Ronald David Laing, a schizophrenia researcher

Ronald David Laing was a British psychiatrist known for his alternative approach to the treatment of schizophrenia. He was also the founder of a movement that would be known as antipsychiatry in the 60s and 70s.

Like many other psychologists and social scientists Laing worked and researched at the famous Tavistock Clinic until, years later, he would become part of the Tavistock Institute team in the research area. The Tavistock Institute was responsible for providing sufficient funding for Laing to carry out his most important research.

His work was focused on the study of schizophrenia and the treatment environment of schizophrenic patients.. Laing proposed that patients behaved differently depending on the environment they inhabited. Below, we reveal more details about his life and his research.

Ronald Laing’s Childhood

Laing was born on 7 October 1927 in Govanhill, Glasgow, Scotland.. He was born into a working class family, being the only child of David McNair Laing and Amelia Laing.

Until 1945, he attended Hutcheson Primary School for Boys in Glasgow, where he stood out as an excellent student. and for possessing exceptional musical ability. He obtained his bachelor’s degree from the Royal Academy of Music in 1944, and joined the Royal College of Music in April 1945.

In these years, he was an avid student of philosophy, some of the authors that caught his attention the most were Freud, Marx, Nietzsche and especially Kierkegaard.. He subsequently studied medicine and psychiatry and obtained a doctorate in medicine from the University of Glasgow in 1951.

The vocation for psychiatry

Between 1951 and 1953, he was recruited as a conscript psychiatrist in the Royal Army Medical Corps.. He was sent to the British Army Psychiatric Unit, Netley, near Southampton, and then to the Military Hospital in Catterick, Yorkshire.

At the end of 1953, he left the army and took up teaching at the University of Glasgow. During this period, he went to Gartnavel Royal Mental Hospital in order to complete his psychiatric training. At this hospital, she established an experimental treatment environment: the ‘Rumpus Room’, in which schizophrenic patients spent time in a comfortable room.

Both staff and patients wore normal clothing and patients were allowed to spend time doing activities such as cooking and doing art activities. Daily activities aimed to ensure an environment in which patients could respond to staff and others in a social, rather than institutional, setting.

All patients showed a notable improvement in behavior as a result of this novel treatment.. In January 1956 he qualified as a psychiatrist.

Laing’s professional consolidation

At the end of 1956, he was appointed senior registrar at the Tavistock Clinic in London.. There he directed the research until 1960.

The Tavistock clinic was made up of doctors who studied patients from the English army and its main objective was to identify the consequences that the war left on an individual.

Shortly after, The Tavistock Institute was created as a non-profit, non-governmental organization. Funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, the Tavistock Institute developed research in social sciences and psychology applied to education, research and professional development.

So, Laing worked for the Tavistock Institute for almost 30 years. Although he was also accepted for training as a psychoanalyst by the Institute of Psychoanalysis.

In 1958, he began the research that would lead to his work Sanity, madness and familywhich would be published in 1964. Likewise, he began a series of seminars that involved various people who would become important collaborators, among them: Aaron Esterson and David Cooper.

Laing’s works and recognition

His work The Divided Self It was published by Tavistock in 1960.. The book received favorable reviews, although, after its release, sales did not match its success. Shortly after, she would publish the book The Self and others.

Laing qualified as a psychoanalyst and established a private practice in London. He began experimenting with drugs, especially LSD. In 1962 he was appointed Clinical Director of the Langham Clinic in London and, from this time, he began to gain some popularity.

In later years, he wrote most of the articles that were later compiled in the book The politics of experience; The bird of paradise. He also published Reason and violence co-authored with David Cooper, another researcher associated with the Tavistock Institute.

The Kingsley Hall project

In 1965, he embarked on the Kingsley Hall project alongside Aaron Esterson, David Cooper and other researchers of the time; The project would last until 1970. In short, Kingsley Hall consisted of establishing an experimental, non-hierarchical community, in which patients with schizophrenia received a space to work on their psychosis without resorting to drugs or other therapies such as electroshocks or surgery.

The inspiration came from Laing’s Rumpus Room projects, and the experience of his collaborators. Other projects such as Cooper’s Villa 21 were fundamental for the development of Kingsley Hall because, in it, a community for schizophrenic patients was developed without distinctions between staff and patients, that is, based on social relationships.

As a result of the success of Kingsley Hall, Laing went on a lecture tour of the United States, which allowed him to come into contact with other renowned psychoanalysts. In 1967, he participated in the Liberation Dialectic Congress, intended to unite leftist politics and psychoanalysis.. There, he gave a speech called The obvious and which, later, would be published in an anthology that compiled the speeches from said congress.

Personal life

In 1952, he married his girlfriend Anne Hearne; That same year, his first daughter was born, whom they named Fiona.. The couple had other children: Susan, Karen, Paul, Adrian.

After separating from Anne, Laing would have Jutta Werner as his partner, with whom he had three children. Later, he would have two more children from different mothers.

In 1971, with Kingsley Hall now closed, Laing decided that the time was right to take a sabbatical year in Sri Lanka and India.. During this trip, he devoted himself to Theravedic Buddhist meditation.

In preparation for his trip, he closes his private practice, the same one where he had conducted LSD therapy sessions during the 1960s. It is unclear whether his LSD research resumed when he returned from India.

On August 23, 1989, Laing died while playing tennis. According to medical reports, he suffered a heart attack.

Legacy of Ronald David Laing

Throughout much of his career, Laing was interested in the underlying causes of schizophrenia and showed clear opposition to the treatments that, at the time, were used to treat these patients. So, Laing tried to find alternatives to hospitalization and electroshock therapy that was widely practiced at the time.

Laing theorized that ontological insecurity (insecurity about one’s existence) causes a defensive reaction. This reaction, in turn, causes the self to split into separate components, thus generating the psychotic symptoms characteristic of schizophrenia.

In his work Health, madness and family published a series of cases of people whose mental illnesses he considered influenced by their family relationships. This approach generated a lot of excitement at the time.

Although his initial approach to schizophrenia was quite controversial, he rectified some of his positions in later years.

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