Famed psychiatrist R. D. Laing gives a study of eleven families and thier children whom are schizophrenic. Laing gives no interjections, but rather lets the conversations that the families have amongst themselves give their own testimony. Laing lets the reader know where language patterns occur, in which he believes is largely due to the psychic split. The "double bind" theory introduced by Gregory Bateson, in which the child has been given mixed messages. In the cases given, the studies are all female, and the mothers are usually the aggressor, while the father the passive, and if other siblings are included, they usually side with the mother against the sibling. Shocking, sad and enlightening all together, Laing gives a great look on how schizophrenic in this light can and does occur. Highly reccomended and should be read by all psychologists entering or in the field (it is a shame that this book, like so many of R.D. Laings books are out of print). One should include with this book Gregory Batesons "Steps to an Ecology of Mind" which includes the essay which explains the "double bind."

That is to say there are logical means to schizophrenia, and nothing that confers to a physical disability. An amazing study of eleven families and the children who are hospitalized because of their "illness" (incidentally noted, they are all female patients). Dr. Laing and Dr. Esertons account of schizophrenia all points to the facts that this mental illness is not a physical impairment, but a distrust in a persons reality, through communication, through insecurity of beliefs and senses. Schizophrenics choose logically and intelligently under the confines of family life with the parents (who are more delussional than the patient). Although this book is primarily a psychological study, it reads like a novel.

Being that there's no description I decided to write the description from the flap of the book for you to see:

Anna is the harrowing story of a beautiful young woman's mental breakdown and descent into madness-and of her husband's decision to take of her at home, surrounded by her children, family, friends, and sensitive "helpers," rather than permit her to be institutionalized and sujected to electroshock therapy.

Everybody meant well-from the family who wanted to save Anna's individuality and human dignity, to the doctors who thought that caring for her at home might work, to the psychotherapists, most of them of the Laingian persusion, who thought that in time the problem would disappear. But nothing disappeared. Instead came pure horror, rape, attempted murder, and the agony of Anna's lingering death from self-inflicted burns.

"Anna" and "David Reed" are pseudonyms, but Anna is a tragically true story. Every painfully revealing biographical detail, every lacerating description of the inexorable destruction of Anna's life is recorded with devastating honesty. The names have been changed in order to protect the living; none of us, on reading this profoundly disturbing book, can know how we would behave if confronted by this appalling dilemma.

Anna is the most powerful and moving story of love and the tragedy of madness to be published in our time.

An excellent book for all people interested in Laing. Hopefully Mullan will find a way to publish the material so that those interested can read it rather than holding onto it and waiting for a publishing deal that isn't too far "beneath" his expectations.

This is one of the most engaging books I've read in over 20 years: it brought back to me the stimulation of encountering a truly first-rate mind.

Mullan has brilliantly effaced himself so that you get 100% Laing direct. And a Laing worthy of his better reputation. Mullan limited himself to brief preface and introductions and, during the interviews, short guiding comments and questions. Another interviewer might have cluttered the interviews with his/her own agenda and introduced the book with lengthy analysis, all of which would have obscured Laing. Undoubtedly Mullan also had a mark in selecting and editing the interviews, but what he achieved was this wonderful effect of making the reader feel like he/she is alone with Laing listening to Laing pour out his life in great detail, with great feeling, and without pulling any punches.

In the section on "Influences", Laing's amazing retention and grasp of his existentialist sources is illuminating. In "Kingsley Hall", you get an inside scoop, with lots of warts acknowledged, on this famous and infamous experiment. These conversations are an invaluable complement (and more) to the other sources on Laing, including Laing's own books.

"Great men have great weaknesses": I was struck by how negative Laing was about many of his contemporaries including coworkers. He seems to have distanced himself from many people. As much as Laing seemed to understand Existentialism, my impression from the section "Buddhism" was that his understanding of Buddhism wasn't especially strong. He claimed to have been credited with having a rare kind of "Nirvana consciousness". Do you need a credited consciousness? At any rate, even with Buddhism, Laing poured himself into it and was not shy of insights.

Whether Laing had a "Nirvana consciousness" or not, he was most certainly extraordinary in these interviews. You'll feel why Laing was special if you read "Mad to be Normal". And you'll have a great context for understanding any of Laing's major books.

Mullan has done Laing a special favor. And us.

