Laing and Rogers

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because humans are driven by passion,the source of which is predominantlyunconscious. Nietzsche loved theGreeks and rejected the modern viewof morality, that we should conductourselves by a set of rules that aredictated by God or the greater good.Nietzsche nonetheless devoted much ofhis thinking to the problem of values,and what kind of values are importantfor the Übermensch to embrace.Nietzsche believed, as did the Greeks,that courage is probably the greatest virtue for the authentic person tocultivate and he saw the Übermensch asa courageous and heroic figure. is isbecause it takes courage to go againstthe dictates of society and follow the‘beat of one’s own drum’, which is more

or less how Nietzsche conducted hisown life.

It is telling that Laing’s mostfamous and polemical book,ePolitics of Experience (1967), in whichhe railed against contemporary societyas a toxic wasteland, is an homage toNietzsche’s us Spoke Zarathustra (1966), one of Laing’s favourite books.Courage is a theme to which Laingreferred countless times, noting thatetymologically the root of the term

goes back to the Latin ‘cor’ , meaning‘heart’. is led Laing to concludethat the literal meaning of courageousis ‘openheartedness’. So an extensionof Laing’s approach to authenticity isthat it requires courage, or ‘guts’ in theconventional sense, but on a deeper,more profound level to be authenticmeans to open one’s heart to anotherperson. is requires real courage,Laing would say, because it is one ofthe riskiest things a person can do. is is consistent with Freud’s thesis

that all forms of psychological distresscan be traced to unrequited love, athesis to which Laing subscribed.

Heidegger’s conception ofauthenticity was influenced byNietzsche, but he also took it in newdirections. Heidegger was a complexthinker and authenticity occupieda major role in his early thinking.Being and Time (1962), Heidegger’smagnum opus, was devoted almostentirely to his novel conception of

authenticity. However, I want to focuson just that aspect of Heidegger’sthinking that influenced Laing’s viewson authenticity, which pertains to

Heidegger’s rejection of Nietzsche’srelatively romantic characterisationof the heroic Übermensch. Instead,Heidegger believed al l human beingsare inherently inauthentic most of thetime because this is our lot, and a majoraspect of the human condition from which none of us can entirely escape. We can, however, relieve ourselves ofthis burden from time to time withauthentic exploits when opportunitiesembolden us to rise to the occasion. e rest of the time we are more or lesscaught up in the pursuit of our dailyaff airs, trying to get ahead in life inunremitting inauthentic and expedientfashion.

According to Heidegger, we spend

most of our time courting popularfavour, competing for promotionsand monetary advantage, seeking toenhance our reputations and status bylooking good professionally, lying at wil l as it suits us when being truthfulis inconvenient or costly, and so on. Inother words, we get caught up in thecrowd of our own device, whatevercrowd or circle we adopt as our own,and that crowd becomes the arena ofour inauthenticity as well as our self-identity. But it is also the source of our

estrangement from ourselves, whichstrikes at the core of our authenticity.

Heidegger does not strictly disputethe existence of a self, but conceives itas a construct that is not entirely mine,but a creature of the myriad relationsthat make up my world, which isnecessarily diff erent from your worldand the world of the next person,etcetera. Becoming authentic does not,however, strictly entail wresting freeof this so-called illusory or ‘false’ self

(c.f. Winnicott) in favour of a higheror better one that is genuine or true,because the self is always, due to itsnature, comprised of compromising

influences to varying degrees. Eachof us has the capacity to learn aboutand accept these circumstances aboutourselves, and in the process gainaccess to deeper, more subtle levelsof our nature that cannot be so easilyreified into this or that personality orcharacter trait, but rather an indistinctotherness at the heart of our being thatspeaks to the inherent mystery of ourexistence.

From Heidegger one gets thesense that we are imperfect, fallencreatures, who nevertheless possessa capacity for grace and forgiveness.One also gets the sense of a profoundloneliness that is co-extensive withauthenticity in both Nietzsche and

Heidegger, because sticking to yourprinciples and doing what in your heart you believe is right, instead of what ispolitically expedient, wil l sometimescost you in the form of public favourand job opportunities, even friends who expect you to abandon yourprinciples when they get in the way ofpolitical expediency. ese aspects ofHeidegger’s thinking had a profoundimpact on Laing’s conception ofauthenticity. e capacity to behonest, even about our inauthentic

transgressions and the ability to ownup to them was, for Laing, almost asadmirable as being authentic! Indeed,the capacity to be honest about ourinauthentic actions became somethingof an ideal for Laing that was morerealistic than measuring up to eitherHeidegger’s or Nietzsche’s respectivenotions of what authenticity entailed. As we shall see, this distinction alsoplanted the seed of confusion for Laingthat became a source of contradiction

and rationalisation in his personalbehaviour.

