R.D Laing, The Divided Self
My first choice for the Book Club.
In 1960 Ronnie Laing, took on all of established psychiatry (and most of established society) with The Divided Self; an insubordinate understanding of mental illness, inspired by existentialism and hippy values, that mandated actually listening to what patients had to say, as opposed to treating their speech as merely another symptom of a sick mind.
He speculated (a bit like Freud's interpretation of dreams) that the discourse of schizophrenics was in fact a deeply personal language/code used to describe their experience. Understanding this symbolism would ultimately lead the therapist to the cause of their condition.
History has since taken a negative view of his theories. In short, none of the treatments he proposed did a damn thing to alleviate schizophrenia.
But he has the legacy of one person who stood up for the genuinely dispossessed. Psychiatry in the 50's was an inhuman institution, reflective of an inhuman face of society. Laing helped to change attitudes towards mental illness. The Divided Self, although its postulations have not stood up to either time or empirical rigour, remains a fantastically interesting work that you can't read without profoundly reconsidering what it means to be mentally ill and what that represents to society as a whole.
No Comments | posted on 31/07/2010
