On Thu, 13 Sep 2012 03:51:43 -0700, Stuart McKelvie wrote: > >Dear Tipsters, > >Michael posted this quotation from Daniels's web page: > >|were "mapped onto" him by his environment. >|As an adult, he was himself schizophrenic for periods of time, spending >|some time as a patient in psychiatric wards. > >By his own account, Ronnie Laing did indeed spend time with patient in wards, >but NOT as a patient!
Perhaps Daniel is wrong on this point but it is clear that Laing suffered from alcoholism and depression through significant parts of his life. In Alan Beveridge's obituary for Laing, he make the following statements: (See: http://pb.rcpsych.org/content/22/7/452.full.pdf ) |The recent triumphal march of biological psychiatry, with its |emphasis on genetics and physical treatment, is seen as rendering |his writing largely irrelevant. In tandem, the spectacular alcohol and |drug-fuelled decline of his later years is taken as confirmation that |his work was the product of an unstable charlatan. (p452) |Years later, Laing recalled, his mother was scandalised by seeing |the word "f*ck" in one of his books and started the practice of sticking |pins into an effigy of her son, called a "Ronald doll", with the express |aim of inducing a heart attack (Burston. 1996). Was Laing's mother |'mad'? The answer would seem to be yes. Two of Laing's medical friends |told the biographer Daniel Burston |that they considered that she had |a psychotic illness. | |Laing's relationship with his father was more positive. David Laing |was an electrical engineer with Glasgow Corporation, and he and |Ronald shared a passion for music. When Laing entered medical |school, his father suffered a depressive breakdown, brought on by |religious doubts. Laing provided psychological support to his father |during this time, and he was later to comment that his father was |his first patient. In old age, David Laing developed a dementing |llness and spent the last years of his life in Leverndale Hospital. (p453) |The end of the 1960s saw Laing retreating to Ceylon .. to spend |time with the country's holy men before returning to Britain two |years later. From then until his death in 1989, there is a sad picture |of decline and dissipation. His writing dried up, and his few books |during this period were, for the most part, slight and insubstantial, |containing eccentric musings about the psychological trauma of the |foetus, and short poems about the devious nature of human |communication. His public appearances were increasingly the occasion |for drunken and outrageous behaviour, while his private life became |ever more chaotic. Laing not only had problems when fame was thrust |upon him in the 1960s, he had even greater problems when it was |taken away. | |In 1985, Laing was interviewed by Anthony Clare (1992) for the programme |in the Psychiatrist's Chair. Typically he arrived at the studio drunk, but, as |he sobered up, he spoke movingly about his childhood, and his fears that |he was suffering from mid-life melancholia, like his father and his father |before him. or in his words "the typical Scottish Calvinist involutional |melancholic type of religious nihilistic ruminations" (Clare, 1992).(p455) Laing's Wikipedia entry provides a little more information about his radio interview and its consequences: |Laing was troubled by his own personal problems, suffering from both |episodic alcoholism and clinical depression, according to his self-diagnosis |in his 1983 BBC Radio interview with Anthony Clare,[17] although he |reportedly was free of both in the years before his death. These admissions |were to have serious consequences for Laing as they formed part of the case |against him by the General Medical Council which led to him ceasing to |practice medicine. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._D._Laing#Personal_life The above descriptions suggest that there was significant psychopathology in his home life and his parents and that he manifested some of it himself. Why Daniel would say Laing had schizophrenia instead of alcoholism and depression (perhaps with psychotic features) is puzzling given that Daniel presumably is familiar with Laing's work and biography. >He took what he regarded as the rare step to simply enter, immerse >himself and observe. His observations are fascinating - perhaps >the topic of another post. Yeah, that's the ticket. -Mike Palij New York University m...@nyu.edu -----Original Message----- From: Michael Palij [mailto:m...@nyu.edu] Sent: Thursday, September 13, 2012 12:13 AM To: Teaching in the Psychological Sciences (TIPS) Cc: Michael Palij Subject: Re: [tips] Quick help: Szasz or RD Laing >On 2012-09-12, at 5:50 PM, mjchael sylvester wrote: >> Who was it that insisted that there were no crazy individuals,only >> crazy environments? > >On Wed, 12 Sep 2012 19:07:38 -0700, Christopher Green wrote: > >What Laing actually said, I think, was that madness is a perfectly >rational response to living in a mad society. Laing is claimed to have said: "Insanity is a sane response to an insane world" However, Wikiquote, which contains a number of Laing quotes, says that it is disputed that it originated with Laing. See: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ronald_David_Laing Click on "Disputed". My favorite quote from the Laing page is: |We are all murderers and prostitutes - no matter to what culture, |society, class, nation, we belong, no matter how normal, moral, or |mature we take ourselves to be.Humanity is estranged from its authentic |possibilities. I think Laing would fit right in with positive psychology. ;-) Victor Daniels of Sonoma State University has a page on Laing and in his presentation of Laingian concepts, he does use "A sane response to an insane situation" as one of Laing's key concepts; see: http://www.sonoma.edu/users/d/daniels/R.D._Laing_Summary_.html I find the following from Daniel's webpage most interesting: |Laing himself grew up in a bizarre family setting. His parents forbid |him to go out of the house alone or play with other children until |middle childhood, they repeatedly conveyed the message to him that he |was "evil," and when he went out with them he was kept on a leash with |a harness. His childhood environment was such as to cause him severe |confusion about which thoughts and feelings were his own, and which |were "mapped onto" him by his environment. |As an adult, he was himself schizophrenic for periods of time, spending |some time as a patient in psychiatric wards. Having schizophrenic (psychotic?) episodes might have given Laing some insights into the experience of schizophrenia but one might view such experience with skepticism, as in the case of a clinical psychology with severe depression who believes he was cured by electroshock therapy. It should be noted that the use of the terms sane and insane is a little strange for a psychologist because these are legal concepts (another way of viewing them is that they are obsolete psychological terms or concepts). The versions provided by Sylvester and Green can be viewed as "updated" versions of what is attributed to Laing, though whether the updated versions maintain the original meaning might be in question. Finally, there have been variants of the statement and they have been used by various people; see: http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20110314091000AA4i8gs Among the people who have used the variants is a character from Alien 3, Mr. Spock from Star Trek, and Leonardo DiCaprio in Titanic. Honorable mentions to Akira Kurosawa and Kurt Vonnegut. ;-) -Mike Palij New York University m...@nyu.edu P.S. Laing cites Sartre as one of his influences and I believe that it was Sartre that distinguished between evil environments (i.e., environments that caused one to behave in evil, cruel ways) and non-evil environments and the need to avoid them (always good advice). --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: arch...@jab.org. To unsubscribe click here: http://fsulist.frostburg.edu/u?id=13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df5d5&n=T&l=tips&o=20394 or send a blank email to leave-20394-13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df...@fsulist.frostburg.edu
