He was an unpredictable, occasionally frenzied, father figure who acted with little regard for the consequences. When, in 1975, his second eldest child, Susan, was diagnosed with terminal monoblastic leukaemia, a row broke out between her parents. Anne felt it would be kinder not to tell Susan the diagnosis. Laing disagreed. In the face of fierce opposition from Anne, Susan's fiancé and her doctors, he insisted on travelling to the hospital to inform her that, in all likelihood, she would not live beyond her 21st birthday. An unusual work by the Scottish psychoanalyst R.D.Laing, Knots is a book of poems, or dialogues, dating from 1971. Each poem describes a different kind of relationship, indicating the knots people will tie themselves into through preconception or misunderstanding. Laing calls them "tangles, disjunctions, impasses or binds". The relationship might be that of parent and child, lovers or analysts. The bonds can be of love, dependency, uncertainty or jealousy. Sometimes the relationship is obvious, but in other poems it becomes apparent through the dialogue. Having been brought up in a religious household the second poem in the book really hit home with me: They are not having fun. Kingsley Hall". Philadelphia Association. Archived from the original on 9 May 2008 . Retrieved 13 September 2008. Burston, D. (1996) The Wing of Madness: The Life and Work of R. D. Laing. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

To this day the life and works of R. D. Laing influence writers, poets, musicians, philosophers, psychologists, therapists, film makers and those involved with the Laing was born in the Govanhill district of Glasgow on 7 October 1927, the only child of civil engineer David Park MacNair Laing and Amelia Glen Laing (née Kirkwood). [6] :7 Laing described his parents — his mother especially — as being somewhat anti-social, and demanding the maximum achievement from him. Although his biographer son largely discounted Laing's account of his childhood, an obituary by an acquaintance of Laing asserted that about his parents– "the full truth he told only to a few close friends". [7] [8] 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]Ocr_converted abbyy-to-hocr 1.1.20 Ocr_module_version 0.0.17 Openlibrary OL9300838M Openlibrary_edition

Burston, Daniel (1998), The Wing of Madness: The Life and Work of R. D. Laing, Harvard University Press, p.145, ISBN 0-674-95359-2 Adrian leans forward, resting his elbows on the stainless steel cafe table. 'In terms of how he rationalised it... erm... I'm not sure that... I don't think my father felt he was the cause [of the breakdown] so he wouldn't feel it was hypocritical.' His third daughter Karen was born in Glasgow in 1955 and is now a pracitising psychotherapist. Burston, Daniel (1998), The Wing of Madness: The Life and Work of R. D. Laing, Harvard University Press, p.125, ISBN 0-674-95359-2 Society highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal. Normal men have killed perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years. Future historians may well cast Thomas Szasz as an intrepid campaigner for the blindingly obvious: people do not have “mental illnesses” but experience a wide range of moral, interpersonal, social and political “problems in living.” All such problems concern, or have an impact on, our sense of who and what we are and could just as easily be called spiritual crises. [3]work was a reaction, tentative at first, against some of the more disturbing psychiatric practises of his day, doubtful and downright dangerous treatments that had been rubber stamped into orthodoxy Existential phenomenology attempts to characterize the nature of a person's experience of his world and himself. It is not so much an attempt to describe particular objects of his experience as to set all particular experiences within the context of his whole being-in-his-world. The mad things said and done by the schizophrenic will remain essentially a closed book if one does not understand their existential context. In describing one way of going mad, I shall try to show that there is a comprehensible transition from the sane schizoid way of being-in-the-world to a psychotic way of being-in-the-world. Although retaining the terms schizoid and schizophrenic for the sane and psychotic positions respectively, I shall not, of course, be using these terms in their usual clinical psychiatric frame of reference, but phenomenologically and existentially.