So what were the basic elementsof authenticity in Laing’s thinking?

Heidegger believed all human beings

are inherently inauthentic most of the

time because this is our lot, and a major

aspect of the human condition from

which none of us can entirely escape.



PSYCHOTHERAPY IN AUSTRALIA VOL 18 NO 2 FEBRUARY 2012 23

Laing could not bear people who hetook to be phonies, who ‘put on airs’and pretended to be who they were not, who were too shy to speak up for fearof making fools of themselves, or whenthey tried too hard to impress you.On the other hand he loved it when you were able to come out of your skinand be yourself, which of course wasnot easy to do in his company becauseLaing was never real ly comfortable with people and this discomfort wastelepathic. ough Laing excelled atputting his patients at ease in a clinicalsituation, social settings did not bringout the best in him, where he could beboorish and intimidating.

A lot of Laing’s preoccupation withthe dynamics of true- and false-self

phenomena in his first book (Laing,1960) speaks to his preoccupation withthe idea of the inherent falsity thatpeople erect around themselves in orderto fit in with society. ey pretend tobe someone they are not and then getmuddled as to who they actually are,in the sense of being genuine or real, without contrivance. Both Winnicottand Sartre influenced Laing’s adoptionof this language but, as we saw earlier,the basic thrust of this notion was

introduced much earlier by Nietzsche,and then subsequently by Heidegger.In Laing’s hands these terms convey acontemporary sensibility of the humancondition that is somehow lacking in Winnicott and even Sartre, despitethe latter’s literary flair and penchantfor drama. As early ase DividedSelf , the relationship between being‘nice’ and ‘false’, or ‘inauthentic’, wasa major component of his thinking, arelationship that Winnicott (1960) alsoattributes to ‘false-self ’ phenomena.

ough Laing gradually abandonedthis terminology as his thinkingdeveloped, he never wavered from hisdistaste for what he termed ‘puttingon airs’ or ‘pretense’, modes of socialinteraction that Kingsley Hall andsubsequent Philadelphia Association (PA) houses were so eff ective atstripping away and exposing.

Laing’s conception of the KingsleyHall community, and the houses thatfollowed after its closure, was explicitly

designed to pare away such inherentlyfalse currency of behaviour as socialniceties, proper manners, and commoncourtesy that are the standard of

social relations virtually everywhereelse except in the PA houses. I willnever forget my first taste of such anexperience when I attended a holidayreception at the Archway Community where no one bothered to respond

to the most innocent salutation orgreeting, and where small talk was virtually non-existent. For those wholived in such places, the idea was tosimulate the same k ind of interaction with each person—no matter howpsychotic, disturbed, or sane—that you would typically experience with youranalyst. In practical terms, this meantdispensing with small talk entirely andspeaking from the depths of your being with the same gravity, anxiety, andhonesty that you might strive for in a

therapy session. e eff ect was bothstartling and profound, and served asa ‘rite de passage’ into the life of thetherapeutic community. All of thehouses fashioned this experience to thepersonalities of the people who wereinvolved there. It came to be knownas the ‘PA experience’ or vision, butin fact it was an initiation into Laing’s vision, which was embodied in thePA culture as its defining sensibility,and remains so today. Over the years,

Laing seemed to become increasinglyobsessed with this highly unorthodoxand ritual behaviour, and tried toreplicate it in as many arenas of social

interaction as he could find, includinghis lectures, training seminars, workshops, even parties! Laing couldbe confrontational and, to some, cruelin the way he could get in one’s faceand call them on this or that character

trait or failing, a tactic he borrowedfrom Esalen techniques practiced inBig Sur, California, ground zero forthe fabled encounter group movementof the 1960s.