In this huge set of interviews, the former king of counter-culture philosophy expresses his provocative opinions on all imaginable topics, from mystcism to politics. If you are the type of person who thinks for yourself and suspects that straight society is almost incurably ill, you will probably find a kindred spirit in this fascinating man. Being a prestigious psychiatrist and former military officer, he knows the system he's trying to change from the inside out (an advantage most radical thinkers don't have).

This is the most profound book I ever read. Laing defines mental illness as an ontological crisis with the potential to be a spiritual breakthrough. He decries psychiatry for perversely thwarting this potential with various forms of torture (incarceration, drugs, electroshock, etc.) As to normality, Laing argues it is the product of a pathological "us and them" mentality underlying personal identity and group dynamics.
To be well-adjusted to our modern dysfunctional society is not healthy for the individual or society. Who is more dangerous? Laing asks: the psychotic who mistakenly believes he carries a hydrogen bomb in his stomach or the perfectly adjusted B-52 bomber pilot who will drop very real hydrogen bombs when ordered to do so?
The chapter titled "The Bird of Paradise" is hypnotically poignant in exploring the inner world of thoughts and emotions. Laing was much more than a scientist. He was a visionary who shed light on the dark role of pscyhiatrists as voodoo-like priests and purveyors of social engineering.

No book on first reading has ever hit me with the force of this one.

Some of the content I don't buy: the focus on madness as a positive journey and the de-emphasis on inborn factors that may lead to "schizophrenia".

But as an example of compelling writing, of a writer putting his heart into his work, I don't know of any rival to this book.

But there's a lot more than writing style here. This is one of the strongest challenges to us "normal" folk about the potential we may have tossed away in exchange for a fit in our troubled society.

This isn't a book that tells us what to do or that sells some old tradition. This is a book that tells us how it seems ... to someone uniquely qualified and extraordinarily concerned about our well-being.

Laing was a great gift to the world and this is his greatest book.

This is an important book in which Laing pioneers a new view of "madness" and "insanity". According to L., a sensitive person, pushed by an unhealthy environment, escapes into another reality so as not to deal with the disconnectedness and horror of the consensual reality. As a consequence, he/she is promptly classified as being "mad" by the orthodox psychiatry and its practitioners, ever so scared of losing the monopoly on sanity. During reading of the book, I sometimes had to ask myself who was really mad: the cold, anal and unfeeling parents or their sensitive schizophrenic son, whose ramblings when decoded make much more sense to me than their parents' eerie "normality". Another question that kept cropping up was whether our shrinks, "regular people" who are usually themselves disconnected from their emotional and spiritual foundations, are the right people to guide the sick into other realities and back again? Laing makes a good case that methods used for training and practicing of psychiatry need serious re-evaluation. This is as true now as it was in the 60-ies.

Many ancient cultures value and even encourage temporary forays into "insanity" when the initiate goes to ask the gods about the meaning of life. We have lost these initiation experiences and when they occur spontaneously in the most sensitive members of our society, as they are wont to, the psychiatrists classify these people as insane, drug them heavily and, if they encounter resistance to their authority, lock them up. The loss, sadly, is all ours. As Laing says: "our sanity is not *true* sanity. their madness is not *true* madness. ...The madness that we encounter in "patients" is a gross travesty, a mockery, a grotesque caricature of what the natural healing of that estranged integration we call sanity might be. True sanity entails... dissolution of the normal ego, that false self competently adjusted to our alienated social reality ".

Our culture is a secular one in which the mystery of death and rebirth has been lost. We therefore lost the ability to help people who have stumbled into the ever-shifting universe of ego dissolution. Even worse, our psychiatry is designed to further push them into helplesness and fragmentation of the self. What should be a joyous experience, a journey into the divine, becomes a journey into hell, a true loss of the soul. Laing, in this precious book, eloquently uncovers the heartless and soulless machine that has been entrusted with this process - and that has failed, millions upon millions of times, to bring light into the darkness.

Laing's compassion for those currently mentally ill (and others), as found in this book and others by him, is powerful. It's very fortunate that he raised his voice (and wrote so well) about the coldness and at time inhumanity that can be found within psychiatry.

Existentialism may, in some hands, support healthy therapy but it can also serve, as it seems to in this book, as:

a) a largely empty explanatory system, i.e. a rich set of concepts that enable one to create a great story about what is going on with someone, but a story that leads nowhere outside of itself. Satre's "Saint Genet" seems such an application, an interesting framework perhaps for a "biography" but layered in fictitious play.

b) a false comfort system that encourages troubled people to see themselves as an important part of some global battle against alienation and, in Laing's version, toward ecstasy ... instead of facing real immediate needs.

