R. D. Laing (1927-1989) was Scotland's most famous public intellectual. His revolutionary challenges to conventional psychiatry were read by millions across the world. When he died, there were memorial services in London and New York, but in his native Scotland, his contribution to intellectual culture is largely forgotten.At the 77th anniversary of his birth (7 October 2004), this book asks why Laing's work has been so unfairly neglected. It also aims to show the enduring value of Laing's ideas, their international significance, and the vibrant Scottish culture from which they arose. In the...

Alasdair Gray's writing, and in particular his great novel Lanark: A Life in Four Books (1981), is often read as a paradigm of postmodern practice. This study challenges that view by presenting an analysis that is at once more conventional and more strongly radical. By reading Gray in his cultural and intellectual context, and by placing him within the tradition of a Scottish history of ideas that has been largely neglected in contemporary critical writing, Gavin Miller re-opens contact between this highly individualistic artist and those Scottish and European philosophers and psychologists...

Although a tide of secularization swept over the post-war United Kingdom, Christianity in Scotland found one way to survive by drawing on alliances that it had built earlier in the century with psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. Psychoanalysis was seen as a way to purify Christianity, and to propel it in a scientifically rational and socially progressive direction. This book draws upon a wealth of archival research to uncover the complex interaction between religion and psychotherapy in twentieth-century Scotland. It explores the practical and intellectual alliance created between the Scottish...