Ronald David Laing was a Scottish psychiatrist who wrote extensively on mental illnesses such as psychosis.
The doctor believed that the true basis of insanity lies in the foundation of human existence. He interpreted many mental disorders as a method and means of survival of individuals in the current world. He suggested that insanity could be regarded as a he althy response to a crazy social environment. Laing also claimed that modern psychiatry misrepresents the real inner world of the mentally ill. He championed 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
British psychiatrist was born in Govanhill (Glasgow) on October 7th, 1927. My father was a designer in various buildings, then an electrical engineer in the city government 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 excessively cold-blooded and indifferent mother.
Education
He was educated at the grammar school, went on to study medicine at the University of Glasgow, did notpassed the exams on the first attempt, but subsequently retaken and successfully completed it in 951.
Career
Ronald Laing spent a couple of years as a psychiatrist in the British Army, where he discovered he had a special talent for dealing with unstable people. In 1953 he left the army and worked at the Royal Gartnavel Hospital, Glasgow. During this period, Ronald Laing also participated in an Existentialist-oriented discussion group at the University of Glasgow organized by Carl Abenheimer and Joe Shorstein.
In 1956, at the invitation of John ("Jock") D. Sutherland, he went on a grant internship at the 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. W. Winnicott and Charles Rycroft. Laing remained at the Tavistock Institute until 1964. In 1965, he formed the Philadelphia Association with a group of colleagues. They started a psychiatric community project in 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.
He began to develop a team offering retreat workshops in which one designated person decides to re-experience the struggle to escape the birth canal in the face of the rest of the group who surroundhim/her.
Private life
Ronald Laing's biography can be seen as a prime example of how each generation of a family has implications for the next. His parents led a life of extreme denial, displaying 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 has been described as "even more psychologically idiosyncratic". According to one friend and neighbor, "everyone on the street knew she was crazy."
Ronald Laing was troubled by his personal problems, suffered from episodic alcoholism and clinical depression - according to his self-diagnosis in 1983 in an interview for BBC Radio with Dr. Anthony Clare. Although he was allegedly free in the years leading up to his death. He died at the age of 61 of a heart attack while playing tennis with his colleague and good friend Robert W. Firestone.
Adam, his eldest son from his second marriage, was found dead in a tent on an island in the Mediterranean in 2008, after what could have been a "suicidal binge" resulting from the end of a long-term relationship with girlfriend Janina. He died of a heart attack at the age of 41.
Theodore Itten, former student of R. D. Lainga, who later became a close friend of the family, said that the breakup of his parents' marriage - Adam's mother Yutta separated from Laing in 1981 - all this had a strong impact on him. When he was 13, 14, 15 he was a rebel, dropped out of school. Theodore said: "I think it wasa 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 at the age of 21 from leukemia. A year later, his eldest daughter Fiona suffered a nervous breakdown. In an interview, she said of her father, "He can solve other people's problems, but not our own."
Laing's perspective on mental illness
He argued that the bizarre behavior and seemingly muddled speech of people experiencing psychological distress should ultimately be seen as an attempt to communicate worries and anxieties, often in situations where this is not possible or prohibited.
Ronald Laing has stated that people can often be placed in impossible situations where they are unable to meet the conflicting expectations of their peers, resulting in complex mental distress for the individuals concerned.
The supposed symptoms of schizophrenia were an expression of this suffering and should be appreciated as a cathartic and transformative experience. This is a reassessment of the focus of the disease process, and therefore a shift in the forms of treatment that has been, and indeed still is (perhaps now more than ever). In the broadest sense, we have in ourselves both psychological subjects and a pathological entity.
Psychiatrist and philosopher Karl Jaspers previously stated in his seminal work "General Psychopathology" that many of the symptoms of mentalillnesses (and especially delusions) are incomprehensible and therefore deserve little attention, except for signs of some other underlying disorders.
Laing was revolutionary in evaluating the content of psychotic behavior and speech as an actual expression of suffering, albeit wrapped in a cryptic language of personal symbolism that only makes sense 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 did not exist, but simply viewed it in a radically different light from his contemporaries.
For Laing, mental illness can be a transformative episode when the process of enduring a mental breakdown is likened to a shamanic journey. The traveler may return from a journey with important ideas, and perhaps even become a wiser and more grounded person as a result.
Achievements
Laing's most famous and practical accomplishment in psychiatry is his co-founding and chairmanship in 1965 of the Philadelphia Association and the wider promotion of therapeutic communities adopted in more efficient and less confrontational psychiatric institutions.
Other organizations in his tradition are the Altanka Association and the New School of Psychotherapy and Counseling in London"Existential Psychotherapy".
Proceedings
Among his works are: "The Divided Me", "Me and Others", "Sanity, Madness and Family" and many others.
In "The Divided Self", Laing contrasted the "ontologically secure person" with another who "cannot take reality, vitality, autonomy, one's identity and others for granted" and therefore comes up with strategies to avoid "losing oneself" ".
Symbolism
He explains that we all exist in the world as beings defined by others who carry a model of us in their heads, just as we carry a model of them in our minds. In later writings, he often takes this to deeper levels, painstakingly spelling out "A knows B knows A knows B knows…"!
In "Me and Others" (1961), Laing's definition of normality shifted slightly.
In Sanity, Madness and the Family (1964), Laing and Esterton talk about several families, analyzing how their members see each other and how they actually communicate with each other.
