RD Laing
Ronald Laing, the radical psychiatrist, psychoanalyst and psychotherapist who profoundly altered our understanding of mental illness, was the founder of just one organisation - the Philadelphia Association.
Born in Glasgow in 1927 R D Laing studied medicine at the University of Glasgow and went on to become a psychiatrist. His first experiment in changing the way people designated the mentally ill took place at Glasgow’s Gartnavel Hospital where he and colleagues radically altered the treatment regime in a long-term women's ward.
Laing moved to London to work at the Tavistock Clinic and trained as a psychoanalyst at the Institute of Psychoanalysis. Laing had for many years been engaged with continental philosophy and in a series of books published in the course of the 1960s he sought to develop what he called ‘an existential-phenomenological foundation for a science of persons’ and sought to set out a description of the experience of those labelled schizophrenic. Such people, Laing argued, suffered from ontological insecurity, a lack of faith in their own and others' reality which led them to create false self systems to fend off psychological and emotional catastrophe. Laing wanted to make madness and the process of going mad comprehensible, and to a great many people, including many of those afflicted, he did so convincingly. The discourse of the 'mad', he showed, if listened to in the right spirit could make a sense of its own. This was to be the line of thought that Laing would pursue for many years in The Divided Self (1960), Self and Others (1961), Sanity, Madness and the Family (1964) and The Politics of Experience (1967).
In order to put their theories into practice, Laing and others (including another Scottish psychiatrist, Aaron Esterson), founded the Philadelphia Association in 1965. They took over a large empty property, Kingsley Hall in London's East End, to create a community, a place of genuine asylum where those designated mentally ill might live free from unwanted and unwarranted interference. Kingsley Hall was to be the first of over 20 therapeutic communities run by the PA to this day.
Laing stepped down as Chair of the PA in 1981 but he continued to be a source of inspiration to the organisation through his writings and his example as someone with a remarkable ability to be with the most disturbed and distressed people.
Laing died in August 1989 from a heart attack while playing tennis in the south of France and was buried in Glasgow. After his death a book of interviews, Mad to Be Normal, was published and there have been several biographies and critical studies.
At a time when psychiatry and psychology are convinced of the biological basis of mental illness and of the (largely) chemical answer to the problem, Laing's best work stands as a challenge, a voice claiming that there is another way of making sense of these matters and that there are other ways of helping people deal with them. Still valid too is Laing's insistence that there is indeed meaning in madness and that the discourse of the disturbed may well make sense if listened to in the right spirit. While it is common to hear that his ideas have been discredited or even disproved (whatever that might mean), there seems little doubt that he (among others) changed the way that mental illness is understood, and changed the ways in which those designated mentally ill are treated.
