Talk:R. D. Laing

Laing's Alleged Renunciation

"Laing regarded schizophrenia as a theory not a fact, but later acknowledged his views on schizophrenia were wrong."

Laing modified his views, but he did not "acknowledge that they were wrong"--at least, the two cited sources for this observation do not support that conclusion. The cited book's references to Laing are explicitly hostile and unbalanced, and the book merely states, parenthetically, simplistically, and without support, that "Laing ultimately discarded his theory" (p. 122) after he had a child who developed schizophrenia. Someone needs to amend this incorrect statement in the article, or else I will. Pernoctus (talk) 18:14, 19 March 2023 (UTC)

@Pernoctus Agreed - he certainly softened his views later in life, but "acknowledged" and "wrong" are not the words I would choose. The book cited is a particularly poor source.

Also, a better description of his view on schizophrenia in the lead is needed - currently says "theory not a fact" which is quite uninformative but also objectively correct insofar as schizophrenia is a syndrome / descriptive label, and not a natural kind. Feline negativity (talk) 09:39, 24 March 2023 (UTC)

Agreed. He was critical of his own approaches but hardly recanted or denounced his key discoveries, especially those detailed in The Divided Self. The sources cited are weak. The New York Times one seems to center around his comments about “having to deal with disruptive people”. This is a widely accepted principle in the criminal justice system, and antisocial behaviour. It’s why we have a police force and noise abatement laws. It’s hardly him saying “I got it wrong”. If he explicitly states somewhere that he “got it wrong” I’d be interested to see the source. Michael Z Freeman (talk) 17:24, 5 August 2023 (UTC)

Overall edit needed

This article needs an overall edit to unify it and bring out a coherent story of what Laing’s main claims to distinction are. Was he mainly a pop-psychology phenomenon, or did he have serious influence on the field? Did he go through different phases, or was he known only for “The Divided Self”? Did he achieve any successes in treatment, or was he mainly a writer? Antiquated (talk) 06:07, 13 January 2024 (UTC)

I've just read a couple of useful sources on Laing's reputation, though one of these is from 2004 and one from 1998, and this might be a very long time ago in terms of psychiatric trends.

His entry in the Oxford DNB sums him up: "Despite Laing's intelligence, charm, energy, and many talents... and his remarkable gift for rapport with the mentally disturbed, he was a flawed character. His ideas on schizophrenia were more derivative than his way of expressing them revealed; he maintained that his rise to fame had been more of a solitary struggle than in fact it was; and his account of his childhood in Wisdom, Madness and Folly is not strictly truthful." This is by Charles Rycroft, who worked with him, and probably sums up his rep among a body of professionals.

An open-access article in Psychiatric Bulletin says roughly that there are two takes on him: one position, mainly held by psychiatrists, is that "he enjoyed a fashionable notoriety in the 1960s when peddling anti-establishment opinions, but that his views on schizophrenia were dangerous nonsense"; the other, mainly held by non-psychiatrists, is that "Laing championed the cause of the mentally ill... Laing brought humanity to the subject. He demonstrated that the mad were people too, and that their utterances could be understood." The author takes a balanced middle view.

As for different phases of his career, Peter Sedgwick breaks it down into two parts: "the radical trip" (roughly, he becomes a counter-cultural guru); "the return to psychiatry" (he retreats from some of his earlier positions and becomes more conservative). No doubt it was more complicated than a simple bipartite thing, but that might not be a bad place to start?

References