The Philadelphia Association: Philosophical Perspective". Philadelphia Association. Archived from the original on 6 December 2008 . Retrieved 7 September 2008. In 1965 Laing co-founded the UK charity the Philadelphia Association, concerned with the understanding and relief of mental suffering, which he also chaired. [33] His work influenced the wider movement of therapeutic communities, operating in less "confrontational" (in a Laingian perspective) psychiatric settings. Other organizations created in a Laingian tradition are the Arbours Association, [34] the New School of Psychotherapy and Counselling in London, [35] and the R.D. Laing in the 21st Century Symposium [36] held annually at Esalen Institute, where Laing frequently taught. Miller, Russell (12 April 2009), "RD Laing: The abominable family man", The Sunday Times, London , retrieved 8 August 2011

Attributing schizophrenia to bad parenting is Laing's most criticised idea, put forward in Sanity, Madness and the Family (1964). RD Laing died in 1989 but controversy about his work has continued, unabated, ever since. It’s fashionable nowadays to use a reductive approach when discussing urn:lcp:knots00rdla:epub:498b52cb-d1bc-44bc-b9ae-6936fb4b589e Extramarc University of Alberta Libraries Foldoutcount 0 Identifier knots00rdla Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t6349zt6d Invoice 11 Isbn 0140033505As for Laing’s family life I was quite unaware of any of this before I did this research. Of course I’m saddened by it but I know too many Scottish families from that era that were shams; mine was one of them. What runs through most of them as a common thread is an ability to explain away their dysfunctionality: “Oh, that’s just your mother’s way,” or, “You know what your father’s like.” We shrug and get on wi’ it. What else is there? It's not the logic that's flawed. It's the premises. You can make perfectly logical statements from crazy premises. Laing would disappear for months on end, forgetting birthdays before turning up in a blizzard of misdirected anger. In a 1994 biography he wrote of his father, Adrian recounts one of Laing's rare visits to their new home in Glasgow when, having argued with Jutta, he took out his anger by beating his daughter, Karen. I do know that Laing, in his all-to-brief life, was a bit like hopeful little me... and my idol, William Blake.

Once you Really begin to wake up, there’s no stopping you. Oh, the Massed Forces of Hades will do everything possible to make you do just that - and direct you into a heavy diagnostic Pit Stop for rebooting. But Laing seemed to mellow with the passing of the years. To his second family with Jutta - Natasha, now 38, Max, 32, and Adam - and to his two youngest children with different women - Benjamin, 23, and Charles, 20 - he proved a more kindly father. Adrian was gradually reconciled with him over the years, coming to stay with his half-siblings when he studied for his bar exams in London. 'Ronnie was clear, kind, warm-hearted and sagacious,' says Theodor Itten, who knew him in this later period. 'He was very gentle with his family. Once he told me that in his first family he had hit his children because he didn't know any better. I was surprised because I always thought Ronnie had been the Ronnie I knew, very playful and comforting as a father.' them quiet. In the eyes of the establishment this amounted to the same thing.This was the approach he was to battle against throughout his sometimes wayward, often colourful, Collusion has resonances of playing at and of deception. It is a ‘game’ played by two or more people whereby they deceive themselves. The game is the game of mutual self-deception. Whereas delusion and elusion and illusion can be applied to one person, collusion is necessarily a two-or-more-person game. Each plays the other’s game, through he may not necessarily be fully aware of doing so. An essential feature of this game is not admitting that it is a game. [14]Poetry by a psychiatrist. This is what you get if you applied Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus to relationship failures. See far below for quoted examples. 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. Like Blake, he had an awfully warm and fuzzy feeling that EMPATHIZING with folks instead of just giving a diagnosis, prescription and pill was one end of a Golden Thread... that when followed, would lead to a Healing of Mind, Body and Soul. Now is that not what Laing’s poem is saying but far more eloquently? But who is the ‘I’ in the poem? As far as Bobby Matherne’s concerned it’s the therapist who “must join them in their game to keep them as clients, or else they will leave therapy. In addition, the therapist must break up the game for the couple to move from a disjunctive conjunction to a copulative conjunction from now on.” [15] I didn’t read it that way when I was nineteen (which is probably how old I was at the time): I saw the ‘I’ in the book as me and the ‘they’ were my parents.