Yet, as often as not, Laing could just as easi ly be uncommonly gentle,kind, and sensitive; it all dependedon what you drew out of him in themoment. In a departure from bothNietzsche and Heidegger, eachof whom separated morality fromauthenticity (see ompson, 2004),

Laing situated ethical standards at theheart of authentic relating in both hispersonal and clinical relationships. is is no doubt a feature of Laing’sneed for, and resonance with, aspiritual dimension to his life thatgoes back to his university days inGlasgow, when he studied Germanexistential and phenomenologicalliterature with a group of thinkersand theologians led by two Germanémigrés, Karl Abenheimer and Joseph

Schorstein, the latter who served asLaing’s mentor and father figure. Fromthem, Laing developed the positionthat there is an inherent goodness or




human decency commensurate withbehaving authentically which comesinto diametric conflict with other views he was to fashion about it. Oneof the most surprising features ofLaing’s conception of authenticity isits proximity to the experience of, andcapacity for, love, epitomised by theLatin term, ‘caritas’ literally meaning‘charity’. I say surprising because few, ifany, people who knew Laing intimately would describe him as a particularlyloving or charitable person, but Laingsought it all his life and found itsabsence to be the pivot around whichthe most chronic levels of humanmisery derive, including his own.Kierkegaard and Scheler were seminalinfluences on both his understanding

of what love is, and the relation itoccupies to authenticity.

One of the many books thatLaing recommended to me whenI was in supervision with him wasKierkegaard’s Purity of Heart is toWill Oneing (1956), a wonderfullittle text that addresses Kierkegaard’snotion of ‘double-mindedness’, orhow the source of human suff eringderives from hypocrisy, and how itscure amounts to cultivating a capacity

for ‘agapé’.

is is a form of love thatearly Christians associated with love ofGod, but can also be directed to otherpeople (Jesus Christ, for example, wassaid to claim that to love others is tolove God). Laing was fascinated withall religions and conversant with many,including several schools of Buddhismand other Eastern traditions, but it wasChristianity with which he was mostidentified.

From Kierkegaard, Laing addedto his conception of authenticity the

idea that it is possible to love anotherperson without ‘trespassing againstthem’, which is to say, without doingthem violence in the act of using themfor your own selfish ends. ough norelationship can be entirely free ofnarcissism, nor should be, Laing feltdeeply that it is possible to achieve astate of awareness with another person, whereby one is able to give and acceptlove without committing violence. istheme is also explored by Max Scheler,

who devoted a book to this subject,e Nature of Sympathy (1954), anothertome Laing insisted I read. Scheler, who was a follower of Husserl, made

an important distinction between‘empathy’—which he defined as theability to intuit the emotional state ofanother person—and ‘sympathy’, whichhe defined as taking the capacity forempathy a step further. In sympathy, Inot only intuit what the other personis feeling, I also resonate with it andembrace it non-judgementally. Ineff ect, I fashion a loving relation withthe other person in his or her being. is idea also had a pivotal impact

on Laing’s thinking about what loveis in its essence and its relation toauthenticity. From the perspectiveof authenticity, you could say thatScheler believed ‘sympathetic’ relatingis more authentic than mere ‘empathic’understanding, the conventional

psychoanalytic standard for working ina clinical context—you can empathise with someone and not feel especially,or even remotely, sympathetic with them. is might result incountertransference enactments on thepart of the analyst—a phenomenonthat has become so ubiquitous thatit is now considered the norm in thepsychoanalytic treatment relationship!Laing thought that Scheler wassaying something very important for

therapists to hear, that it is not enoughto understand your patients, that youneed to love them as well, in a mannerthat Scheler termed ‘sympathetically’,an attribute that, unlike spontaneouslove, can be cultivated over time and with eff ort.

But, of all the sources of influenceon Laing’s notions about love andtheir role in both human misery and well-being, none compares with theimportance that Christianity playedon Laing’s thinking. is was probably

why the most common litmus forLaing’s personal stamp on authenticityderived from ‘the Golden Rule’: ‘dounto others as you would have them dounto you’ . I cannot think of anotherexpression that I heard Laing refer tomore than this one in terms of basichuman decency, as a ‘rough-and-ready’guide to authentic relating. Laingloved to read from the Lord’s Prayerin his seminars on frequent occasions,inspired, he said, by a book of Aldous

Huxley’s on the subject, where Huxley went through each line of the prayerand after each one rendered a morecontemporary interpretation of it.

