Laing was troubled by his own personal problems, suffering from both episodic alcoholism and clinical depression, according to his self-diagnosis in a BBC Radio interview with Anthony Clare in 1983, [21] although he reportedly was free of both in the years before his death. These admissions were to have serious consequences for Laing as they formed part of the case against him by the General Medical Council which led to him ceasing to practise medicine. [22] He was educated initially at Sir John Neilson Cuthbertson Public School and after four years transferred to Hutchesons' Grammar School. Described variously as clever, competitive or precocious, he studied classics, particularly philosophy, including through reading books from the local library. Small and slightly built, Laing participated in distance running; he was also a musician, being made an Associate of the Royal College of Music. He studied medicine at the University of Glasgow. During his medical degree he set up a "Socratic Club", of which the philosopher Bertrand Russell agreed to be president. Laing failed his final exams. In a partial autobiography, Wisdom, Madness and Folly, Laing said he felt remarks he made under the influence of alcohol at a university function had offended the staff and led to him being failed on every subject including some he was sure he had passed. After spending six months working on a psychiatric unit, Laing passed the re-sits in 1951 to qualify as a medical doctor. [9] Career [ edit ] An expression to describe him, used by Anne Hearne Laing, his ex-wife, as quoted in "RD Laing: The Abominable Family Man" in The Sunday Times (12 April 2009) Collusion has resonances of playing at and of deception. It is a ‘game’ played by two or more people whereby they deceive themselves. The game is the game of mutual self-deception. Whereas delusion and elusion and illusion can be applied to one person, collusion is necessarily a two-or-more-person game. Each plays the other’s game, through he may not necessarily be fully aware of doing so. An essential feature of this game is not admitting that it is a game. [14]

In Self and Others (1961), Laing's definition of normality shifted somewhat. [31] [ unreliable source?] For sure, they will throw EVERYTHING at you. But whole cities have fallen to the weakness of a good soul, as they fell like dominoes to little King David. Humanity is estranged from its authentic possibilities. This basic vision prevents us from taking any unequivocal view of the sanity of common sense, or of the madness of the so-called madman. … Our alientation goes to the roots. The realisation of this is the essential springboard for any serious reflection on any aspect of present inter-human life.Susie died, aged 21, in March 1976. 'My father was riddled with guilt about it. He would have been aware of the statistics that demonstrate there is a higher chance of dying from that particular disease if you are from a broken family.'

El amor (2016). Short film by Siddhartha García Sánchez, filmed around the book Knots by Laing. [ citation needed] Once you Really begin to wake up, there’s no stopping you. Oh, the Massed Forces of Hades will do everything possible to make you do just that - and direct you into a heavy diagnostic Pit Stop for rebooting. R.D. Laing was a controversial figure to the Establishment and a hero to the counter-culture movement of the 1960s which viewed R. D. Laing as a pioneering humanitarian It's not the logic that's flawed. It's the premises. You can make perfectly logical statements from crazy premises.To this day the life and works of R. D. Laing influence writers, poets, musicians, philosophers, psychologists, therapists, film makers and those involved with the Sally Vincent, a lover, as quoted in "RD Laing: The Abominable Family Man" in The Sunday Times (12 April 2009) Laing expanded the view of the " double bind" hypothesis put forth by Bateson and his team, and came up with a new concept to describe the highly complex situation that unfolds in the process of "going mad" — an "incompatible knot". Karen Laing quoted in Russell Miller, ‘RD Laing: The abominable family man’, The Times, 12 th April 2009 In other words: the static friction coefficient (μ) between two solid surfaces is defined as the ratio of the tangential force (F) required to produce sliding divided by the normal force between the surfaces (N).

Ah, Sunflower (1967). Short film by Robert Klinkert and Iain Sinclair, filmed around the Dialectics of Liberation conference and featuring Laing, Allen Ginsberg, Stokely Carmichael and others. Laing would disappear for months on end, forgetting birthdays before turning up in a blizzard of misdirected anger. In a 1994 biography he wrote of his father, Adrian recounts one of Laing's rare visits to their new home in Glasgow when, having argued with Jutta, he took out his anger by beating his daughter, Karen.A poem by Daniel Goleman, modeled in style on R.D. Laing's "knots" and often mistakenly used as a quotation of Laing. D. Goleman (1985). Vital lies, simple truths. New York: Simon & Schuster, p. 24. The Divided Self (1960) [ edit ] The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness The Politics of Experience (1967) [ edit ] We are all murderers and prostitutes — no matter to what culture, society, class, nation, we belong, no matter how normal, moral, or mature we take ourselves to be. Humanity is estranged from its authentic possibilities. We can see other people's behaviour, but not their experience. Psychology is the logos of experience. Psychology is the structure of the evidence, and hence psychology is the science of sciences. Society highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal. Normal men have killed perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years. We are effectively destroying ourselves by violence masquerading as love. We can see other people's behaviour, but not their experience. This has led some people to insist that psychology has nothing to do with the other person's experience, but only with his behaviour. Laing argued that labeling the individual often has little to do with accurate assessment of the patient's real problems, and that the remedial interventions mandated by a specific diagnosis often serve complex social functions by equilibrating extant social-systems, i.e. maintaining the status quo. In short, clinicians frequently locate the cause of the disturbance in individuals to divert attention from the processes that actually engendered their disturbed behavior. If they did not, they would often construe the "signs and symptoms" of these diagnostic entities as intelligible responses to what Laing termed "unlivable situations" — ones which the patient can neither understand, nor tolerate, nor change effectively.