Laing really did feel that the family was an area for strategising. Love was a way in which one person tried to dominate another person: I love you but I’m making a condition for that love which is impossible for you to fulfil and so there’s nothing you can do to earn my love even though I’m telling you you have to earn my love.

As 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? 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 RD Laing and the others who shared his vision of a genuinely compassionate response to mental disturbance had a profound influence on the practice ofJonathan Brown, R D Laing: ‘The celebrity shrink who put the psychedelia into psychiatry’, The Independent, 29th December 2008 According to his friends, colleagues and relatives, Laing was frequently unable to extend the compassion he felt for his patients to his own family. His children were left to grapple with their demons. Sometimes, as with Adam, it came with tragic consequences. For all his professional benevolence, Laing was a flawed parent. He, too, was capable of unleashing 'these forces of violence called love'. Laing, Adrian (1994). R.D. Laing: A Life. London: HarperCollinsPublishers. pp.165–166. ISBN 0-00-638829-9.

In Self and Others (1961), Laing's definition of normality shifted somewhat. [31] [ unreliable source?] 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.Later he tells a revealing story about Susan being interviewed in 1974 by a journalist writing a feature on the children of famous people. The piece ended with a memorable quote from her: 'He can solve everybody else's problems but not our own.' All the bells are ringing here with this post, Jim! A fine profile and commentary, one of your best. And I had no logical reason offered to me for renouncing my innocent “apostasy.” Might doesn’t always make right. And somehow my faith and hope endured. A post over at my friend Dave King’s blog where he was looking for his readers to submit lines of poetry that we felt were immortal started me thinking about the poetry that has had the greatest influence on me. It’s not a long list I’m sorry to say but that says more about how little poetry I’ve been exposed to rather than the quality of that poetry. In the main it’s been individual poems but there is one exception, a book of poetry, and a most unusual book it is. For starters it was written by a man who is far better known as a psychiatrist than a poet. That man was Ronald David Laing.

Okay it’s not Wordsworth and there will be those who might argue that it’s not even proper poetry but I don’t care. My Vintage edition catalogues it under ‘Psychology’ and that’s fine by me. 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. Mott, F.J. and R.D. Laing (2014) Mythology of the Prenatal Life London: Starwalker Press. (Hand-written annotations [c.1977] by R.D. Laing are included in the text, revealing Laing's own thoughts and associative material on prenatal psychology as he studied this book. [41] 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).

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Elizabeth Day and Graham Keeley, 'Dad solved other people's problems - but not his own', The Guardian, 1st June 2008 I see you, and you see me. I experience you, and you experience me. I see your behaviour. You see my behaviour. But I do not and never have and never will see your experience of me. Just as you cannot "see" my experience of you. My experience of you is not "inside" me. It is simply you, as I experience you. And I do not experience you as inside me. Similarly, I take it that you do not experience me as inside you.

I have sat in on sessions with my father while he was working with clients and experienced his genius as a man who could relate to another human’s pain and suffering. There seems to me to be a huge void and contradiction between R D Laing the psychiatrist and Ronnie Laing the father. There was something he was constantly searching for within himself and it tortured him. [11]

Various – Miniatures (A Sequence of Fifty-One Tiny Masterpieces Edited by Morgan Fisher) (Vinyl, LP, Album)". discogs.com. Discogs . Retrieved 4 October 2016.