Ronald D. Laing

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RD Laing (1983)

Ronald David Laing (born October 7, 1927 in Glasgow , Scotland , † August 23, 1989 in St. Tropez , France ) was a British psychiatrist and one of the founders of the antipsychiatric movement.

Life

After studying medicine at the University of Glasgow, Laing worked as a psychiatrist in the British Army (1951 to 1953). There he developed a special interest in psychotic patients. Inspired by reading Harry Stack Sullivan , Frieda Fromm-Reichmann and Marguerite Sechehaye , he sought to gain an understanding approach to these patients.

In 1956 he went to London and worked at the London Tavistock Clinic . He began training as a psychoanalyst at the Institute for Psychoanalysis (his training analyst was Charles Rycroft under the supervision of Donald W. Winnicott and Marion Milner ). In disappointment and critical departure from this experience, he turned to the analytical psychology Carl Gustav Jung , whose thinking seems to allow a rehabilitation of psychotic processes as a meaningful, mental restructuring (" metanoia ").

The Divided Self was published in 1960 (German edition 1973: The divided self ). With reference to the contemporary philosophical current of phenomenology and existential philosophy, Laing drew a first résumé of his engagement with conventional psychiatry and psychoanalysis. On the basis of a phenomenological ontology of interpersonal relationships ( interpersonal phenomenology ), he criticized in particular their reifying, depersonalizing character and the resulting medical practice.

In 1965, Laing founded the Philadelphia Association, the aim of which is to save the mentally ill from being admitted to a mental institution by living together in a supervised household. One of the first projects was a shared apartment in Kingsley Hall, a house in London where Laing and other members of the Philadelphia Association lived with schizophrenics (documentary Asylum by Peter Robinson, USA 1972).

In the 1960s he worked with the mathematician, psychologist and philosopher George Spencer-Brown , who was best known in Germany through Niklas Luhmann . Laing is one of the few scientists who explicitly refers to Spencer-Brown's Laws Of Form .

"Did You Used to Be RD Laing?" Is a biographical television documentary from 1989. In 2000 the play of the same name received a prize at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe .

In 1989 he died of a heart attack while playing tennis in St. Tropez.

theory

Like Ludwig Binswanger , the founder of “Daseinsanalyse”, before him, Laing was inspired by the insights of the more recent German ( Husserl , Heidegger ) and French philosophy ( Sartre ) in the critical examination of psychiatric theory and practice promised a changed view of phenomena of serious mental and emotional disorders. He also received the modern schools of depth psychology ( Freud , Jung ) as well as contemporary communication theory , which tried to trace mental illnesses back to dysfunctional communication relationships ( double bond theory ). In doing so, Laing maintains a critical distance from all theories of mental disorders insofar as they relate to the original human encounter, i.e. H. Disguise the authentic aspect of the relationship between the practitioner and the patient. This also applies to approaches such as Daseinanalysis or antipsychiatry, which are based on his considerations.

Critique of the Diagnostic Gaze

All of his work is directed against the conventional medical reification of psychotic illnesses that Freud regarded as untreatable . For Laing, these mental disorders also stand in the context of a - family and social - genesis and are above all existential situations of those affected themselves, which must be lived by them and by the attending doctors etc. and, if at all possible, existentially understood instead of should be categorized objectively. He regularly shows that the criteria of the diagnostic gaze, for example for the definition of schizophrenia, refer back to this without further ado: The diagnosis “schizophrenia” turns out to be a projection of a schizophrenic theory; as such, it is based on unquestioned basic attitudes and principles (such as that of depersonalization ), which are discovered in the corresponding diagnostics as disease-related features on the object .

Interpersonal Phenomenology

Laing founded interpersonal phenomenology . This is intended to represent a method for describing what happens between people, while largely dispensing with a medical interpretation or ideology (such as psychoanalysis or current psychiatric school opinion). For medical practice, Laing demands a basic phenomenological attitude, which is expressed in the readiness for direct interpersonal encounters and the ability to renounce the role distribution typical of the situation.

