Ronald David Laing was a Scottish psychiatrist who wrote a lot about 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 world today. He suggested that insanity can be regarded as a sound response to a crazy social environment. Laing also claimed that modern psychiatry misrepresented the true inner world of the mentally ill. He defended the rights of patients.
He is often associated with the anti-psychiatry movement, although, like many of his contemporaries, also criticizes it, he himself denies this stereotype. He made a significant contribution to the ethics of psychology.
Biography
A British psychiatrist was born in Govanhill (Glasgow area) on October 7, 1927. My father was a designer in various buildings, then an electrician in the city government of Glasgow. As Laing stated, in his early years and youth he had deepest feelings, the cause of which he considered his own overly cold-blooded and indifferent mother.
Education
He was educated at a gymnasium, continued to study medicine at the University of Glasgow, did not pass exams on the first attempt, but later retook and successfully completed it in 951.
Career
Ronald Laing spent a couple of years as a psychiatrist in the British Army, where he discovered that he had a special talent for dealing with unbalanced people. In 1953, he left the army and worked at the Royal Gartnavel Hospital, Glasgow. During this period, Ronald Laing also participated in the existentialism-oriented discussion group at the University of Glasgow, organized by Karl Abenheimer and Joe Shorstein.
In 1956, at the invitation of John (“Jock”) D. Sutherland, he went on an internship for a grant at the Tavistock Clinic in London, widely known as the center for the study and practice of psychotherapy (especially psychoanalysis).
At this time, he was associated with John Bowlby, D.V. Winnicott and Charles Rycroft. Laing remained at the Tavistock Institute until 1964. In 1965, he and a group of colleagues created the Philadelphia Association. 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 Shanti Devi ship in Stockholm.
He began to develop a team offering repeat workshops in which one designated person decides to try the struggle again, trying to break out of the birth canal in the person of the other members of the group that surround him / her.
Personal life
The biography of Ronald Laing can be seen as a striking example of how each generation of the family has consequences for the next. His parents led a life of extreme denial, showing 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 was described as "even more psychologically peculiar." According to one friend and neighbor, "everyone on the street knew that she was crazy."
Ronald Laing was worried about 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 Claire. Although he was supposedly free in the years preceding his death. He died at the age of 61 of a heart attack, 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 Sea in 2008, after what could have been "suicidal binge" as a result of the severance of a long-term relationship with his friend Janina. He died of a heart attack at the age of 41.
Theodore Itten, former student of R.D. Laing, who later became a close friend of the family, said that the breakup of his parents' marriage - Adam's mother Jutta broke up with Laing in 1981 - all this greatly influenced him. When he was 13, 14, 15 he was a rebel, dropped out of school. Theodore said: "I think it was a 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."
Lang's view of mental illness
He argued that the strange behavior and seemingly confused speech of people experiencing a psychological disorder should ultimately be regarded as an attempt to communicate concerns and worries, often in situations where this is not possible or forbidden.
Ronald Laing stated that people can often be put in impossible situations, when they are not able to meet the conflicting expectations of their peers, which leads to a complex mental disorder for the individuals concerned.
The alleged symptoms of schizophrenia were an expression of this suffering and should be evaluated as catharsis and a transformative experience. This is a reassessment of the focus of the disease process, and, therefore, a shift in the forms of treatment that was, and indeed still is (perhaps now more than ever). In the broadest sense, we have in ourselves both psychological subjects and a pathological entity.
The psychiatrist and philosopher Karl Jaspers previously stated in his fruitful work, General Psychopathology, that many of the symptoms of mental illness (and especially delirium) are incomprehensible, and therefore deserve little attention, except for signs of some other major disorders.
Laing was a revolutionary in assessing the content of psychotic behavior and speech as a real expression of suffering, albeit wrapped in the mysterious language of personal symbolism, which 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 does not exist, but simply examined it in a radically different light from his contemporaries.
For Laing, a mental illness can be a transformative episode when the process of transferring a mental disorder is compared to a shamanic journey. A traveler can return from a journey with important ideas, and perhaps even become a wiser and more informed person as a result.
Achievements
The most famous and practically useful achievement of Lang in psychiatry is his co-founding and presidency of the Philadelphia Association in 1965 and the wider promotion of therapeutic communities adopted in more effective and less confrontational psychiatric institutions.
Other organizations established in his traditions are the Altanki Association and the New Existential Psychotherapy School of Psychotherapy and Counseling in London .
Proceedings
Among his works are: “The Shattered Me,” “I and Others,” “Sanity, Madness, and Family,” and many others.
In "The Shattered Self," Laing contrasted an "ontologically safe person" with another who "cannot take reality, vitality, autonomy, his identity and others for granted" and, therefore, devises strategies to avoid "losing himself."
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 models of them in our minds. In later works, he often takes this at deeper levels, painstakingly writing as "A knows that B knows that A knows that B knows ..."!
In "I and Others" (1961), Lang's definition of normality has shifted somewhat.
In the book 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.