R.D. Laing

Born on October 7, 1927, in the Govanhill district of Glasgow, the only child of David Laing, a civil engineer, and Amelia Glen Kirkwood, Ronald David Laing grew up with parents he remembered as withdrawn and demanding, and found his way out through the public library, reading philosophy and the classics while still a boy at Hutchesons' Grammar School. He was a distance runner and a trained musician, an Associate of the Royal College of Music, before he read medicine at the University of Glasgow, where he founded a Socratic Club with Bertrand Russell as its president. He failed his finals, spent six months on a psychiatric unit, and qualified in 1951. Army service at Netley, where he saw insulin shock therapy in use, and a post at Glasgow's Gartnavel Royal Hospital were followed in 1956 by training at the Tavistock Clinic in London. There he wrote The Divided Self (1960), an existential study of schizophrenia that asked psychiatry to hear what a person in crisis was trying to say instead of reading it only as a symptom. The Self and Others, Sanity, Madness and the Family, and The Politics of Experience (1967) made him a celebrity and a hero of the counterculture, though he rejected the label of anti-psychiatry. In 1965 he co-founded the Philadelphia Association, a charity for the understanding and relief of mental suffering, which he chaired. He also wrote poetry, most widely read in Knots (1970). Drinking and depression shadowed his later years, and in 1987 he withdrew his name from the Medical Register after a case before the General Medical Council. He fathered ten children by four women. He died of a heart attack on a tennis court in Saint-Tropez on August 23, 1989, at sixty-one.

In 1965 Laing and his colleagues took over Kingsley Hall in east London, the settlement house where Gandhi had lodged in 1931, and opened it to people in the grip of psychosis, who lived there alongside their therapists without electric shock or drugs. Mary Barnes, a former nurse, painted her way through her breakdown on its walls. The experiment lasted five years.