Background
Ronald David Laing was born October 7, 1927, in Glasgow, Scotland, United Kingdom.
(Compilación de estudios correspondientes a 11 familias de...)
Compilación de estudios correspondientes a 11 familias de esquizofrénicos. Trata, pues, de las familias de los pacientes, con intención de los autores a mostrar el medio social inmediato en que se mueven los enfermos, con la idea de sugerir posibles nexos causales entre los familiares y los orígenes y el desarrollo del padecimiento.
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Ronald David Laing was born October 7, 1927, in Glasgow, Scotland, United Kingdom.
He received a medical degree from Glasgow University in 1951.
From 1951 to 1953 he served as a psychiatrist in the British army, after which he worked in one of Glasgow's mental hospitals while teaching at the university. In 1957 Laing moved to the Tavistock Clinic in London and there completed his first book, The Divided Self (1959). From 1961 to 1967 he studied family interaction patterns with colleagues at the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations. Thereafter, Laing practiced psychoanalysis, traveled widely to consult, lecture, and study, and wrote a number of books.
In addition to The Divided Self, his major writings include Reason and Violence (with David Cooper, 1964); Sanity, Madness, and the Family (with Aaron Esterson, 1964); Interpersonal Perception (with H. Phillipson and A. R. Lee, 1966); The Politics of Experience (1967); The Politics of the Family (1969); Self and Others (1969); Knots (1970); and The Facts of Life (1976).
In his early writings, although Laing accepted the idea that schizophrenia could be identified by "symptoms, " such as deranged speech and bizarre behavior, he argued that these symptoms were intelligible when viewed in a family context. Thus, schizophrenics were seen not as "crazy" but as making the best of a bad situation. The family as a unit was deranged and the patient was merely a scapegoat, a victim of conflicting, hypocritical messages. The problem was social rather than medical. The patient's self had been split between his "true" needs and feelings and a "false" front erected to please the family, which Laing called a "false self system. "
In the middle 1960's Laing began to write and lecture about the possible benefits of psychotic experience. If normal adjustment to modern society requires hypocrisy, repression of feelings, splitting of the self, and cruelty to others, then perhaps the psychotic deserves praise for being sensitive enough to disintegrate under the pressure and seek a more honest, unified organization of the self. Laing and his associates began to experiment with communal forms of treatment and to criticize standard mental hospitals, which treated patients' experiences as something to be gotten rid of - by such methods as drugs and electric shock - rather than gotten through and beyond. Laing treated insanity as a journey into "inner space. " Although it is too early to judge this idea scientifically, many readers have been convinced by the compelling case study published by a patient, Mary Barnes, and a psychoanalyst, Joseph Burke, in the book Mary Barnes: Two Accounts of a Journey Through Madness (1972). The authors both lived in a communal treatment center called Kingsley Hall, founded by Laing. There, the staff lived on an equal basis with the patients. The patients were not drugged or otherwise inhibited from fully experiencing and expressing their feelings. Though some of the patients persisted in bizarre, regressive behavior, others, such as Mary Barnes, "went through" their madness and came out the other end in a more integrated, "healthy" condition.
Laing's position attracted attention during the 1960's partly because it corresponded closely to countercultural attacks upon traditional institutions. Another reason for his popularity was that, unlike most psychiatric researchers and theorists, he attempted to convey the experiences and feelings of his patients, to get inside their world and to describe that world in evocative essays and poems. In The Politics of Experience he even described one of his own mystical experiences in terms that suggested that he too might have "gone mad. " Laing's refusal to describe mental disorder in detached clinical terms is exemplified by Knots, a collection of poems depicting "impasses, disjunctions, and binds" in interpersonal relationships.
He is known for his analyses of communication patterns in disordered families, especially families in which one member has been diagnosed as schizophrenic.
Although Laing's work is obviously controversial, it is safe to say that he has contributed to the understanding of psychotic experience, strengthened the movement for mental patients' rights, and made more persuasive current criticism of the medical model of "mental illness. "
(Compilación de estudios correspondientes a 11 familias de...)
Politically, he was regarded as a thinker of the New Left.
He views the schizophrenic as an oppressed victim of social forces.
Unlike most psychiatric writers, Laing analyzes family interaction patterns politically, in terms of power relations. Laing became controversial for emphasizing the potential benefits of psychotic experience, which he sometimes characterized as akin to mystical insight and as a path to higher forms of personal integration. In its extreme form, Laing's position appears to be that insanity is a more honest, even "logical" response to the modern world than adjustment.
Laing was troubled by his own personal problems, suffering from both episodic alcoholism and clinical depression.
Laing fathered six sons and four daughters by four women.
