Dr. Laing's first purpose is to make madness and the process of going mad comprehensible. In this, with case studies of schizophrenic patients, he succeeds brilliantly, but he does more: through a vision of sanity and madness as 'degrees of conjunction and disjunction between two persons where the one is sane by common consent' he offers a rich existential analysis of personal alienation.

The outsider, estranged from himself and society, cannot experience either himself or others as 'real'. He invents a false self and with it he confronts both the outside world and his own despair. The...

R.D. Laing is at his most wickedly iconoclastic in this eloquent assault on conventional morality. Unorthodox to some, brilliantly original to others, The Politics of Experience goes beyond the usual theories of mental illness and alienation, and makes a convincing case for the "madness of morality." Compelling, unsettling, consistently absorbing, The Politics of Experience is a classic of genuine importance that will "excite, enthrall, and disturb. No one who reads it will remain unaffected." (Rollo May, Saturday Review)

A series of dialogue-scenarios, which can be read as poems or plays, describing the "knots" and impasses in various kinds of human relationships.

This work is available on its own or as part of the 7 volume set Selected Works of R. D. Laing

This work is available on its own or as part of the 7 volume set Selected Works of R. D. Laing

This work is available on its own or as part of the 7 volume set Selected Works of R. D. Laing

This work is available on its own or as part of the 7 volume set Selected Works of R. D. Laing

This work is available on its own or as part of the 7 volume set Selected Works of R. D. Laing

This work is available on its own or as part of the 7 volume set Selected Works of R. D. Laing

This set reprints seven of Laing's major works, originally published between 1960 and 1971 and out of print for many years.
Laing was an existential psychiatrist who offered a radical critique of abnormal behaviour and social and medical models for its treatment. He was critical of the extent to which psychoanalytic concepts may conceal or distort human experience and of the tendency to label the patient "sick" as opposed to looking at "sickness" in the patient's family or in society. It was Laing who argued that schizophrenia is not an illness but a label for another kind of problematic...