Home > Encyclopedia of Psychology > Ronald David Laing

1927-1989
Scottish existential psychiatrist who argued that insanity could be a creative and adaptive response to the world.

Ronald David Laing, or R.D., as he was invariably known, developed the theory that mental illness was an escape mechanism that allowed individuals to free themselves from intolerable circumstances. As a revolutionary thinker, he questioned the controls that were imposed on the individual by family, state, and society. Rejecting a physiological basis for diseases such as schizophrenia, Laing argued that madness was a response to insanity in the environment. A very prolific...