Laing was especially taken withthe part of the prayer that speaks totrespassing against one’s neighboursand the need to forgive both those who trespass against oneself, as wellas one’s own trespasses against others.Laing seemed particularly sensitiveto crossing that line, when therapists,for example, trespass into that spaceof vulnerability that is no longertherapeutic, but injurious. Indeed, this was the one of irreducible elementsof Laing’s critique of psychiatric andpsychoanalytic forms of therapeuticpractice. It seems to me that the heartand soul of Laing’s clinical philosophyover the span of his professionalcareer comes down to one ineluctableconclusion—that psychological

conflict is more often than not theconsequence of uncommonly subtleforms of violence perpetrated bypersons in authority—be they parents,guardians, educators, psychiatrists,psychoanalysts—against persons, forone reason or another, who happento be at their mercy, be they children,students, or patients in treatment.

In book after book, and vignetteafter vignette, Laing took pains tobring our attention to something that

is such a common part of our everydaylife that it is often too obvious tonotice—that most of us are simplymore callous than we allow ourselvesto admit. is means that those to whom we entrust ourselves when most vulnerable are oftentimes insensitiveto the power they have to inflict injuryupon us. Laing’s most controversialmessage, and the one that caused himthe most grief, was the accusationthat the very people who holdthemselves out to be helpful—mental

health professionals and the l ike—oftentimes make matters worse by theextraordinary thoughtlessness with which they treat their patients. It wasthis message that became the batt lecry of the so-called anti-psychiatrymovement with which Laing’s namebecame indelibly associated, though it was a label that he himself rejected.

What are we to make ofLaing’s legacy—of his influenceon the contemporary psychiatric,

psychotherapeutic, and psychoanalyticscene and the treatment of the severelydisturbed? It is not a pretty picture.Laing’s writing had the power to




persuade and mesmerise, but not toconvince those very mental healthprofessionals that he so desperately wished to influence. For one thing,his position on schizophrenia keptchanging. First schizophrenia existed,but it was not being treated in the mosthumane or eff ective manner; thenhe questioned whether anyone wasactually schizophrenic and whetherit even existed; next, he argued somepeople were indeed mad, but themad ones were less crazy than those who were sane; then schizophrenia was a transcendental experiencethat amounted to a self-healing; andfinally, Laing seemed to argue that ifthere is such a thing as mental illness,psychiatrists and psychoanalysts are

employing the wrong techniques,indeed, that the problem is using anytechnique at all, coming more or lessfull circle to his original position. is is confusing, but Laing couldhave clarified things considerablyhad he simply written a definitive work that summarised his final—orat any rate, most current—word onthe matter, from ‘a to z’, how he gotthere, and where he ended up, if onlyprovisionally. Sadly, by the 1970s,

Laing’s ability to write in a legible,discursive form seems to have allbut abandoned him, as he wrote oneself-referential, incomprehensiblebook after another, none of whichsold very well. As his writing becamemore pretentious and self-indulgent,his name and reputation diminishedaccordingly. e heart of Laing’s clinical work

was situated in the context of hisinvolvement with the Philadelphia

Association. It was in this context that

I got to know him intimately as thePA Secretary working under Laing’sdirection for seven years. Four ofthose years I lived in one of the PAhouses and, just before returning toCalifornia, I graduated from the PA’sPsychoanalytic Training Programme.It was through the PA that Laing hadoriginally established Kingsley Hallin 1965, and subsequently the manyPA houses served as ‘laboratories’ where Laing’s theories about the

nature of, and potential treatment for,schizophrenia flourished. At one timein the 1970s, there were a total of eighttherapeutic households under the PA’s

auspices, each with its own uniquecharacter and feel. What of theirresults? Not quite as dramatic as Lainghad hoped—which was to changeconventional treatment of psychoticprocess—but amazing, nonetheless.

What Laing finally concluded bythe late 1970s was that living in oneof the PA houses might be helpful to aperson who was in a psychotic state inthe same way that, say, psychoanalysismay be helpful for a person in aneurotic condition. In both cases it

depends on the individual, and whetheror not they are predisposed to makinguse of the experience that is avai lable tothem. However, it can take t ime and,like psychoanalysis, the results may bepartial rather than dramatic.

On the other hand, some peopleexperienced extraordinary results,and I published an account of one ofthe most remarkable success stories of

one man’s journey in a PA householdsome years ago ( ompson, 1997).Despite all this eff ort and success,however, they seem to have done littleto enhance Laing’s reputation. oughthe PA remains a vital training centre,and the houses continue to flourish,Laing suff ered a dramatic break withhis colleagues there in 1981, and wasmore or less invited to leave. e deathof Hugh Crawford the year before,and the break-up of Laing’s marriagea few months earlier, both conspired

to unhinge Laing as he fell apart andindulged in a period of self-destructivedrinking and acting out that becameintolerable to most of his colleaguesand friends.

