Laing’s ideology, it seems to me, could not be more relevant today given that many psychiatrists are quicker to prescribe aggressive anti-psychotics than to listen to their patients and in a climate where Cognitive Behavioural Therapy is prevalent.
From my own experience, working within an NHS psychotherapy clinic and, in particular, during a placement in a psychiatric in-patient unit, I have found Laing’s ideas invaluable in articulating a generalised sense of unease. Primarily, this relates to the lack of time and attention being given to the experience of patients as persons, rather than as faulty organisms to be treated with medication. This is epitomised by the fact that CBT can be delivered via computer – here we are firmly in the terrain of The Politics of Experience where transactional therapies negate that which is specifically human, and behaviour therapy is ‘a technique of non-meeting, of manipulation and control.’ There seems to have been little progress since Sanity, Madness and the Family was published in acknowledging the social intelligibility of madness and little credence is given to the idea that meaning could be found in floridly psychotic speech. When a patient of mine challenged her diagnosis of Borderline Personality Disorder, the psychiatrist told her that the very fact she was challenging it proved its validity.
Twenty-five years on from the death of RD Laing, is this not a maddening state of affairs?
References
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Foucault, M. (1965) Madness and Civilization. New York: Random House, Inc.
Freud, S. (2005) The Essentials of Psycho-analysis, ed. Anna Freud (tr. James Strachey). London: Vintage
Isaacs, S. (1948) The Nature and Function of Phantasy from International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 29:73-97
Lacan, J. (2006) Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English. New York and London: W.W. Norton & Co.
Laing, R.D. (1964) The Divided Self. Middlesex: Penguin Books
—— (1971) Self and Others. Middlesex: Penguin Books
—— (1987) The Use of Existential Phenomenology in Psychotherapy. In: The Evolution of Psychotherapy, ed. Jeffrey Zeig.
—— (1990) The Politics of Experience. London: Penguin Books
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Laing, R.D. and Esterson, A. (1970) Sanity, Madness and the Family. Middlesex: Penguin Books
Laplanche, J. (1999) Essays on Otherness. London, New York, Canada: Routledge
Levinas, E. (1987) Time and the Other. Pennsylvania: Duquesne University Press
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1968) The Visible and the Invisible. Illinois: Northwestern University Press
Thorne, B. (2002) Person-Centred Therapy. In Handbook of Individual Therapy, ed. Dryden W. London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi: Sage Publications