It is, however, the perfect metaphor and made a huge impression on me at the time and still. The expression Laing uses in the book’s introduction to describe these ‘knots’ is “the final formal elegance in these webs of maya.” Maya is a Sanskrit word that in Indian religions has multiple meanings centred around the concept of "illusion".

He was educated initially at Sir John Neilson Cuthbertson Public School and after four years transferred to Hutchesons' Grammar School. Described variously as clever, competitive or precocious, he studied classics, particularly philosophy, including through reading books from the local library. Small and slightly built, Laing participated in distance running; he was also a musician, being made an Associate of the Royal College of Music. He studied medicine at the University of Glasgow. During his medical degree he set up a "Socratic Club", of which the philosopher Bertrand Russell agreed to be president. Laing failed his final exams. In a partial autobiography, Wisdom, Madness and Folly, Laing said he felt remarks he made under the influence of alcohol at a university function had offended the staff and led to him being failed on every subject including some he was sure he had passed. After spending six months working on a psychiatric unit, Laing passed the re-sits in 1951 to qualify as a medical doctor. [9] Career [ edit ] by minds less flexible and more accepting than his own. From his early days as an army psychiatrist, Laing realised that the whole object of psychiatric hospitals wasn’t to cure patients but to keepRD 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

Among those considered to be his most celebrated admirers at the height of his influence in the 1960s when he was a regular feature on television were The Beatles, Jim Morrison, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. Laing, R.D. (1982) The Voice of Experience: Experience, Science and Psychiatry. Harmondsworth: Penguin. But in his later years, as he became more dependent on alcohol and drugs, his judgment was blunted. When he was drunk Laing could exploit the fault-lines in someone's personality with a vicious cruelty. One of his students, Francis Huxley, once said that Laing's words could act like 'a psychic fist hitting the navel of insincerity'.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. We are all murderers and prostitutes — no matter to what culture, society, class, nation, we belong, no matter how normal, moral, or mature we take ourselves to be. 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 RD Laing the psychiatrist and Ronnie Laing the father. There was something he was constantly searching for within himself and it tortured him. Mad to Be Normal (2017). A fictionalised account of the Kingsley Hall project, starring David Tennant as Laing and directed by Robert Mullan. [39]