Despite these tragic and irreparablelosses, Laing continued to work,to write and to speak out againstthe inequities in the mental healthcommunity, as he saw them. Laingdid not seem to care how manypsychiatrists and psychoanalysts he

alienated, and he paid a price forspeaking out against the kinds ofmanipulative clinical interventionsthat we continue to take for granted.

e clinical establishment still hasnot forgiven him for it, even thougha significant number in their midstidolised Laing in their youth. Iconsider this pretty heroic stuff , but itonly paints part of the picture, and if we are to be honest, then the rest of thepicture needs to be painted as well.

What are we to make of a man who by the time of his death, becauseof his grievous behaviour, managedto alienate most of his closest friendsand colleagues? Who delighted in

bullying those closest to him as a formof sport that was amusing to no one buthimself? Whose drinking and drug usedrove him to behaving so irresponsiblyover the last decade of his life that it was obvious to those closest to himthat he was gradually, if inexorably,alienating himself from a phenomenalfollowing that had taken him only afew short years in the 1960’s to fashion?

For those of us who knew Laing andloved him, witnessing this process wasa painful and helpless aff air, and oneto which everyone fell victim at onetime or other. We remain haunted tothis day by this perplexing legacy ofa man to whom we owe so much, butunderstand so little.

I know I could expend my eff ortssimply celebrating Laing and singinghis praises, as others have done, butgiven the topic of this paper concernsauthenticity, I do not believe Laing

would have stood for that. I hope thoseof you who admire Laing and whoare loathe to hear him criticised canforgive me. I am going to say somethings that may be painful to hear, butmust be said because everyone whoknew him knows what they are, andthere is nothing to gain by pretendingthat we do not continue to feeldisturbed by them. I am going to try toreconcile Laing’s unseemly behaviour with his views about authenticity

as he tried to explicate them. WasLaing’s penchant for bullying a formof unmitigated rudeness masqueradingas a radical therapeutic intervention, or

We remain haunted to this day by this

perplexing legacy of a man to whom we

owe so much, but understand so little.




a manifestation of genuine authenticself-expression, true to his personal values, but destined to confound theinnocent and uncomprehending?

When preparing this paper, I was reading through some of thecontributions to Bob Mullan’s(1997) collection of papers publisheda few years after Laing’s death,consisting of articles and testimonialsby many of Laing’s friends andprofessional acquaintances. Many ofthe contributions were predictablyreverential, but what struck me most was the pain expressed even by those who were closest to him. Saddest wasthe contribution from John Duff y,Laing’s oldest and dearest friend fromchildhood, and a man who Laing

described to everyone who knewhim as his ‘best friend’. John Duff ydescribed Laing—Ronnie to him—asa kind, sensitive, and loving youngman, a really outstanding individual who was diff erent than the rest,remarkably caring and gentle. Healso noted that Laing changed overtime, and became increasingly self-absorbed and sometimes brutal. Someof this he attributed to Laing’s firstand extremely unhappy marriage to

Anne. But later when Laing married Jutta and became famous, though thismarriage was happier than the first,his brutal behaviour grew worse andencroached into his friendship withDuff y. Laing’s famous penchant fordrinking escalated, and he becameincreasingly aggressive and bell igerent.Duff y recounts an incident at a localbar in Scotland when Laing threw aglass of whisky at a barmaid for noapparent reason. What finally got toDuff y, however, was Laing’s increasing

self-absorption. eir conversations were always about Ronnie’s pain, withless and less time apportioned forconcern about Duff y’s, until he finallyconcluded that Laing simply did notcare about him any more, but onlyhimself. Eventually he had enough andended their friendship, much to Laing’sshock and disbelief.

Everyone who knew Laingexperienced what Duff y was talkingabout first hand, the drinking, the

anger, the bullying and aggression,crossing the line—in a word,‘trespassing’. And yet, Laing wouldoften say that such expressions of anger

were authentic, that it was not simplya case of being drunk or out of control,that there was method to his madness,ala William Blake. Laing loved Blakeand one of his favourite adages fromhis work was, ‘ e Road of Excess Leadsto the Palace of Wisdom’ . Laing seemedto interpret this adage as a personallicense to commit all sorts of mischief,endorsed by Blake and Nietzsche, with whom Laing identified intensely.Such explanations, however, could beconfusing because Laing could just assuddenly apologise for such behaviouras if to say he had not meant it, whileon other occasions he would insist,in a paranoid sort of way, that he wasprovoked, or teaching some bloke alesson.

