Book Review: The Wing of Madness - The Life and Work of R. D. Laing

The Wing of Madness - The Life and Work of R. D. Laing by Daniel Burston, Harvard University Press, (1996).

This biography is one of several books in preparation (or already published) on R.D.Laing. Those by son, Adrian Laing, and Bob Mullan, I have previously reviewed for this journal. When approaching those previous reviews, as in this, I was particularly interested in enquiry into and exploration of the professional legacy of Laing, as well as any charting of the chronicle of his life which inevitably makes for interesting reading. How much was the rise of Laing to superstar (if not guru) status part of the counterculture of the 1960's? What lasting contribution did he make to the study of human relations - be that in psychiatry or, indeed, in the practice of psychotherapy? And what were the philosophical and psychoanalytic foundations to that contribution?

An initial difficulty associate to any such endeavour is that Laing, as Burston comments, is a formidable subject to biography. A man of wide-ranging intelligence and seemingly endless contradictory qualities who was perhaps at root torn between a craving for acclaim and the humanistic values which he endorsed. Paradox personified. Further complications for the biographer lie in the fact that mental health professionals (like priests) are expected to live exemplary or at least orderly lives. Laing's life story stands in complete opposition to this and, indeed, his identity, Burston goes so far to suggest, could be described as "oppositional": a sense of selfhood rooted in the defiance of authority. For Laing's renowned capacity for empathy was matched by his opposition to virtually any form of authority thus inviting the structures of psychopathology being applied to himself. The effect, of course, was and is to spread doubt (and hence dismissal) to the validity of his ideas. Burston's thesis, however, is that Laing's contribution to psychology and psychiatry is "possibly of the same order of magnitude" as Freud and Jung, and that "in the present climate of opinion, we must be very careful to assess his personal virtues and his intellectual merits on separate scales of

value." The aim of this book, then, is "to illuminate those aspects of Laing's life that have a direct bearing on the development of his work, and, more important, to set his contribution to the human sciences within the history of ideas." So, how far does Burston succeed in these two respects?

The book is structured into eleven chapters but is, in essence, divided into two parts thus echoing the author's protested aim. The first part, consisting of the first seven chapters takes us through the various phases of Laing's life from childhood to his death in 1989. Rather than simply chronicling Lang's life, the author does indeed attempt to illuminate aspects of it that have, in his view, a direct bearing on the development of his work. In chapter one, 'Beginnings', we are told the story of a bleak and lonely childhood which the author suggests to be the springboard leading toward Laing's "prodigious intellectual accomplishment" which brought for a while fame and riches and a substitute for the "unconditional love" he never had from parents. 'Schooling' includes Laing's early experience as a junior psychiatrist in mainstream psychiatry wherein he discovered his ability to empathise with very distressed and psychotic people. "Laing was anxious to discover how these miserable, frightened, and deeply confused people experienced the world, and how they would respond given the chance to communicate freely." His primary intellectual commitment was moving in the direction of existentialism and thence the writing of the manuscript form of The Divided Self which led to his being invited to train as a psychoanalyst at the Tavistock Clinic. The move to London and the Tavistock, however, proved to be more than difficult for Laing both in his professional and family life.

Laing's discordant and ambivalent relationship with psychoanalysis is portrayed in The Tavistock and Family Research. What is also revealed is how out of place Laing felt with the (less disturbed) outpatients of the Tavistock Clinic. He was clearly out on a limb in the world of psychoanalysis and only qualified as a psychoanalyst after attempts by the training committee to effectively disqualify him were contested by his supervisors Milner and Winnicott, and his analyst Charles Rycroft. It is interesting to read of Rycroft's remark in his letter to the training committee to the effect that there was something in Laing's personality which polarized people's feelings about him in a definitely positive or negative direction. Discord also prevailed in Laing's marriage which was steadily deteriorating. The time and energy he devoted to work with Aaron Esterson on Sanity,

Madness and the Family (1964) caused even greater deterioration in his marriage leading to its eventual collapse.

In and Out of Kingsley Hall and The Turn to Mysticism reveal that the collapse of Laing's first marriage in 1965 came, interestingly, at the same time as the foundation of the Philadelphia Association with, amongst others, David Cooper and Aaron Esterson. Kingsley Hall, the community alternative to mental hospital, was founded soon afterward. During this time Laing is portrayed by the author as a man hellbent on becoming a guru. His "stylizings became portentous, often making it hard to discriminate between his genuine thought and superficial mantras mouthed for the sake of being trendy." The publication of The Politics of Experience (1967) with its despair and vehement criticism of the family highlighted Laing's ambivalence about the family and underscored "the richly ambiguous nature of Laing's legacy..." He was to father a second family with another partner, Jutta Werner, in 1967. They later married in 1974.

As the 1970's unfolded Burston considers that Laing encountered a number of converging crises. The publication of Knots (1970) conveyed the impression that his anger and hopelessness had been transformed into detachment and resignation. It didn't appear to lead anywhere. And, indeed, after a period of sojourn in India and Ceylon Laing and his new family returned to London with he trying to transform his public image from psychotherapist /philosopher to poet/philosopher. His writing no longer came easily. He became involved with the practice of rebirthing and published The Facts of Life (1976). Projects like a record album based on his book of Sonnets (1979) and numerous musical recitals and poetry readings failed to impress the public who continued to think of Laing as the "old" Laing, or else not at all. Silence met his efforts.

