"A kind of angel let loose on a world he never made was how the psychotherapist Rollo May summed up the pioneering the psychiatrist R.D. Laing, whom he first encountered on a TV chat show in 1972, by which time Laing had metamorphosed into a media celebrity and chic guru of the left.
Others took a more demonic view of Laing, with anthropologist Margaret Mead refusing to join him on a radio show during the same US tour, because he had left his wife and five children. Many considered that Laing's work of radical research into mental illness had degenerated into a cultivation of the lost magic of feeling and a bombastic rhetoric attacking family and social constraints. Alienation had a lot to answer for.
At the height of Laing's fame, during lecture tours to promote his books, the once dapper little Scot in his three piece suits, with the magnetic and caring eyes, loafed bare footed on sofas in luxury hotels, massaging his gums with a toothpick, exuding sadness and a whiff of cordite.
The angel of compassion aroused intense devotion, at the same time as his erratic behaviour provoked fury, often in those closest to him. These fissures in his reputation capture the enigma of Laing better than the rather bland adaptation of the title of his book, The Divided Self which Jungian analyst John Clay chooses as the theme for this new, authorised biography.
It all started in Glasgow in 1927 when Ronald Laing was born as the only child of Amelia Kirkwood and his electrical engineer father David. The sensitive Ronnie was marked for life by his mother's secretiveness and suffocating grip. He shared a bedroom with her up to the age of thirteen, his father being relegated to the back room.
His jaundiced views on the family and on the double binds involved in love, especially maternal, love, are traced back by Clay to the peculiarities of Laing's childhood. At times it's analysis by numbers with some humorous speculation on the effects on Laing of being "forced" to witness his mother's discreet undressing.
Medical training and a passion ate intellectual quest took up his early adult years. These endeavours were fused when he became a psychiatrist, first in the British army and then in the primitive hospitals of the time. The most enlightening part of Clay's book is his account of the barbaric practices which Laing encountered as a young psychiatrist. The passion behind Laing's writing and work is simply explained by Chekhov's comment on why he wrote "People shouldn't have to live like that."
It is easy now to look back at the contradictions in Laing's life and discredit his achievements. The therapeutic communities he established may have lacked order and good management but at the time were beacons of light in psychiatric care dominated by locked door wards and harsh treatment.
Concerning his writings, Clay is valuable in suggesting that Laing is best approached as a master of story telling rather than as a grand theorist. Laing explored everything, philosophy and religion, East and West, radical love and confrontation, drugs and anti drugs, poetry and self parody at his best he is a scintillating charmer, at his worst an eclectic conjurer.
My own view is that a rushed assimilation of the alluring ambiguities of Eastern philosophy did his writing more harm than the more publicised taking of mind blowing psychedelic drugs. Towards the end of his life, Laing had a more measured respect for the resources of the classical Western tradition.
Clay's account of the turbulent life of Laing during the decades when he was an influential force in psychotherapy is a masterpiece of condensation, but I was left with a feeling of breathlessness, an appropriate image since Laing had difficulty all his life reaching a state of relaxed breathing. How did he ever get time to read the books he quoted so eloquently in his writings and conversation?
Laing's energy, whether he was writing, lecturing, seeing patients, playing music (he was hypnotic at the piano) or drinking was prodigious and it is exhausting to follow the swings of his intellect, heart and spirit as he fathered ten children, travelled the world, always trying to understand the extremes of human behaviour.
It is ironic that more than anything else it was classical aggressive drinking habits (such as he might have learned in any Glasgow pub) which caused him to become marginalised in later years. About a year before his death in 1989 he told an audience expecting sophisticated enlightenment about addictions that the only therapy was to quit drinking and, consolingly, this he himself did.
Clay ventilates well the caustic criticism evoked by Laing, but remains a sympathetic biographer. All his life Laing retained an uncanny ability to reach out and heal disturbed people but showed frighteningly little awareness of how to confront his own demons.
My abiding wish from reading Clay's book is that I could be transported back to one of the late night sessions in Kingsley Hall, Laing's first therapeutic community. The wine is still flowing around the large, candle lit table, Laing, friends and residents are discoursing and playing music. Anything could happen. Inevitably the tireless Laing would be the last to go to bed.