Home > International Dictionary of Psychoanalysis > Laing, Ronald David (1927-1989)

Ronald David Laing, a British psychiatrist, was born in Glasgow, Scotland, on October 7, 1927. He died in St. Tropez, France, on August 23, 1989.

The only child of strictly Presbyterian Scottish parents of modest means, Laing studied classics at Hutchison's Boy's Grammar School and medicine at university. To his medical peer group in Glasgow, Laing showed himself to be an extraordinarily gifted musician, scholar, and discussant. He introduced them to Freud. In a population still heavily influenced by puritan values and respectable civic expectations, his behavioral example and the range of his mind were exhilarating. As a final year student Laing opted to become an assistant on psychiatric wards. This, together with his immediate postgraduate training for six months, led to his being graded a psychiatrist throughout two years compulsory military service. At Netley Hospital he spent hours sitting with very disturbed patients and thus found himself researching psychotic states.

Returning to Glasgow, he sought and was given facilities at Garthavel Royal Mental Hospital to set up a special nursing care unit for chronic schizophrenic women. The impressive results he obtained there were published in The Lance (Cameron, McGhie and Laing, 1955). In Glasgow he continued the original clinical observations which would underpin his book, The Divided Self. Meanwhile he read very widely in philosophy and in phenomenological and existential psychiatry. Identified by J. D. Sutherland and John Bowlby as a candidate of outstanding originality and promise, Laing was offered a full-time salaried post at the Tavistock Clinic and a training analysis in conjunction with this at no cost to himself. His analyst was Charles Rycroft, his supervisors Marion Milner and Donald Winnicott. Although his qualification as an analyst was opposed by some teachers and administrators, it was strongly supported by those training analysts just mentioned.

The publication of The Divided Self in 1960 marked an important turning point in British psychiatry largely because Laing was able to collate, digest, synthesize, and crystallize ideas that were already current or latent in continental Europe and North America. It gave a voice to madness. Laing's originality lay in his power to complete the task and in his capacity to present the ideas, which had by then become his, with clinical illustrations, in such a way that a very large number of people were persuaded (and continue to be persuaded) that he was right.

The Divided Self, subtitled An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness, was Laing's first book and is widely regarded as his finest. Along with The Politics of Experience (1967), it brought him worldwide fame. In time, Laing's importance in the United States waned, and he never completely recovered from the public versus private identity crisis of his late thirties.

JAMES R. HOOD

See also: Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia; Great Britain; Schizophrenia; Tavistock Clinic.