Ontological uncertainty

According to Laing, the schizoid or schizophrenic experience of existence is characterized by the feeling of constant threat, which he calls “ontological insecurity”, and must be distinguished from the experience of other people: “When a position of primary ontological security has been reached, the Ordinary living conditions do not pose a constant threat to one's own existence. If such a livelihood has not been achieved, the ordinary situations of everyday life constitute a continuous and deadly threat. Only if one realizes this is it possible to understand how certain psychoses can develop. ”The permanent fear of annihilation manifests itself as fear of being engulfed, implosion (destructive intrusion of reality into the self) or as petrification (petrification through terror) and depersonalization .

Works

  • The divided self. An existential study of mental health and insanity. 1987 (orig. The Divided Self. An existential study on sanity and madness. 1960).
  • Sanity, Madness and the Family. 1964.
  • The Politics of Experience. 1967.
    • German: Phenomenology of Experience. Translated by Klaus Figge and Waltraud Stein, Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt 1969, ISBN 3-518-10314-8 .
  • Family politics. 1969 (orig. The Politics of the Family. ).
  • Schizophrenia and Family. With G. Bateson, DD Jackson, Th. Lidz, LC Wynne u. a., 1969.
  • Node. (Orig. Knots. 1970).
  • Reason and violence. Three commentaries on Sartre's philosophy 1950–1960. With DG Cooper, 1971.
  • Interpersonal perception. 1971 (orig. Inter-personal Perception. ).
  • The self and the others. 1973 (orig. Self and others. Tavistock Publications, London 1961, 1969).
  • The facts of life. (Orig. The Facts of Life. 1976).
  • Do you love me? Stories in Conversations and Poems. 1978 (orig. Do you love me? ).
  • Conversations with my children. 1980 (orig. Conversations With Adam and Natasha. ).
  • I don't mind being human. A conversation with Vincenzo Caretti. 1981 (orig. Intervista sul folle e il saggio a cura di Vincenzo Caretti. 1979).
  • The voice of experience. Experience, Science, and Psychiatry. 1983 (orig. The Voice of Experience. ).
  • Wisdom, madness, folly. The career of a psychiatrist 1927–1957. 1985.

literature

  • Mary Barnes: My Journey Through Madness. Fischer Taschenbuchverlag, Frankfurt / M. 1989, ISBN 3-596-42203-5 . The author reports on her time as a patient of RD Laing at Kingsley Hall.
  • Adrian C. Laing: RD Laing. A life. HarperCollins, London 1997, ISBN 0-00-638829-9 .
  • Bob Mullan: Mad to be normal. Conversations with RD Laing. Free Association Books, London 1995, ISBN 1-85343-395-0 .
  • Daniel Burston: The Wing of Madness. The Life and Work of RD Laing. Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA 1996, ISBN 0-674-95358-4 .
  • Daniel Burston: The Crucible of Experience. RD Laing and the Crisis of Psychotherapy. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts 2000, ISBN 978-0-674-00217-3 .
  • Josef Rattner : Ronald D. Laing. In: J. Rattner: Classics of Psychoanalysis. 2nd edition, Beltz Verlag, Weinheim 1995, pp. 770–799, ISBN 3-621-27276-3 (former title: Klassiker der Tiefenpsychologie. ) Pp. 770–799.

Web links

Wikiquote: Ronald D. Laing  - Quotes

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Daniel Burston: RD Laing and The Politics of Diagnosis. “ […] Laing spent as much time as possible in padded cells with the men placed in his custody. This kind of intense immersion in the schizophrenic life-world was unheard of at the time. He found that with enough patience and persistence he could eventually get on their wave length, and make sense of the peculiar speech and gestures that his colleagues found completely unintelligible [...] ”.
  2. ↑ a b History. Philadelphia Association website.
  3. ^ Kingsley Hall. On: sgipt.org.
  4. ↑ For example RD Laing: The Voice of Experience. Munich 1989, p. 181.
  5. ↑ Did you used to be RD Laing? in the Internet Movie Database (English)
  6. ↑ Laing (1987), p. 41.
personal data
SURNAME Laing, Ronald D.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Laing, RD; Laing, Ronald David
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British psychiatrist and co-founder of the anti-psychiatry movement
DATE OF BIRTH October 7, 1927
PLACE OF BIRTH Glasgow , Scotland
DATE OF DEATH 23rd August 1989
Place of death St. Tropez , France