R.D. Laing

Scottish psychiatrist, writer, analyst, philosopher and counter-culture cult figure whose controversial views on mental illness made him a guru among the young and radical in the '60s. He broke with traditional psychotherapy and sought new treatments for schizophrenia based on a concern for the rights of mental patients.

He authored "The Politics of Family and Other Essays," 1971 and "The Facts of Life," 1976. His book, "The Voice of Experience," sounded a theme that behavior shouldn't be considered abnormal just because we don't understand it, and he viewed psychosis as a potentially enriching experience. In 1964, he founded an organization in London known as The Philadelphia Association. It set up homes throughout England where diagnosed schizophrenics lived equally with resident psychiatrists and could opt not to have treatment.

Laing received his medical degree from Glasgow University in 1951. He worked as a psychiatrist in the British army, taught and practiced in Glasgow for a while, and then in the late 1950s, trained as a psychoanalyst at the Tavistock Institute in London, the British center of orthodox Freudian psychiatry. In the 1960s, he began to emerge from that orthodoxy, becoming an outspoken critic of traditional approaches and beginning to experiment with the therapeutic use of mescaline and LSD.

In London, he founded a therapeutic community where patients, doctors and staff lived and worked together democratically, without distinctions of rank or role. He was criticized by some for idealizing mental illness as a hyper state of awareness. He felt that Schizophrenia was neither genetic or biochemical but arose from being in hopeless emotional situations.

He was married twice, divorced twice, and had nine children, three daughters and six sons.

A resident of London, Laing died of a heart attack on 23 August 1989, while playing tennis in St.