An example of this latterexplanation was recounted by MaureenO’Hara (Mullan, 1997), an ex-patriotBritish woman who had been livingin Southern California, and working with Carl Rogers as a personal assistant when in 1978 she contacted the PA with a proposal to organise a one-day public event featuring Laing andRogers on stage. As PA Secretary, I was assigned to work with Maureen toorganise the event, and it eventually

took place at the London Hilton in August of that year with a coterie ofpeople that accompanied Rogers, andanother group that Laing selected fromthe PA. e event was uneventful,but the evening before it was a nightthe participants wil l never forget.Laing and Rogers had never met, sohe invited Rogers’ group to his homethe evening before the workshop to getacquainted. From the first moment, inO’Hara’s words, an air of discomfortpervaded the room. Rogers’ group

introduced themselves while Laing,Francis Huxley, Hugh Crawford, andseveral others gathered around in stonysilence saying nothing while Rogers’group was speaking, and then whenthey were finished, again nothing butsilence. Finally, as the silence becomespalpable, Laing announces to Rogers:“If you and I are to have any kind ofmeaningful dialogue, you are going tohave to cut out the California ‘nice-guy’act and get to something approaching an

authentic encounter” (p. 315). At this point a testy exchange of

views concerning the human condition was shared, Rogers with his everyone-

has-love-at-their-core perspective, while the PA position proceeded toexpound on the opposite view thatit is probably the ‘nice’ people in the world who are most responsible forthe terrible mess we are in. Afterthis brief exchange was over, the twogroups were more polarised than everand decidedly on unfriendly terms. It was clearly time to break for dinner. At the restaurant near Laing’s homeon Eton Road, Laing isolated himselffrom the others and proceeded to getdrunk, much to Rogers’ and his group’sdiscomfort. When a group of peoplethen entered the restaurant Laingcalled out to them: “See that bald-headed man sitting there” —pointing toRogers— “Well, he’s not a man, he’s a

perrrson!” (p. 319), alluding to Rogers’most famous book, On Becoming aPerson (1961), in his thick Scottish burrand in a decidedly dismissive fashion. As the room fel l into stunned silence,Laing ambled over to where O’Hara was sitting and proceeded to pour someScotch into her empty water glass. Heasked if she liked it and, after takinga sip, she said she did, thinking this was a gesture of friendly camaraderiedesigned to defuse the tension he had

created. At this point Laing spat in herdrink and asked, “Well, how do you likeit now?” (Mullan, 1997, p. 19). O’Haratossed the drink in Laing’s face and thesituation desolved into pandemonium.Outside the restaurant the two groups were on the verge of a fist fight andLaing announced that the Rogersgroup was not welcome to return to hishome, at which point they announcedthey were withdrawing from the eventscheduled for the following day. ough the groups eventually

patched things up and went on withthe program the next morning, thedamage had been done, and therelationship between Laing and Rogers was permanently tainted. Later, Laingheld to his conviction that makingRogers and his group feel intenselyuncomfortable with his rude andprovocative behaviour was his way ofbeing authentic, or real, in a way thatthey were not being with him and hisgroup, because they were being ‘nice’

in a way that was socially desirable,but blatantly artificial. Rogers hadcut his teeth on his own conceptionof authenticity and Laing thought he




needed to be taught a lesson or two.So he decided to get them rattledand angry with him in order to showthem what they were really made of,‘the rot and gore’ lurking beneaththe sweet facade, which finally cameout when they exploded. Laing hadconvinced himself that anything goes when it comes to stripping away thiskind of artificial niceness whenever

and wherever one meets it, no matterhow much trespassing is necessary to

perform the exercise. I do not believein Laing’s right mind that he reallybelieved this, but that he fell prey tothis behaviour on certain occasions when he simply lost it.

Yet, to give Laing his due, O’Hara’sconclusion to this story is bothsurprising and typical of what, forlack of a better term, we might al low was a method to his madness. Despitethe anger and incomprehension thatRogers felt toward Laing, for O’Hara

it was a life-changing experience. After returning to Laing’s home topatch things up, O’Hara suff ered abreakdown from the stress and strainof the evening, which culminated in aprofound therapeutic experience that was li fe-changing. After she returnedto the United States she began to seeRogers in a new light. Previously shehad idolised him and believed stronglyin his message. After the experience atLaing’s home she said that she realisedthat she no longer needed Rogers as

a crutch and that she was now ableto stand on her own feet. She hadsuff ered a crisis, but was able to take astep forward in her self-development,feeling wiser and self-confident. Allapparently due to the way Laing hadchallenged them that evening. WasLaing’s ‘authentic’ acting out an agentof therapeutic change, or a merecoincidence?

