Mad To Be Normal: Conversations With R.D. Laing

Description

Mad to be Normal presents Laing's own words, about his work and about his life. It is the most complete record on Laing, by Laing. Entertaining, maddening, surprising, impressive, occasionally scurrilous, and evoking a compelling portrait of the heady and sometimes self-regarding mood of the 1960s and early 1970s, this book necessitates a reassessment of Laing and his work; work which is part of a lengthier and on-going process concerned with the routine care of those disturbed in mind. Preface vii Acknowledgements x Introduction i Conversations with R.D. Laing 1. Family Life 12 2. Influences 85 3. A Career in Psychiatry 120 4. The Tavistock Clinic 143 5. Kingsley Hall 172 6. Contemporaries 194 7. Dialectics of Liberation 215 8. Buddhism 228 9. The Divided Self 255 10. Sanity, Madness and the Family 272 11. Knots 291 12. Theory and Therapy 303 13. Reputation 340 14. Psychiatry and Schizophrenia 368 Notes and References 381 Index 384