatry didn’t have a ‘snowball’s chance in hell’, as he put it, of understanding or helping people.

At the beginning of the 1960s Laing moved to London, where he acquired training in psychoanalysis and family therapy, and where he set up a number of ‘asylums’ where people could safely go to pieces if they felt like it (the best known being Kingsley Hall). Just at that moment the coercive and primitive methods of classical psychiatry were beginning to come under fire from all quarters. Laing hastened their decline — and the more popular he became, the more the medical establishment hated him for it.

What Laing was trying to get across was much more than a new theory of what was wrong with mental patients. From time to time he had a number of such theories; but they were never properly worked out, and one suspects he didn’t much mind very much when the defenders of the psychiatric faith tore them to pieces in the pages of their journals. No, what Laing tried to create was something more fundamental and much harder to ‘refute’ — it was a whole new way of looking at the problems of psychiatry.

The imposing label he used of ‘existential phenomenology’ put some people off, but what Laing was arguing for was very simple: that we should apply to mental patients the interpretative skills we develop intuitively in the process of becoming a person.

You could say, then, that Laing was an expert in what it is to be a person; but his real genius had to do with the opposite of this — the ways people stop each other existing as persons. He had a unique gift for analysing the intangible forms of cognitive power which can squeeze the life out of someone without laying a finger on them. This, I think, is what really captured the imagination of his readers: he taught them to see violence that takes place in the space between people. And for those who saw it for the first time — whether it was in their family life, at school, university, work, in psychiatry, politics or whatever — it was a tremendously liberating revelation.

Some time in the 1960s Laing embarked on a new career; one which was eventually to take him over; that of culture-hero. Gradually he became incorporated in a movement, in the heady mix of mysticism and revolutionary politics that spread through the capitals of the West and reached a peak in the student revolt of 1968. Paradoxically, however, while hundreds of thousands of his books were sold his influence on his own profession began to dwindle.

Laing so utterly detested psychiatry that he failed to see that it sometimes does a necessary job. Because of this, he failed to build up links with people in the profession who were equally fed up with it, but who wanted to build something new from inside. And because he made little effort to reach these people, he missed the chance of a role comparable to Franco Basaglia in Italian psychiatry — of leading a revolution of the profession from within.

One may argue that in Britain, such a revolution was never on the cards; but Laing could have addressed himself more to the doctors and nurses who struggled, then as now, against oppression and inhumanity perpetrated in the name of medicine. He chose the high road — international notoriety, cult status, a mass audience — and that was perhaps what he was cut out for. But those on the low road sometimes resented him for it.

Even they, however, could take inspiration from his penetrating insights, his razor-sharp prose, and the verve with which he managed to knock a whole profession off its pedestal. You might not like him, but once you’d read his books you were never quite the same again.