Ronald David Laing was a Scottish psychiatrist who wrote a lot about mental illnesses like psychosis.
The doctor believed that the true basisinsanity lurks in the foundation of human existence. He interpreted many mental disorders as a method and means of survival of individuals in the present world. He suggested that one could regard madness as a sound response to a crazy social environment. Also, Laing claimed that the newest psychiatry is misrepresenting the real inner world of the mentally ill. He defended the rights of patients.
He is often associated with the movement against psychiatry, although, like many of his contemporaries, he also criticizes it, he himself denies this stereotype. He made a significant contribution to the ethics of psychology.
Biography
Британский психиатр родился в Гованхилле (районе Glasgow) October 7, 1927. My father was a designer in various buildings, then an electrical engineer in the city administration of Glasgow. As Laing stated, in his early years and in his youth he experienced the deepest experiences, the cause of which he considered his own overly cool and indifferent mother.
Education
He was educated at the gymnasium, continued to study medicine at the University of Glasgow, did not pass the exams on the first attempt, but later re-took and successfully graduated in 951.
Career
Ronald Laing spent a couple of years asa psychiatrist in the British army, where he found that he had a special talent for communicating with unbalanced people. In 1953, he left the army and worked at Gartnavel Royal Hospital, Glasgow. During this period, Ronald Laing also participated in an existential-oriented discussion group at the University of Glasgow, organized by Carl Abenheimer and Joe Schorstein.
In 1956, at the invitation of John ("Jock") D.Sutherland, he went on an internship for a grant to a Tavistock clinic in London, widely known as a center for the study and practice of psychotherapy (especially psychoanalysis).
At this time he was associated with John Bowlby, D.V.Winnicott and Charles Rycroft. Laing remained at the Tavistock Institute until 1964. In 1965, he and a group of colleagues created the Philadelphia Association. They began a psychiatric community project at Kingsley Hall, where patients and therapists lived together.
Norwegian author Axel Jensen met Ronald Laing during this period. They became close friends, and Laing often visited the writer on his ship “Shanti Devi” in Stockholm.
Он начал развивать команду, предлагающую repeated seminars in which one appointed person decides to re-experience the struggle, trying to break out of the birth canal in the face of the rest of the group who surrounds him / her.
Personal life
Biography of Ronald Laing can be vieweda clear example of how each generation of a family has implications for the next. His parents led a life of extreme denial, showing strange behavior. His father, David, an electrical engineer, often fought with his own brother, and had a nervous breakdown when Laing was a teenager. His mother Amelia was described as "even more psychologically peculiar." According to one friend and neighbor, "everyone in the street knew that she was crazy."
Рональд Лэйнг был обеспокоен своими личными problems, suffered from episodic alcoholism and clinical depression - according to his self-diagnosis in 1983 in an interview for BBC Radio with Dr. Anthony Claire. Although he was allegedly free in the years preceding his death. He died at the age of 61 from a heart attack, playing tennis with his colleague and good friend Robert W. Firestone.
Adam, his eldest son from his second marriage, wasfound dead in a tent on an island in the Mediterranean in 2008, after what could have been a "suicidal binge" as a result of a break in the long-term relationship with her friend Janina. He died of a heart attack at the age of 41.
Theodore Itten, former student of RDLaing, who later became a close friend of the family, said that the breakup of his parents' marriage - Adam's mother Jutta broke up with Laing in 1981 - all this had a strong influence on him. When he was 13, 14, 15 he was a rebel, dropped out of school. Theodore said: "I think it was a very sad time for Adam. He tried to calm himself with cigarettes, sometimes drugs and alcohol, as a kind of self-help."
Susan, his daughter, died in March 1976 atage 21 from leukemia. A year later, his eldest daughter Fiona suffered a nervous breakdown. In an interview, she said about her father: "He can solve other people's problems, but not our own."
Laing's view of mental illness
He claimed that strange behavior and seemedHowever, the confusion of speech of people experiencing a psychological disorder should ultimately be regarded as an attempt to communicate worries and anxieties, often in situations where this is impossible or forbidden.
Ronald Laing stated that people can oftenput in impossible situations when they are not able to meet the contradictory expectations of their peers, which leads to a complex mental disorder for the individuals concerned.
The alleged symptoms of schizophrenia wereby expressing this suffering, and should be evaluated as a catharsis and transformative experience. This is a reassessment of the focus of the disease process, and, consequently, a shift in the forms of treatment, which was, and indeed is still there (perhaps now more than ever). In the broadest sense, we have in ourselves both psychological subjects and a pathological essence.
The psychiatrist and philosopher Karl Jaspers had previously stated infor his fruitful work, General Psychopathology, that many of the symptoms of mental illness (and especially of delirium) are incomprehensible, and therefore deserve little attention, except for signs of some other major disorders.
Laing was a revolutionary in evaluating contentpsychotic behavior and speech as a real expression of suffering, even if wrapped in the mysterious language of personal symbolism, which makes sense only in their situation.
According to him, if the therapist can better understand his patient, then he can begin to understand the symbolism of his psychosis, and, therefore, begin to solve the problems that are the root cause of the disaster.
Ronald never said that mental illness does not exist, but simply viewed it in a radically different light from contemporaries.
For Laing, a mental illness can bea transforming episode where the process of experiencing a mental disorder is compared to a shaman's journey. A traveler may return from a journey with important ideas, and perhaps even become a wiser and more reasonable person as a result.
Achievements
The most famous and practically usefulLaing's achievement in psychiatry is his co-founding and presidency in 1965 at the Philadelphia Association and the wider promotion of therapeutic communities adopted in more effective and less confrontational psychiatric institutions.
Other organizations created in its traditions are the Altanka Association and the New School of Psychotherapy and Counseling in London Existential Psychotherapy.
Proceedings
Among his works are: "I split", "I and others", "Sanity, madness and family" and many others.
In "The Cracked I", Laing contrasted“an ontologically safe person” with another who “cannot accept reality, vitality, autonomy, one’s identity and others for granted” and, therefore, devises strategies to avoid “losing oneself”.
Symbolism
He explains that we all exist in the world asbeings identified by others who carry a model of us in their heads, just as we carry their models in our consciousness. In later works, he often takes it at deeper levels, painstakingly writing as “A knows that B knows that A knows that B knows ...”!
In I and Others (1961), Laing’s definition of normality somewhat shifted.
In Sanity, Madness and Family (1964), Laing and Esterton talk about several families, analyzing how their members see each other and how they actually communicate with each other.