Where did this behaviourcome from and what made him so

convinced that acts of aggressioncan be construed as an authentic wayof behaving? is is one of thosechicken or egg conundrums as to

whether this sensibil ity originatedin Laing’s character, and foundconfirmation in theory, or the reverse.Laing identified profoundly with hisScottish heritage, and a significantpart of that heritage is that Scotsdo not suff er fools gladly, especiallyGlaswegians. Moreover, Laing hada mean temper and suff ered from adrinking problem all of his adult life.

One could surmise he was predisposedto perceiving authenticity as a l icense

to permit free reign to aspects of hispersonality that Laing attributed toNietzsche and Blake. Another elementin Laing’s assertion that anger is a‘royal road’ to authenticity is supportedin Winnicott’s conception of thetrue-self, outlined in ‘Ego Distortionin Terms of True and False Self ’ (1960),published the same year as Laing’se Divided Self. ere, and in otherpublications, Winnicott proposed thateveryone constructs around themselves

a false-self façade that is comprisedof good manners and social nicetiesthat serve to disguise what they arereally feeling, and that we are often noteven aware of what we are concealingfrom ourselves until we ‘pop a cork’, orexperience a good analysis. Under thisfaçade lies the true-self, which is moreoften than not made up of feelings we are uncomfortable with, includinganger, disgust, resentment, hate, evenmurderous rage.

According to this thesis, it is the

angry, hateful feelings that are morerepresentative of how we really feelabout someone, whereas the nicefaçade is more often than not a lie.Laing elaborated on this theory in eDivided Self , but treated it with morefinesse and insight than did Winnicott(whom Laing saw in supervisionduring his psychoanalytic training).In a chapter devoted to ‘ e False-SelfSystem’ , Laing (1960) avers that:

‘ e actions of this false self…usually

amount to an excess of being ‘good’,never doing anything other than whatone is told, never being ‘a trouble’never asserting or even betraying any

counterwill of one’s own. Being good isnot, however, done out of any positivedesire on the individual’s own part todo the things that are said by others to be

good, but is a negative conformity to astandard that is the other’s standard andnot one’s own, and is prompted by thedread of what might happen if one wereto be oneself in actuality.is complianceis partly, therefore, a betrayal of one’s own

possibilities…’ ( p. 104). Although Winnicott would have

been loathe to suggest that expressionsof anger are a lways more authenticthan, for instance, kindness orsensitivity, one can appreciate how sucha theory may be stretched to fit such athesis, especially if one is predisposedto seeing the world that way.

Laing was a mass of contradictions.He was a solitary figure with aprofoundly spiritual center that inturn fueled his quest for authenticrelationship, especially with peoplein his care. Yet he pursued fame andcelebrity with such raw ambition that you would think his l ife depended onthe adulation of strangers. Laing onceconfided to my six-year old son thatfrom the time he was a child he had asingular, all-consuming ambition—to

grow up to be healthy, wealthy, and wise, and rich and famous! Famebecame the driving force in Laing’slife and, in the end, it tore him apartbecause it was so antithetical to aperson who was committed to a pathof genuine wisdom and authenticity.Laing hated being famous, yet couldnot live without it. He despised thepeople who came to his public lecturesand bought his books because hebelieved—quite correctly, sometimes—they had not a clue as to what his

message was really about.Laing probably peaked too early

and became famous too quickly for hisown good, before he was able to handleit. Yet fame did not come easily. Hisfirst book,e Divided Self , which willbe remembered as his best, fel l uponthe psychiatric and psychoanalyticprofessional worlds like a stone, andits sequel, Self and Others (1969),published a year later, fared even worse. But in the following fi ve years,

Laing threw himself into an incredibleamount of activity during whichhe published several more books, voluminous papers and magazine

Laing hated being famous, yet

could not live without it.




articles, gave frequent public lectures,mounted professional conferences andcongresses, founded the Philadelphia

