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“... physically distressed patients said about the nature of the symptoms. In the early Sixties, R.D. Laing and others began to define psychosis in terms of its relation to society, and psychotics as individuals who in their own way were making sense of their social circumstances. The mad might be alienated, but they were not aliens, and therefore their doctors ...”

“... schizophrenics. Within this difficult, and often bewildering, territory the voice of Dr R.D. Laing has been heard – and in equal measure celebrated and scorned – for more than a quarter of a century. The historical sensibility of Western psychiatry, particularly in its British manifestation, has been very limited and that ...”

“... in 1960 and 1961: Michel Foucault’s Folie et déraison, Erving Goffman’s Asylums and R.D. Laing’s Divided Self, which, along with Thomas Szasz’s The Myth of Mental Illness, also published in 1961, were set to become iconoclastic classics. There is a revealing passage in History of Madness in which Foucault proposes that ‘the knowledge of madness ...”

“... over the last twenty or thirty years. The works of Foucault, Erving Goffman, Thomas Szasz and R.D. Laing, and more recently the contributions of Andrew Scull and a new generation of historians, have made it impossible to accept the Whig view of psychiatry’s history. Yet, if these writers have managed to convince historians that work in the subject must take ...”

“... us an informative, penetrating, witty and critical account of anti-psychiatry as represented by Laing, Szasz, Goffman and Foucault. The central ambition of anti-psychiatry has been to replace the so-called medical model of mental illness by a ‘labelling’ one, according to which the behaviours which provoked diagnoses of psychopathology were not ...”

“... course on gathering information and ideas about the world. Month by month, titles came out by Laing and Esterson, Willmott and Young, J.K. Galbraith, Maynard Smith, Martin Gardner, Richard Leakey, Margaret Mead; psychoanalysts, sociologists, economists, mathematicians, historians, physicists, biologists and literary critics, each offering their latest ...”

“... Waters tells Willis that some time in 1968, maybe, he drove Barrett to an appointment with R.D. Laing. When he parked the car, Barrett wisely refused to get out. There was a later attempt to get him an audience with the master, but this time Barrett wouldn’t even leave the flat in South Kensington. In 1970, there were two poignant solo albums, The Madcap ...”

“... authority over those who were susceptible to this magic. More recently, modern gurus like R.D. Laing explicitly followed the arguments and even the language of the early sages. Renaissance magi wrote of their ability to ‘show the straight road to the eternal kingdom’ and to command ‘the celestial doctor that he may liberate us with ethics and ...”

“... between sanity and madness always has a question-mark over it.’ Phillips doesn’t want to get rid of the question-mark, but he thinks it helps give sanity a bad reputation, and like Pound invites us to think about what ‘sane enough’ means. He cites an American court ruling of 2003 that ordered a prisoner on death row to be ‘forcibly treated for ...”

“... appears here as a bizarre arena for endless folies à deux, from their early history up to R.D. Laing. Porter’s extracts convey a sense of menace, of exchanges of rage between the doctors and the confined, trapped in the asylum milieu. While clearly believing that dreadful things have been done to patients, and quoting throughout the book from David ...”

“... fathers’. From an early age he developed what he calls a ‘star astigmatism’. R.D. Laing later told him he had ‘the makings of a first-class schizophrenic’. His problem, he admits, was ‘slipp[ing] onto the soundstage of my mind where I can control the camera, lighting, make-up’. Black Sunset, a memoir written with the pace and in the ...”

“... time. Mary Karr’s The Liar’s Club is subtitled ‘a memoir’. It opens with a quote from R.D. Laing: ‘We have our secrets and our needs to confess. We may remember ... what an accomplishment it was when we, in fear and trembling, could tell our first lie.’ But the story is one of incredible torment, told by the injured party. It is remembered as Karr ...”

“... in the reassuring soup of “objectivity”.’ In spite of quoting the dubious authority of R.D. Laing, there is no questioning Master’s intention, which is serious, as it was in his previous book on Dennis Nilsen, another killer whose behaviour was inexplicable to most people. Murder is the borderline between society and the wilderness. It is the ...”

“... keeps people shopping. This is the argument of the anti-psychiatry movement that goes back to R.D. Laing. What’s unusual about Salvayre’s thinking is that she identifies political dysfunction as the root of emotional dysfunction, which is perhaps why she exposes the secret hell of family with such relish. Society drives someone mad, and the family passes ...”

“... Rhodesia; in the 1960s, a bitingly reluctant figurehead for the women’s movement; a disenchanted Red who retains a primarily sociological understanding of the individual; a colonial writer edgily occupying a position of prominence at the heart of the metropolitan literary scene. Her global readership stretches from America to the Third World and she has ...”