Daniel Burston’s previous book, The
Wing of Madness: The Life and Work of R.D. Laing (Reviewed in Metapsychology
October 2000), made a strong case that it is possible to understand
Laing’s collection of writings in the context of his life and that the themes
of his well-known earlier writings persist in his more outlandish later
work.  Burston’s careful investigation
showed the coherence of Laing’s work as a whole, and made a strong case for
ranking Laing with other major thinkers in psychology and psychiatry.  In The Crucible of Experience,
Burston continues this project with a more thorough assessment of Laing’s work
in the context of the philosophical traditions of phenomenology and
existentialism. 

Maybe the major challenge for
Burston and defenders of Laing is to counter the impression that his work
contains a wide range of disparate ideas which are collected together without
regard for consistency or theoretical coherence.  It is often far from clear that the project of interpreting
Laing’s work is intrinsically worthwhile, and if one is to invest energy in
creating a theoretical framework for a critical approach to psychiatry, it
might be better to use Laing more as an inspiration rather than an
authoritative source.  Simply put,
Laing’s ideas often seem so scattered and his usage of key terms so variable
that an interpretive project aimed at discovering the core of this thought is
in real danger of merely arriving at a number of vague suggestions. 

One reason that we still have for returning to
Laing’s ideas is that there are few thinkers who have carried on in his tradition
of suspicion of the mainstream who match his theoretical complexity, his
interest in philosophical insights, and his popular appeal.  Thomas Szasz has continued to repeat his old
arguments from the 1950s with no sign of intellectual development or readiness
to enter into genuine dialogue with other people who are sympathetic to some of
his ideas, and besides, most with left and liberal leanings find Szasz’s rigid
political libertarianism very unattractive. 
Some historians of psychiatry work in a critical tradition in line with
Laing’s ideas — Andrew Scull is an excellent example — but they tend to avoid
any direct theorizing about the nature of mental disorder, and their work tends
to be academic and rather inaccessible to a general readership.  Other academics also tend to be specialized
and technical.  Psychiatric consumer and
survivor movements tend to focus on particular issues and are less concerned
with finding a broad theoretical background for their approach.  Thus, Laing remains one of the most
important figures in the critical psychiatry literature, despite the
shortcomings of his work. 

The Crucible of Experience
is a relatively short book at 168 pages. 
In six chapters, it outlines a number of central themes in Laing’s
work.  The first chapter briefly recaps
Laing’s life and achievements.  The
second provides an outline of the philosophical tradition of existential
phenomenology that influences Laing so powerfully, including Husserl, Dilthey,
Jaspers, and Heidegger.  In the third
chapter, Burston compares Laing’s approach with those who formulated
existential psychotherapy, and includes discussion of Carl Rogers, Erich Fromm,
and Paul Tillich, as well as substantial discussion of Laing’s own work and
anecdotes concerning his practice.  The
fourth chapter locates Laing’s ideas in the context of different theories about
the nature of schizophrenia and its treatment, including some comparison with
Freud, Sartre, and Lacan.  One of the
most interesting parts of the book is the investigation of Laing’s views about
normality in the fifth chapter, which shows how different his ideas are from
that of a crude antipsychiatry that simply denies the existence of mental
illness.  Laing was certainly suspicious
of the distinction between normal and pathological, and he argued that
normality is often a highly problematic condition.  Burston does a good job of elaborating the concept of alienation
in the existentialist tradition and as it appears in Laing’s theories, and
especially the complex relation between his views and those of Heidegger.  The final chapter provides an overview and
discussion of the implications of the ideas set out in earlier chapters, and an
assessment of future of the study of Laing’s work. 

Burston’s book is rich and
scholarly, and so it deserves careful study. 
He resists any simplistic evaluation of the worth of Laing’s
contribution to psychiatric theory, and it is not an easy book to simply
skim.  Its ultimate achievement is to
make a strong case that Laing’s writings are still relevant to the study of
mental illness today, and one hopes that it will provoke new scholarship to
carry on Laing’s important projects. 

© 2003 Christian Perring. All
rights reserved.

Christian Perring, Ph.D., is Chair of the Philosophy Department
at Dowling College, Long Island, and editor of Metapsychology
Online Review.  His main research is on philosophical issues in
medicine, psychiatry and psychology.

Categories: Philosophical, Psychotherapy, Psychology