Ronald David Laing was a British psychiatrist known for his alternative approach to the treatment of schizophrenia and was the founder of a chain known as antipsychiatry in the 1960s and 1970s.
Like many other psychologists and social scientists, Laing worked and researched at the famous Tavistock Clinic. Years later, he joined the Tavistock Institute team in the field of research.
- The Tavistock Institute was responsible for providing Laing with the necessary funds to carry out its most important research.
His work has focused on the study of schizophrenia and the treatment environment for schizophrenic patients. Laing proposed the theory that patients behave differently depending on the environment in which they lived.
Below, we’ll reveal more details about Ronald David Laing’s life and his research related to schizophrenia.
Laing was born on 7 October 1927 in Govanhill, Glasgow, Ecosse. He was born into a working-class family, the only child of David McNair Laing and Amelia Laing.
Until 1945 he attended Hutcheson Boys’ Primary School in Glasgow, where he distinguished himself by an excellent student and exceptional musical talent. He graduated from the Royal Academy of Music in 1944 and joined the Royal College of Masica in April 1945.
During this time he was a passionate philosophy student, some of the authors who most received his attention are Freud, Marx, Nietzsche and, above all, Kierkegaard, later studied Medicine and Psychiatry and received his doctorate in Medicine from the University of Glasgow in 1951.
Between 1951 and 1953, he was recruited as a psychiatrist by the Royal Army medical corps and sent to the British Army Psychiatric Unit, Netley, near Southampton, and then to the military hospital in Catterick, Yorkshire.
In late 1953 he left the army and began working as a professor at the University of Glasgow, during which time he went to the Royal Psychiatric Hospital in Gartnavel to complete his psychiatric training.
In this hospital, he installed an experimental treatment site: the “Rumpus Room”, in which schizophrenic patients spent time in a comfortable room.
Staff and patients wore normal clothing, and patients were able to devote time to activities such as cooking and the arts.
Daily activities aim to ensure that patients can respond to employees and others in a social rather than institutional environment.
All patients have shown a marked improvement in their behavior thanks to this innovative treatment. In January 1956 he graduated as a psychiatrist.
In late 1956 he was appointed Senior Registrar at the Tavistock Clinic in London, where he conducted research at the institute until 1960.
The Tavistock clinic was made up of doctors studying English Navy patients, and its main objective was to identify the consequences of war on an individual.
A short time later, the Tavistock Institute was established as a non-governmental non-profit organization. Founded by the Rockefeller Foundation, the Tavistock Institute has developed research in social sciences and psychology applied to education, research and professional development.
For example, Laing worked for the Tavistock Institute for nearly 30 years. In 1958, he began research that led him to his book Sanidade, Madness and the Family, published in 1964.
He also began conducting a series of seminars involving several people, who eventually became important collaborators, such as Aaron Esterson and David Cooper.
His book O Eu Dividido, published by Tavistock in 1960, received rave reviews, although after its release sales did not keep pace with his success, and shortly the day after he published the book O Eu eo os Outros.
Laing graduated as a psychoanalyst and established a private practice in London. She began experimenting with drugs, especially LSD.
In 1962, he was appointed clinical director of Langham Clinic in London and, from then on, began to gain some popularity.
In the following years, he wrote most of the articles that were later compiled in the book The Politics of Experience and the Bird of Paradise. He also published Reason and Violence, co-written with David Cooper, another associate researcher at the Tavistock Institute.
In 1965, Laing embarked on the Kingsley Hall project with Aaron Esterson, David Cooper and other researchers of the time, which lasted until 1970.
In short, Kingsley Hall was about building an experimental, non-hierarchical community in which patients with schizophrenia had a space to work on their psychosis without resorting to drugs or other therapies, such as electroshock or surgery. .
The inspiration came from Laing’s Rumpus Room projects and the experience of its employees. Other projects, such as Cooper’s Villa 21, have proven critical to the development of Kingsley Hall.
Thus, a community for schizophrenic patients has been developed without distinction between employees and patients, that is, based on social relationships.
Following the success of Kingsley Hall, Laing toured the United States, giving him the opportunity to connect with other renowned psychoanalysts.
In 1967 he participated in the Congress of Liberation Dialectics, aimed at uniting left-wing politics and psychoanalysis, where he gave a speech entitled O’Bvio, which was later published in an anthology that collected the speeches of this congress.
In 1952, Laing married his girlfriend, Anne Hearne. The same year his first daughter, called Fiona, was born. The couple also gave birth to other children: Susan, Karen, Paul, Adrian.
After separating from Anne, Laing partnered with Jutta Werner, with whom she had three other children, later, she would have two other children of different mothers.
In 1971, with the closure of Kingsley Hall, Laing decided it was the right time to take a gap year in Sri Lanka and India. During this trip, he devoted himself to Vedidic Buddhist meditation.
Preparing for his trip, he closed his private consultation, the same in which he had conducted LSD therapy sessions in the 1960s. It was unclear whether his LSD investigation had resumed upon his return from India.
On August 23, 1989, Laing died while playing tennis and reportedly suffered a heart attack.
Throughout her career, Laing has become interested in the underlying causes of schizophrenia and has clearly opposed the treatments used to treat these patients at the time.
So Laing tried to look for alternatives to hospitalization and electroshock therapy that were common at this point in history.
“We must focus on unlearning a lot of what has been learned and learning what we have not learned. ” – R. D. Laing-
Laing hypothesized that ontological insecurity (insecurity about self-existence) provokes a defensive reaction that, in turn, causes the self to be divided into separate components, thus generating the psychotic symptoms characteristic of schizophrenia.
In his book Sanidade, Loucura ea Famolia, he published a number of cases of people whose mental illnesses were, according to Laing, influenced by their family relationships, and there was a lot of enthusiasm for this approach at the time.
Although Ronald David Laing’s initial approach to schizophrenia was quite controversial, he corrected some of his positions in the following years.