Getting a job may be more important than ecstasy. Taking a pill may be wiser than considering one's "false self" or going further on some great voyage toward transcendence. True, Laing has acknowledged the value of pills and the possibility of genetic/biochemical causes, but, as seen in this book, that was a very tiny part of his concern. What he wanted, this overcoming of the false self, this ending of violence has turned out to be largely orthogonal to the needs of the psychotic, for many of whom the right medication and daily routine has enabled them to enter the mainstream of society productively. Whether existence precedes existence was of no consequence to these people in getting well; now that they are, they can decide to what extent existentialism and Laing's vision counts. My impression is that, except for the great contribution he has made in encouraging compassion to them, his analyses matter very little and rightly so. It's unfortunate that his great compassion (and writings on) got mixed in with his attempts to apply existentialist notions, which tend to be very complicated and lead to a system as dangerous as Freud's in its abuse of speculation masking as truth.

Kingsley Hall, as described by Laing himself in interviews, was a compassionate start at providing humane mental health treatment, but therapeutically a mess. Sartre is vastly less effective than some of the growing number of anti-psychotic medications and it does a great disservice to the many of the mentally ill to suggest otherwise. Despite some disclaimers, Laing, as in "The Divided Self" and "The Politics of Experience", has done just that. He witnessed some terrible medical practices and he recognized they were so and called attention to that, but then he opted for mind games like existentialism and knots instead of providing practical guidance. "The Divided Self" is great in some ways and, for a young man of 28, forgiveable.

Nonetheless, "The Divided Self" is a bad book for most anyone who is mentally troubled and it is a bad book for most anyone who will be dealing with anyone mentally troubled. Boring practical choices made day to day are infinintely more useful than existentialist analysis and fantasies of transcendence.

Foucault wrote in madness and civilization: "The constitution of madness as a mental illness, at the end of the eighteenth century, affords the evidence of a broken dialogue.... In the serene world of mental illness, modern man no longer communicates with the madman."

Psychiatric dogma says that Schizophrenics are incapable of human relationships; that it is impossible to meaningfully dialogue with schizophrenics. Laing in this work develops an existential account of madness, which is in direct opposition to the modern dogma of psychiatry. He shows, with the aid of case studies, that madness should be viewed from the 'inside'; that is, people diagnosed as psychotic should be understood; a conversation/relationship should and can be developed. This is the very thing to be avoided according to the modern idea that the mentally ill are merely objects of 'scientific ' enquiry; patients to be diagnosed and treated.

Also developed in the book is the idea that public sanity is not identical with wisdom or truth. As Laing says early in the book " ... The cracked mind of the schizophrenic may let in light which does not enter the intact minds of many sane people whose minds are closed". This is not altogether new, Socrates saw "the superiority of heaven-sent madness over man-made sanity". The idea seems to have been lost in our current culture where the standards of sanity and reason are in large part intellectual constructions; formed by supposed 'experts' of the human condition or by the sloganistic and emotive words of public opinion devoid of all fixed meaning.

The book is informative and just great reading.

For anyone who has been thrilled by any of Laing's books, as I had been, reading a biography of Laing can be a sad experience. Burston doesn't shrink from the disappointing aspects of Laing, but he finds great and continuing value in Laing's work while also reminding us of Laing's better side.

Burston has divided the biograpy roughly in half. First comes the standard chronological presentation, then an analysis of Laing's thoughts and concerns. This meaty but quite readable analysis includes assessment of Laing's philosophical assumptions, his position on psychoanalysis, and his place within psychiatry.

Burston effectively reminds us that, whatever his failings and however large his fall from popularity, Laing's work still presents challenges and promises values which we would be foolish to ignore. Blessed with a great mind, R.D. Laing also forged a wonderful heart: too many other therapists forget that our suffering needs both.

This really should be read along with the biography by hy Ronald Laing's son, Adrian Laing. Adrian Laing is much more critical. Although he is a lawyer and Burston a psychologist, I think Adrian Laing shows more understanding of RD Laing's place in psychiatry. Both books are very readable (which is the reason for the 5 stars) because Laing's life makes makes a good story.
By the end of the 1960's Laing was a dinosaur rather than an innovator. He was still blaming parents for their children's mental illness and advocating treating schizophrenia without medication. When I came to America in 1963 psychanalysis was dominant in psychiatry here. By the time time Laing died in 1989, psychanalysis was no longer taken seriously by most psychiatrists. I suspect that part of the reason for Laing's tragic self-destructive behavior came from the dawning realization that his treatment methods did not work for schizophrenia. Unlike Bateson and many of the American neo-Freudians, who were not MD's, he was a psychiatrist who undertook clinical responsibilities. Having set himself up, or been set up, as an omniscient healer he found he could not help those who turned to him.

