The Anti-Psychiatrist

This piece on R.D.Laing in today's Sunday Times calls him "a brilliant psychiatrist who redefined the family". That seems to me to be a remarkably generous assessment. "The Divided Self", it's true, was an enormously influential book at the time, and fitted in very nicely with the anti-authority Sixties and that whole "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" world where the mentally ill are heroes rebelling against The System, but its main thesis - that schizophrenia is caused by dysfunctional families using the famous double bind - is now generally seen as nonsense on the same level as Bruno Bettelheim's refrigerator mother explanation for autism.

What comes out most clearly from the article, which includes contributions from some of his children, is what a monster he was:

“Laing had an aching addiction to fame and celebrity and it unquestionably damaged his reputation,” said Daniel Burston, a professor of psychology at Duquesne University in Pennsylvania and the author of two books on Laing. “His need for attention was a lifelong problem and robbed his work of credibility, particularly after he had a serious midlife crisis of creativity and felt he had run out of things to say. He became a tragic figure, his behaviour erratic and self-destructive. There were flashes of the old brilliance, but much of his later output was of questionable value. Frankly, it was dreck.”

After a lecture tour in the United States, undertaken solely to earn money, Laing began to focus his attention on what he called “the politics of the birth process”. To the dismay of his admirers, he started organising “rebirthing workshops”, with teams kitted out in pastel-coloured tracksuits, and took up esoteric causes like shamanism. He was transformed, said Burston, from one of the most compelling intellectual heroes of the 1960s into a “gruesome purveyor of mysticism and bad poetry”.

Meanwhile, what remained of his family life was falling apart. In 1973 he discovered that Jutta was having an affair with a television producer and he descended into an alcoholic depression. Although they were reconciled (they would marry the following year), he remained in a fragile state. He was enraged when he returned to his home in Belsize Park from a visit abroad to discover there had been “a bit of bother”. Karen, his 17-year-old daughter from his first marriage, had agreed to baby-sit for Jutta but had turned up high on drugs. Jutta had freaked out; the police had been called. Laing overreacted: he travelled up to Glasgow, burst into the family house, Ruskin Place, in a fury and attacked Karen, beating her mercilessly until her two brothers intervened. [...]

In 1975, Karen’s sister Susan was diagnosed with monoblastic leukaemia and was not expected to live another 12 months. Her mother, her fiancé and her doctors all agreed that the diagnosis should be kept from her to spare her further suffering. Her father disagreed; he took a train from London to Glasgow, visited his daughter in hospital and informed her that in all likelihood she was unlikely to live beyond her 21st birthday. He then returned to London and left the family to cope. Susan’s mother was incensed and told her children she hoped that her former husband would “rot in hell”.

Susan died in March 1976. At her funeral her brother Adrian was weeping on his mother’s shoulder when the social worker assigned to Susan’s case, who had been invited, told him to pull himself together. Ronnie went berserk, dragged the woman across the room and began pounding her against the wall, shouting between thumps: “Don’t you f***ing understand… that what I am f***ing going on about… is that f***ing social workers have no f***ing right to f***ing interfere with families!” He then threw her out.

By any measure, Laing was going off the rails. On a visit to New York he agreed to meet an American psychiatrist, Gene Nameche, to discuss the possibility of collaborating on a biography of Jung. In Laing’s suite at the St Moritz hotel the two men began drinking. Something triggered Laing’s temper and he began beating Nameche, eventually hurling a marble coffee table at him. Fortunately, it missed, smashing to pieces against a wall, but then Laing decided that the television must be destroyed and started throwing shards of the coffee table at it. When it eventually exploded, the hotel security guards burst into the suite, guns drawn. Laing, suddenly sober, persuaded them that Nameche was suffering from a psychiatric disorder and was responsible for the damage. Nameche was handcuffed and escorted from the premises.  [...]

Back in Britain, Laing’s behaviour towards his colleagues became intolerable, and in 1981 he was obliged to resign as chairperson of the Philadelphia Association. Jutta finally walked out on him around this time, taking their three children with her. Her place was taken by Sue Sunkel, a German-born psychotherapist who would bear his ninth child, Benjamin, born in 1984. Sunkel’s view that Laing could “manage” his drinking does not bear close scrutiny. In September 1984 he was arrested for drunkenness after throwing a full bottle of wine through the window of the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh Centre in Hampstead shortly before midnight. He was found sitting on the pavement and muttering obscenities about “orange wankers”.

Well OK, anyone who can throw a bottle of wine through the window of the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh Centre while shouting obscenities about "orange wankers" can't be all bad, but it's a grim catalogue nevertheless. The point is, surely, that in the end he was in the same business as the redoubtable Rajneesh, aka Osho - he of the 93 Rolls-Royces. That is, he'd become less of an anti-psychiatrist, more of a guru - a cult leader. And it's clear that the charisma lingers on, despite all the evidence that his "insights" were largely dangerous nonsense:

“Ronnie was a great figure,” said Dr Joseph Berke, who worked with Laing at Kingsley Hall. “He opened up the field. Certainly he had a lot of detractors but it was mainly because they felt terrified and threatened by what he said and wrote. Yes, he had a complicated personal life, but then many people do. He wasn’t an alcoholic, he was a Glaswegian. Glaswegians drink.”

Paradoxically, Laing is today much more highly regarded abroad than in Britain. Nevertheless his works are still required reading for students of psychiatry and psychotherapy around the world, more books have been written about him since his death than he ever wrote himself and The Divided Self has been continuously in print for nearly 50 years. While improved drugs have meant that a biomedical treatment for serious mental illness is now the norm (something he would have hated), his influence on the treatment of less serious conditions remains profound.

I don't know for sure, but I frankly doubt that his works are "required reading for students of psychiatry and psychotherapy around the world". If they are, it explains a lot.

There's a movie in the pipeline, apparently, with Robert Carlyle lined up to play Laing, though there are doubts that it'll ever be made. It's a great story, certainly. The growth of the various psychological movements through the 20th Century around charismatic leaders like Freud or Jung, not forgetting the great L Ron Hubbard, and how they inevitably mutated into something indistinguishable from cults, makes a fascinating intellectual history. Ronnie Laing was one of the more colourful figures in that history. A brilliant psychiatrist, though? I don't think so. 

Comments

[dearieme]

What we can't explain we make up stories about. Science has advanced far enough that the unknown has become an archipelago rather than a continent, so people drift away from fairy stories that are continental in scope - religions - and settle for island-sized yarns, like psychiatry.

Why the Americans cling to religion and yet have also been the main enthusiasts for silly cults like Freudiansism and Macroeconomics is something for which I don't yet have an explanation. Perhaps the Americans who cling to the first are different Americans from those who cultivate the other two.

[Dom]

Do you know something about Hubbard that I don't, or am I reading too much into "mutated into a cult". Freud and Jung mutated, Hubbard was always a cult and nothing more.

[Mick H]

Yes, you're right. I was originally trying to think of some modern equivalent to Freud and Jung, but then L Ron came to mind. Not exact equivalents. But he incorporated bits of the psychology of the time - lie-detector tests and suchlike - into Scientology.

[Mike]

A better comparison could be Transactional Analysis, devised by Eric Berne in the 1960s and a magnet for the 1960s counter-culture and its adherents such as Jacqui Schiff and Bert Hellinger.

[Mick H]

Yes indeed. Or perhaps, more recently, Neuro-Linguistic Programming and Milton Erickson, but to be honest I don't really know enough about it.