The author portrays the 1980's as a decade of growing obscurity for R.D.Laing. Continuing reliance on alcohol and drugs, fuelled by wanting creativity and declining popularity, led to another marital crisis, his leaving the Philadelphia Association, his name being withdrawn from the register of practising physicians in Great Britain, and his only work of note being his autobiography Wisdom, Madness and Folly: The making of a Psychiatrist (1985), which was intended as the first of two volumes. He died whilst playing tennis in St. Tropez in 1989.

In the second part of the book, being the latter four chapters, the author sets about his aim of exploring Laing's "contribution to the human sciences within the history of ideas". I was particularly interested in this part of the book given Laing's refusal to be directly

placed in relation to influence by any of the major existential philosophers in his "conversations" with Bob Mullan in Mad to be Normal (1995). Burston suggests that, in terms of conceptual underpinnings, the mental health field can be divided into six basic models of human nature. Though outlining the existential/phenomenological and psychoanalytic models as two of these, he leaves a fuller analysis of Laing's relationship with them to chapters nine and ten- 'Philosophical Anthropology' and 'The Critique of Psychoanalysis'. In the former I was not surprised when the author tells us that Laing never outlined an explicit philosophical anthropology and "most of his ideas on the subject have to be inferred from his texts." It is noticeable, however, that though the author suggests that "Heidegger's answer to Husserl's phenomenology engendered the existential-phenomenological tradition that influenced Laing" he makes no direct references to what Heidegger actually said (in Being and Time). And, further, references to literature at the end of the book contain no works by any major existentialist philosopher. John Heaton has suggested in a previous issue of this journal, that Laing tried to bring together two radically opposed ways of thinking about persons and selves - firstly, the object relations theorists, like Winnicott, with a psychological theory of the mind, and secondly, philosophical thought about the self as represented by Kierkegaard and Heidegger which involves thinking through the nature of persons and their relationship to the mind. These two approaches have very different ramifications regarding the concept of self - be it reified, "true" or "false" self, as portrayed by object relations theorists and Laing in The Divided Self, or, a "relation which relates to itself" ie. no fixed core self, as portrayed by Kierkegaard in The Sickness unto Death which Heaton suggests Laing claimed to influence his thinking on the problems of schizoid people. Burston does not reference this issue and believes that Laing's work discloses a distinctive form of philosophical anthropology that merits attention and proceeds to outline such as a concern for the situational and relational aspects of our being-in-the-world, a dialectical approach to the concepts of selfhood and identity, the notion of authenticity, and his conception of a series of "existential needs" (being a term borrowed from Erich Fromm).

I felt the author to be on more familiar and safer ground in "The Critique of Psychoanalysis', being the chapter on Laing's ambivalent relationship with psychoanalysis. References to literature at the end of the book echo this with multiple references to the works of Freud and Jung. Laing's criticism of psychoanalysis regarding the inferences and assumptions made by analysis about patients' unconscious experience is set, however, against his belief that it was still possible to allow for a phenomenological examination of unconscious phantasy. The author suggests that "we are apt to forget that Laing's rejection of the natural science approach to psychoanalysis, which is now quite common, was considered radical in the early 1960's." Laing's influence, however, has been unacknowledged by "humanistic or hermeneutically oriented psychoanalysis." My own reading of mainstream and current journals of psychoanalysis and psychoanalytical psychotherapy, however, does not concur with any rejection of a natural scientific approach or the existence of Humanistic or hermeneutically oriented" psychoanalysis. Cartesian thinking and the subject/ object split remains a widespread influence or the whole of psychoanalytic theory goes into collapse.

Laing's most important theoretical contributions, Burston believes, lay in his interpretation of the meaning of the concept of "unconscious fantasy" and the introduction of the idea of "transpersonal defences". Rather than seeing unconscious fantasy as a device to avoid the experience of something real, Laing insisted that fantasy has its own validity and rationality and its true function is to express the truth of lived experience in symbols and metaphors. His theory of transpersonal defences demonstrates that many so-called defence mechanisms are not situated inside the individual, but are distributed throughout the various groups and institutions of which we are part. Transposing the ostensible meaning of symptoms from past to present, from intrapsychic to the interpersonal sphere, and then demonstrating the hidden but adaptive aspect of seemingly maladaptive behaviours was, according to the author, the "hallmark of Laing's best case histories and clinical vignettes". In the light of this it is interesting to speculate on how influential Laing's work may have been with regard to the arrival of family therapy. The climate might also have been set for the publication by the Tavistock of Isobel Menzies' influential paper 'Social Systems as a Defence against Anxiety' in 1970. I enjoyed reading this book which is close to being a critical monograph. Despite my reservations regarding the author's knowledge and interpretation of several important aspects of existential philosophy and theory, Daniel Burston has clearly attempted and produced a scholarly piece of work. Pulling together the various strands of Laing's multifarious works, not to say his life, must have been a momentous task requiring much devotion! I echo back to Charles Rycroft's comment that there was something about Laing's personality that polarized people's feelings about him in a definitely positive or negative way and have to admit that during the course of

reading this book I found myself swinging back and forth in these respects. On balance, however, I agree with the writer, who is perhaps more positive than I towards Laing, that Laing's best work during the 1960's is impressive and that his influence on psychiatry is unquantifiable. Care in the community in the twentieth century perhaps started with Kingsley Hall. It is sad, though, that he was never able to build on these brilliant beginnings with a continuing methodology leading towards a comprehensive "science of persons". That legacy has been left to others who will write more singularly in the existential/phenomenological tradition.

Nick Zinovieff