- Anti-Psychiatry, Madness, Anti-Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, English Literature, R D Laing, Doris Lessing, and 15 moreLiterary Theory, Reader Response, Rhetoric, Composition and Rhetoric, Alternative Pedagogy, Wilhelm Reich, Cultural and Political Activism of the 1960s and 1970s, Counterculture, Radical Pedagogy, Radical Educational Philosophy, Radical psychiatry, Mary Barnes, Peter Reich, Curious Incident of the Dog In the NIght-Time, and History Of Madness And Psychiatryedit
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/dradrianchapmanedit
This article explores archival accounts of the experimental community, Kingsley Hall (1965-70), established by R. D. Laing, the radical Scottish psychiatrist. The paper contributes to renewed interest in Kingsley Hall, R. D. Laing's... more
This article explores archival accounts of the experimental community, Kingsley Hall (1965-70), established by R. D. Laing, the radical Scottish psychiatrist. The paper contributes to renewed interest in Kingsley Hall, R. D. Laing's radical psychiatry and UK counterculture. Archival sources enable not only the further exploration of already known figures but also let us hear previously unheard voices. Following a discussion of archival materials, the Hall is analyzed thematically and historically as (i) an inner spaceship; (ii) an embattled middle-class countercultural plantation; (iii) a site of spiritual renewal and development; (iv) a single-building arts colony; and (v) a countercultural experiment. Finally, it is argued that with re-evaluation of 1960s and 1970s counterculture now underway on the Left, the Hall’s experiment in Laingian countercultural psychiatry—as we may fittingly call it—may yet inform future radical projects (in mental health and beyond).
Research Interests: Mental Health, Countercultural Studies, Radical psychiatry, R D Laing, The Sixties, and 15 moreHistory Of Madness And Psychiatry, Anti-Psychiatry, Psychedelics (Psychology), Illness Narrative, Counterculture, 1960s, Antipsychiatry, Madness, Anti-Psychiatry, Mad Studies, Social Psychiatry, Psychedelic therapy, Mad pride, Critical Psychiatry, Therapeutic Communities, and Psychonautics
Contributing to renewed scholarly interest in R. D. Laing and his circle, and in the radical therapeutic community of Kingsley Hall, London (1965-1970), this article offers the first article-length reading of Mary Barnes’ and Joseph... more
Contributing to renewed scholarly interest in R. D. Laing and his circle, and in the radical therapeutic community of Kingsley Hall, London (1965-1970), this article offers the first article-length reading of Mary Barnes’ and Joseph Berke’s Mary Barnes: Two Accounts of a Journey through Madness. This text offers views of anti-psychiatry ‘on the ground’ that critique the 1960s utopianism of Laing’s championing of madness as a metanoic, quasi-psychedelic voyage. Barnes’ story, too, reveals tensions within the anti-psychiatric movement. Moving beyond existing criticism of the text, Barnes, it is argued here, emerges as far more than an exemplary patient, victim or anti-psychiatric puppet. Particular attention is paid in this reading of Two Accounts to the following: the ways in which the spiritually inclined Barnes and the psychoanalytic Berke differ in this dual narrative text; the ways in which each differs from Laing; the metaphor of the journey; and the setting of Barnes’ story in the often conflicted, experimental household of Kingsley Hall.
Research Interests: Psychiatry, Countercultural Studies, R D Laing, History of Psychiatry, Christian Spirituality, and 11 moreSpirituality & Counselling & Psychotherapy, Spirituality & Psychology, Counterculture, 1960s, Antipsychiatry, Therapeutic Community, Therapeutic Communities, Psychology of Religion and Spirituality, RD Laing, Mary Barnes, and Kingsley Hall, London
This article offers an introduction to David Cooper (1931–86), who coined the term ‘anti-psychiatry’, and, it is argued here, has not so far received the scholarly attention that he deserves. The first section presents his life in... more
This article offers an introduction to David Cooper (1931–86), who coined the term ‘anti-psychiatry’, and, it is argued here, has not so far received the scholarly attention that he deserves. The first section presents his life in context. The second section presents his work in detail. There follows a section on the critical reception of Cooper, and, finally, a conclusion that sets out ways in which he might be interesting and useful today.
Research Interests:
Despite renewed interest in the radical psychiatrist R. D. Laing (1927-1989), his The Bird of Paradise (1967), published in a single volume with The Politics of Experience, has received scant scholarly attention. Characterised largely as... more
Despite renewed interest in the radical psychiatrist R. D. Laing (1927-1989), his The Bird of Paradise (1967), published in a single volume with The Politics of Experience, has received scant scholarly attention. Characterised largely as odd, it has even been read as a sign that Laing, deeply sympathetic to the mad, had himself gone crazy. Eschewing biographical criticism, I focus rather on the problem of assigning Bird to a genre (and the significance of this difficulty). Finding the capacious prose poem genre the most appropriate category, I take Bird seriously as a complex literary text, offer an overview of it, relate it to Politics and sixties counterculture, and attend to Laing’s ambivalent attitude towards writing. Bird, I argue, represents an attempt—albeit an ultimately unsuccessful one—at overcoming what Laing understands as alienated self-division (“dismemberment”) through a reaching towards wholeness (a “re-membering” of the self).