Daniel Burston, a professor in the existential-phenomenological psychology program at Duquesne University and a respected Laing scholar, has put together a very well-written, interesting, but uneven work on the manifold ways in which Laing's thought can be connected with psychotherapy. After reading his excellent, rigorously intellectual biography of Laing, _The Wing of Madness_, I had expected to find in the _Crucible of Experience_ an equivalent depth of scholarly knowledge and clarity. And some sections of the book do possess this. The chapter on normality and the numinous, for instance, offers a very patient and careful teasing-apart of the many meanings of "normality" and how Laing treated these different meanings in his understandings of mental disorder. Other sections, however, were not as impressive. The chapter on Laing's roots in existentialism and phenomenology, for example, was far too reliant on secondary sources, and its summaries of the views of the various existential and phenomenological philosophers often felt curt and staccato. One more serious problem I had with this work was that it mostly ignored Laing's conceptualization of what he termed "knots:"- contradictory, paradoxical, and entangling patterns of relatedness that create vicious circles. (see Laing's own book _Knots_) From my perspective, "knots" are probably the most relevant element of Laing's thought for psychotherapy, thus, their omission is rather glaring. Overall, however, Burston's book is a well-written, enjoyable, and thoughtful journey through the labyrinths of Laing's thinking.

a most enjoyable, penetrating look into the mind of a genius. We see the beauty of Laing's thought and his amazing contributions to the field of mental health. We are treated to a thorough character assessment and loving, if at times probing, analysis of what Laing was all about.

This work is written in a conversational but educated tone that lends itself nicely to the subject matter.

Highly recommended if you have not read all the others.

I first read this more than 10 years ago & found it a pleasant diversion from his more polemical writing. Laing is witty & honest: he cites but doesn't dwell on the cliches & sloganry that have fairly engulfed descriptions of his profession. Laing is incisive & wastes little time with exposition: he's on to another topic before you realize he's just alluded to rabid anti-Semitism in Great Britain during WWII! His descriptions of patients are heart-rending, especially the elderly women with whom he worked after his stint in the Army. Laing was & still is maligned by the psychiatric professional community in the U.S., but in Italy this year, it's the 20th anniversary of the "Basaglia Act," which was promoted by doctors & virtually altered the way "mental disorder" is viewed & treated. Laing made no small contribution here, & his easy style & good humor are evident in WM&F & just two reasons why he remains influential.

I could never get this book. It took my twenty years of reading the Divided Self to fully understand this author. This book was also titled the bird of paradise, but is not the book the other reviewer thought it was, that was also a book by RD Laing but with another author and also had the word *family* in the title. This book originally was not like an accounting of families but philosophical and psychiatric speculation. This book is all fine for someone studying psychology or psychiatry but for fellow consumers of mental health or their families I would say avoid this rather weighty tome.

I own an older version of this, with the Henry More sculpture on the cover. A collection of lectures, altered for book form. Kind of a messy format but not as polemical as the more popular The Politics of Experience.

Notable for some very obvious but otherwise-by-others neglected observations: standard doctors are called in to intervene in medical emergencies; psychiatrists are called in to intervene in social crises PRESUMED to be caused by medical emergencies. What's endearingly called the medical model is not some magical talisman kept in a velvet case until use; it's the set of procedures in which all doctors are trained. Laing just believed it was inadequate when applied to social situations, ones in which some ONE is the problem & if that some ONE "gets right," everything'll be OK.

Whether you believe that a real medical malady called mental illness has a genuine pathological etiology that can be diagnosed & treated, the fact remains that one gets diagonsed on the basis of conduct & not on the basis of that medical malady.

As in the much better-formatted "Sanity, Madness & Family," Laing shows us that once we see what people in those situations are trying to do & what they're succeeding at doing, it's difficult to understand why any one person in that situation gets diagnosed at all.

"It took my twenty years of reading the Divided Self to fully understand this author." Peter Timusk, stop, I'm laughing too hard.