Preface
Preface to the Second Edition
Foreword to the Routledge Classics Edition, by Hilary Mantel
Introduction
- The Abbotts
- The Blairs
- The Churches
- The Danzigs
- The Edens
- The Fields
- The Golds
- The Heads
- The Irwins
- The Kings
- The Lawsons
Appendix
Index
Biography
R.D. Laing (1927–1989) was one of the best-known and most controversial psychiatrists of the post-war period. After a short period as a psychiatrist in the British Army he moved to the Tavistock Institute in London in 1956, where he worked alongside leading psychotherapists such as John Bowlby and D.W. Winnicott. In 1965 he co-founded the Philadelphia Practice in London, where patients, doctors and staff mixed freely without hierarchy. His many books include The Divided Self, Self and Others and Knots.
Aaron Esterson (1923–1999) was an existential psychoanalyst and family therapist, and with R.D. Laing helped found the Philadelphia Practice.
'Laing challenged the psychiatric orthodoxy of his time…an icon of the 1960s counter-culture.' – The Times
'His major achievement was that he dragged the isolated and neglected inner world of the severely psychotic individual out of the back ward of the large gloomy mental hospital and on to the front pages of influential newspapers, journals and literary magazines…Everyone in contemporary psychiatry owes something to R.D.Laing.' – Anthony Clare, The Guardian