Keywords: R. D. Laing, madness, alienation, genre, prose poem, counterculture.
Keywords: R. D. Laing, madness, alienation, genre, prose poem, counterculture.
Research Interests: Scottish Literature, Genre, Schizophrenia, Psychedelics, Radical psychiatry, and 15 moreR D Laing, History Of Madness And Psychiatry, Psychedelics (Psychology), Madness and Literature, Alienation, Counterculture, Prose poems, LSD, Antipsychiatry, Madness, Anti-Psychiatry, Psychedelic therapy, 1960s Culture, Psychoanalysis, anti-psychiatry, radical psychology, Timothy Leary, and Consciousness studies;depth, transpersonal, and integral psychology; addiction, entheogenic studies (psychedelic research)
R. D. Laing’s critically neglected verse volume Knots (1970) is treated as a literary text and related to games, game theory and Cold War politics. The main focus is Laing’s use and view of language. He attempts, Zen-like, to reveal its... more
R. D. Laing’s critically neglected verse volume Knots (1970) is treated as a literary text and related to games, game theory and Cold War politics. The main focus is Laing’s use and view of language. He attempts, Zen-like, to reveal its conventionality and point towards another order of being. Knots participates in several genres and Laing - someone who sought to dissolve the doctor-patient distinction - transgresses what, he implies, are merely categories existing in language’s zone of illusion. His view of language relates, I argue, to his movement away from the speaking cure and towards greater interest in the body and pre-linguistic experience. While the countercultural Laing looks forward to the complete untangling of psychic, somatic and social knots, his presentation of such knots also suggests their unavoidability. If unavoidable, this text could help readers relate differently to their own knots and perhaps tie some more interesting ones.
Research Interests:
Zone of the Interior is a satirical novel by an American, Clancy Sigal, about 1960s British anti-psychiatry, in particular, R. D. Laing, the radical Scottish psychiatrist and his idea (shared most notably by David Cooper, another... more
Zone of the Interior is a satirical novel by an American, Clancy Sigal, about 1960s British anti-psychiatry, in particular, R. D. Laing, the radical Scottish psychiatrist and his idea (shared most notably by David Cooper, another existential therapist working in England) that schizophrenic breakdown might be a natural, healing process. Sigal's little-known novel can help us think about the nature of anti-psychiatry and contribute to the resurgence of interest in it as we approach the 25th anniversary of Laing's death. While Sigal, who was a patient and collaborator of Laing and worked in a democratized hospital unit set up by Cooper, lampoons anti-psychiatric doctors, the novel is a fundamentally sympathetic critique of anti-psychiatry: patients and nurses are the heroes, ordinariness wins out over madness as self-discovery, and anti-psychiatry is skillfully linked to issues of class, gender and New Left politics.
Research Interests: R D Laing, Therapeutic Communities And Environments, Counter Culture, Anti-Psychiatry, New Left, and 12 moreDoris Lessing, New Left and the 1960s, Madness and Literature, Counterculture, Madness, Anti-Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, anti-psychiatry, radical psychology, Anti-Psy, Therapeutic Community, Ronald David Laing, 1960's Counterculture, DAVID COOPER, and Clancy Sigal
The Nobel laureate Doris Lessing’s 'Prisons We Choose to Live Inside' is a little commented-upon text derived from the Massey Lectures she delivered on Canadian radio in the mid-80s. I shall try to make sense of Lessing’s fluctuation... more
The Nobel laureate Doris Lessing’s 'Prisons We Choose to Live Inside' is a little commented-upon text derived from the Massey Lectures she delivered on Canadian radio in the mid-80s. I shall try to make sense of Lessing’s fluctuation between optimism and pessimism – on the one hand, her focus on humanity’s compulsion to repeat errors that undermine progress (“Whenever things seem to be going along quite smoothly”); and, on the other hand, the hope she invests in the role of the novelist as teacher and in the liberatory potential of research in Psychology and the social sciences. The lecture is a pedagogical form, but quite what is Lessing teaching, and what (if anything) might her ‘students’ - compelled to deleterious repetition - learn? In thinking about all this, I shall relate the text to some of the ways in which education, psychoanalysis, war and politics feature in Lessing’s oeuvre.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
This 2017 story, in Ars Medica: A Journal of Medicine, the Arts, and the Humanities (17.3), offers a satirical perspective on the Laingian idea of the therapeutic 'voyage.' You can download a .pdf of the text.
