This is what happens when smart guys get a stupid idea. I'm glad this philosophy never caught on, otherwise we'd all be Existentialists (meaning a 90% chance we'd never mature past freshman year of university-level I-think-I'm-so-cool-I-worship-Sartre mentality, since 90% of Exies I know of fit that description)- and not just that, we'd be parentless Existentialists with Marxists leanings. Naturally, Cooper's (Not-so)Great Idea ended up where it was destined to be: in the realm of obscurity, with all the other concepts that seemed cool & progressive at the time of their birth but now seem really lame!

David Cooper, one of the grand old men of existential psychiatry, delivers a withering assault on the family from an individualist perspective. "Bringing up a child," he says, "is bringing down a person"; the family teaches us to live "agglutinatively," hence pathologically, rooting our identity in our birth milieu instead of in who we are as individuals.

It's hard to find books that recognize that the family -- modern society's bedrock institution -- has critical problems which themselves underlie so many of our social problems.

Written in the 70s, the book has a streak of Marxist jargon that contemporary readers may find distracting. But look past that -- beneath it is as pure and radical a call to tear down the family and all the "subtle violence" it works on the individual that you will ever read.

Sartre & two British psychiatrists might seem like strange bedfellows. But Laing & Cooper took Sartre's theory of practical groups to heart & produced the still-controversial social movement called antipsychiatry.

Reason & Violence is a compendium of three of Sartre's works published betw. 1950 & 1960. Saint Genet was the 1952 bio. in which Sartre mused that playwright-pervert-pickpocket Jean Genet had achieved something approximating a psychoanalytic cure by becoming what others said he was & producing similar fictional characters. Laing & Cooper also reduced to a few pages Search for a Method & Critique of Dialectical Reason, writings which shaped in part Sartre's philosophy during his last 30 years.

The intro noted that they were dealing with key ideas here; moreover, none of these works had been translated into English at the time L&C tackled them. Despite brevity (compared with the originals), this is often difficult material to wade thru. The editing leaves much to be desired, & the language is frequently awkward & stilted. But it remains an original & a highly literate work of first magnitude.

After all, who could write this today? The dung heap of pop culturalists all want to write fiction with a message. They want to write Moby Dick while they lecture Ahab on his political incorrectitude. They want to put Holden Caulfield in a 12-step program & scold his parents. But they lack any sense of drama or character development, so they write Winning thru Intimidation, The Se7en Habits, Cultural Literacy, & The End of History: metaphorical accounts of modern society. And if they're not writing for mass market, then it's for each other & more govt. grants to research, say, prison conditions for Mary, Queen of Scots.

Marshall McLuhan supposedly wrote that schizophrenia was a necessary consequence of literacy. If that's true, our pop commentators are safely sane.

Not so Laing & Cooper. Reason & Violence is maddening in its content. In a foreward, Sartre himself praises them for seeking an existentialist explanation to the mentally sick. And we shall not soon see its (or their) like again.

this book is a very good and philosophical book. i enjoyed it alot. anyone who is interested in Philosophy should read this book. it has many aspects that startle as you are reading it. every single paragraph has something to make you go really?

therefore you should read this book for sure.