R.D.LAING 1927 - 1989

Ronnie Laing was born in Scotland to a middle class Presbyterian family, who, while being materially OK, were supposedly emotionally bereft, especially on his mother's side. He was for all intensive purposes an existentialist, and seemed to live out his philosophy.

He was classically educated in Glasgow, and attended Glasgow University from 1945 - 1951, completing his psychiatric training in 1955. He discouraged traditional lobotomies, shock, and drug treatments on patients, opting for an interpersonal approach, as expressed in his "Rumpus Room" research. This later became to be called "Social Phenomenology", (the importance of interpersonal relations in the treatment of chronic schizophrenia) which he learned in the army. Both staff and patients wore normal clothes, and patients were allowed to spent time doing activites such as cooking and art, the idea being to provide a setting where patients could respond to staff and each other in a social, rather than institutional setting. The patients all showed a noticable improvement in behaviour as a result of this.

He conducted sessions in LSD therapy in the 1960's and did a sabbatical in Sri Lanka and India in the 70's, devoting himself to Theravedic Buddhist Meditation. Laing spent three weeks studying under Gangroti Baba, a Hindu ascetic, who initiated Laing into the cult of the Hindu goddess Kali. Also spent time learning Sanskrit and visiting Govinda Lama, who had been a guru to Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert.

He later did re-birthing workshops, identifying himself as a proponent of natural birth. He later told that he had remembered his birth. A Synchronicity is that on the 21st April 1978, Laing's father died at 5.15pm, the exact time of Laing's birth. He oriented himself in the late 70's to more humanistic psychology, plus poetry.

Hw wrote numerous books, most notably "The Politics of Experience" and "The Bird of Paradise". His last book, "The Lies of Love", was never published. His method of approach to his work seemed to flow and never quite settle into something that could be categorised specifically, and so he became at odds with the establishment in his last years. Overall, his beliefs held that falling ill is the first step in a "self-cure," a process Laing later called "metanoia," "a term used in the Greek New Testament for atonement." Metanoia, especially in its schizophrenic form, is an existential journey, Laing argued; with safe surroundings, it can actually be a route toward recovery based on choice. "Laing, like Sartre," Mr. Burston writes, "construed the mad (or nearly mad) person as an active agent in the creation and perpetuation of his own misery, who must choose, finally, to abandon his schizoid isolation in favor of authentic relatedness to others in order to regain his sanity."

adapted from Stephen Ticktin and Perry Meisel

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