Research Interests:
A short story that has been accepted for publication in The Journal of Medical Humanities (Springer Press).
Research Interests:
A poem written whilst at the R. D. Laing Archive, University of Glasgow in September, 2014.
Research Interests:
A discussion of Laing on his US lecture tour, 1972, when he was a 'rock star psychiatrist.' Plus a consideration of his present-day relevance.
Research Interests:
A blog about R. D. Laing and the UK underground press.
Research Interests:
Psychiatry and rock music are unlikely bedfellows. It is also strange to think that a psychiatrist's ideas might relate closely to a countercultural movement and feature in its publications. Yet music, psychiatry and the underground press... more
Psychiatry and rock music are unlikely bedfellows. It is also strange to think that a psychiatrist's ideas might relate closely to a countercultural movement and feature in its publications. Yet music, psychiatry and the underground press were bound up together in the 1960s and early 1970s, when a Scottish psychiatrist called R D Laing (1927-89) was the most famous therapist in the world. This article considers tracks by The Beatles, The Deviants, Quintessence, Syd Barrett, and Pink Floyd.
Research Interests: R D Laing, The Sixties, The Beatles, Counterculture, Psychedelic Culture, and 13 more1960s, Prog/alternative/psychedelic Rock, Quintessence, Rock Music, Pink Floyd, student activism and protest in Britain in the Long Sixties, Ronald David Laing, Psychedelia, Syd Barrett, Culture and Psychiatry, History of the Sixties, David Bowie and music, and David Bowie and Literature
This blog post, taking a London exhibition on the nature of the asylum as its starting point, considers R. D. Laing's radical approach to asylum, his experimental community at Kingsley Hall, East London (1965-70), and the cultural... more
This blog post, taking a London exhibition on the nature of the asylum as its starting point, considers R. D. Laing's radical approach to asylum, his experimental community at Kingsley Hall, East London (1965-70), and the cultural significance of Laing's ideas.
Research Interests:
This blog posting gives an overview of my research focus whilst a Wellcome Trust-funded Fellow at Glasgow University's Medical Humanities Research Centre, where I was examining papers in the R. D. Laing archive.
Research Interests:
Alongside Michael Staub’s Madness is Civilization, Oisín Wall’s The British Anti-Psychiatrists, and recent work on Laingian radical and countercultural psychiatry, Lucas Richert’s Break on Through represents continuing recent interest in... more
Alongside Michael Staub’s Madness is Civilization, Oisín Wall’s The British Anti-Psychiatrists, and recent work on Laingian radical and countercultural psychiatry, Lucas Richert’s Break on Through represents continuing recent interest in radical psychiatry of the long 1960s. 1 Now, Richert writes, is a good time to revisit mental health in the 1970s. He notes recent concerns about the close relation between mental illness, poverty, and inequality, themes much-discussed in radical psychiatric circles in the 1970s. There was then also much discussion of and research into the possibility of treating mental distress with psychedelic drugs. Today we are in the midst of a “psychedelic renaissance,” with several research projects into the therapeutic potential of psychedelics underway at prestigious universities (and Silicon Valley computer geeks microdosing on LSD to increase their creativity). Michael Pollan’s How to Change Your Mind represents a bestselling attempt to mainstream psychedelics.
Research Interests:
A review of Clancy Sigal's posthumous memoir, The London Lover, in which the left-wing US author and journalist recalls the UK capital in the 1950s and 1960s (and later), looks back on his relationship with Doris Lessing, remembers R. D.... more
A review of Clancy Sigal's posthumous memoir, The London Lover, in which the left-wing US author and journalist recalls the UK capital in the 1950s and 1960s (and later), looks back on his relationship with Doris Lessing, remembers R. D. Laing, and discusses life as a jobbing writer.
Research Interests:
A review published in The Sixties journal.
Research Interests:
“I’m not a shaman”, says RD Laing, arrestingly played by David Tennant in Mad to be Normal, the new film about the radical Scottish psychiatrist and the experimental late-60s therapeutic community at Kingsley Hall, in London’s East End.... more
“I’m not a shaman”, says RD Laing, arrestingly played by David
Tennant in Mad to be Normal, the new film about the radical
Scottish psychiatrist and the experimental late-60s therapeutic
community at Kingsley Hall, in London’s East End. Throughout
the film, however, Laing is presented as a figure of extraordinary
charisma and shamanic power. He’s also a conflicted figure, a
wounded healer.
Tennant in Mad to be Normal, the new film about the radical
Scottish psychiatrist and the experimental late-60s therapeutic
community at Kingsley Hall, in London’s East End. Throughout
the film, however, Laing is presented as a figure of extraordinary
charisma and shamanic power. He’s also a conflicted figure, a
wounded healer.