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“... the individual in conflict, riven in one way or another. It is no accident, so to speak, that R.D. Laing took his title The Divided Self from William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience. If we take self-division and conflict for granted, as Freud and Eliot clearly do; and if we take seriously the problem, and not merely the progress, of ...”

“... Sanity and its vagaries were much discussed at this time, the fashionable theorists being R.D. Laing and Thomas Szasz. Their ideas had never impinged on my father nor were they likely to; balance of mind was something you were entitled to take for granted so far as he was concerned: ‘Item No. 1 on the agenda, to get your Mam back to normal.’ Except ...”

“... experiments. The patients flitted like ghosts across the pages. To my embarrassment, I couldn’t rid myself of a mental image of animals glimpsed in the wild – the odd sightings of the patients in these official studies are like flashes of life in an alien habitat. But the metaphor seems obscene given that these patients were (or had been) pretty much ...”