You know, liberation isn’t one battle. It’s the little skirmishes of an Entire Life - of a life that REFUSES TO QUIT. Attributing schizophrenia to bad parenting is Laing's most criticised idea, put forward in Sanity, Madness and the Family (1964). Coltart, Nina (1990). "ARBOURS ASSOCIATION 20TH ANNIVERSARY LECTURE". British Journal of Psychotherapy. p.165 . Retrieved 7 September 2008. [ dead link] I’ve never had a great deal of interest in the big three sciences – biology, chemistry and physics – but I do like formulae. I think it’s simply amazing that you can reduce things to a stream (and often a very short stream) of letters, symbols and numbers. The one I remember from school is something called the coefficient of friction– µ. (µ is the twelfth letter of the Greek alphabet which we pronounce ‘mu’.) It tells you how slippery things are. Ice on steel has a low coefficient of friction, while rubber on pavement has a high coefficient of friction. Under good conditions, a tire on concrete may have a coefficient of friction of about 1.7 where a value of 0 means no friction whatsoever. The coefficient of friction is, however, an empirical measurement – it has to be measured experimentally, and cannot be found through calculations. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have a formula, and here it is:

Needless to say when he came to have his own family it was not a rip-roaring success. His son Adrian, speaking in 2008 said: I started off talking about formulae and so let me finish there. Some people object to poems being viewed as problems to be solved. Formulae are not problems – they’re the answer to problems and that’s what many poems are, a working example. In Knots R D Laing presents us with scenarios but he’s not asking us to solve these so much as to see if we can relate to them. And isn’t that something we do with all poetry, look for ourselves in the lines and in between them? As a psychiatrist, both brilliant and unconventional, RD Laing pioneered the humane treatment of the mentally ill. But as a father, clinically depressed and alcoholic, he bequeathed his ten children and his two wives a more chequered legacy. [13] Stories (parables, metaphors) are immensely seductive. If you can make a story out of your nonsense it just seems more true. I didn't internalize the Christian story growing up - the closest thing to church Mom subjected us to was the Unitarian kind where symbols from a variety of religions hung in banners from the ceiling - and, no, I didn't know what they were getting at when I was little. But I've heard & read enough of the Christian stuff (and been beaten about the head with it by the legislate from the pulpit crowd) that I know it at least as well as most Christians. I mostly think it's Evil with a big big E. Original sin is sex? We are born in sin blah blah blah ... Um. No. But once we’ve heard that Call - and understand that we’re saved by Hope - we’ll gain the humility to continue.But in his later years, as he became more dependent on alcohol and drugs, his judgment was blunted. When he was drunk Laing could exploit the fault-lines in someone's personality with a vicious cruelty. One of his students, Francis Huxley, once said that Laing's words could act like 'a psychic fist hitting the navel of insincerity'.

Knots is a logical breakdown of every argument possible, based on how one's identity is affected by others. Laing never denied the existence of mental illness, but viewed it in a radically different light from his contemporaries. For Laing, mental illness could be a transformative episode whereby the process of undergoing mental distress was compared to a shamanic journey. The traveler could return from the journey with important insights, and may have become (in the views of Laing and his followers) a wiser and more grounded person as a result (Louis, B., 2006, Moving Beyond Prozac, DSM, and the New Psychiatry). In fact, I retained the whole armour of primordial goodness up until I was 20. But permissive society didn’t share my enthusiasm. In fact, permissiveness decided to put the boots to me. You HAD to read Laing in those years. The awakening that invigorated young people around the world in the late sixties was now bearing fruit in the staid adult world of traditional disciplines.

Ronald Laing was five when his parents told him Santa Claus did not exist. He never forgave them, claiming in later years that the realisation they had been lying to him triggered his first existential crisis. For the rest of his life, his childhood memories were bleak. He told interviewers of an emotionally deprived upbringing in the Govanhill area of Glasgow, with a disciplinarian mother who broke his favourite toys when he became too attached to them. The Divided Self is required reading on many psychology courses, now published by Penguin as a Modern Classic