Association and set up its inauguraltherapeutic household, KingsleyHall. In London, Laing became alocal celebrity with a reputation forradical theories about the etiologyof schizophrenia and its inhumanetreatment by conventional psychiatry. All this activity culminated in thepublication ofe Politics of Experience(1967), a collection of the papershe had published in the precedingfi ve years in a variety of radical left- wing journals and periodicals, wherehe pronounced that contrary toconventional wisdom, it is the madpeople who are sane and the sane who

are stark-raving mad. Comments likethat came back to haunt him, but theyserved their purpose. is messagecatapulted Laing to the ether sphereof fame or infamy—depending onone’s perspective. By the late 1960s heassumed the role of an internationalpresence and a guru to the Vietnam-era counterculture in America, wherehis notoriety made him a best-sellingauthor and nattily-dressed, ‘with it’man of means. e fame he had craved

all his life wasfi

nally his, but the pricehe paid to get there was enormous.By the early 1970’s with the

publication ofe Facts of Life (1975),Laing’s ability to write had collapsedand his books became increasinglyself-referential and pretentious, anembarrassment to those of us who worked closely with him and who,frankly, expected more. Laing’s abililtyto write best-sellers abandoned him ashe became increasingly self-consciousof his status in the world and what he

believed his audience expected from‘R. D. Laing’, ironically a false-self ofhis own making that had gobbled himup and now represented him before the world in his stead. is was the period,the 1970’s, when I came to knowLaing, the beginning of his decline,and by 1980, the year I left London toreturn to California, it was evident tome that Laing was never going to writethat last ‘great book’ that everyone,including himself, was waiting for him

to craft, to redeem himself and hislegacy that was once rich with suchpromise.

It is perhaps telling that Laing’s

last book project, which he struggled with for years but could not finish, was devoted to love, a topic that wascentral to his work, but a subject thatI suspect Laing knew very litt le about. Yet Laing argued that while love inthe form of caritas is a corollary toauthenticity, he also insisted that actsof cruelty are perfectly resonant withauthentic forms of relation as well.On some occasions, for example, he would remind his audience how Jesusstates somewhere in the Bible that youcannot be his disciple until ‘you come tohate your mother and father’ , whereas onother occasions he would assert thatthe word ‘hate’ was a mistranslationof the Aramaic that substitutes inits place ‘happily indiff erent’. It is no

wonder that Laing could never finishthis book, or even settle on a title forit. ese views are as contradictory asLaing himself was, and his anger at hisdeclining status and fame made himincreasingly bitter as his once-brightstar diminished.

In his biography, John Clay notesthat Laing once had a painting ofBreughel’s Fall of Icarus hanging onthe wall of his consulting room on Wimpole Street in the early days of

his clinical practice. Anthony Clare(Mullan, 1997) interprets Laing’schoice of this famous Greek myth asespecially pertinent. Laing, too, flewtoo close to the sun, as a consequenceof his elevation to the status of a guru.Laing desperately needed people tolove him, and those of us who knewhim know of the loneliness he enduredas a child, the depression he struggled with throughout his adult l ife, and hisdisappointment with his own analysis with Charles Rycroft at finding relief

from the torment he suff ered day-to-day. Drugs and alcohol were aconstant, but the real drug that Laingcould not do without was the worshipof other people, and the decline ofhis status when it intersected withthe collapse of his marriage to Juttain 1981 was probably what finally didhim in. During the tortuous demiseof his marriage to Jutta, Laing wentthrough a period of reprehensibleacting out that severed his relationship

with the PA and subsequently lost himhis medical license. He spent the lastdecade of his life on the road withouta home, at the mercy of the public he

so much despised, who supported himthrough attending the lectures he gaveall over the world, more often than notin an inebriated condition. As he toldme on one of his visits to Californiaduring this period, “ ey’re not paying

for a coherent lecture; they’re paying to seeR. D. Laing, and by God, that’s whatthey’re going to see, warts and all!”

Even in these acts of rebelliousness,I think Laing believed he was salvaging what litt le was left of his capacity toremain authentic, in the face of havingsold out to a forum for which he hadnothing but contempt. Perhaps there was a grain of truth to this. He hadopportunities for employment duringthis period that he avidly pursued inthe form of university posts, one at

Stanford University. Something wasarranged through Rollo May and allLaing had to do was to show up soberand act ‘nice’, something, we know,did not come easily to him. When thetime came, he simply could not do it.He arrived drunk and belligerent, blewthe interview and that was the end ofit, another sabotaged opportunity to be‘respectable’, but by playing the gametheir way. In a way, I admired thisabout Laing, his inability to grovel, to

act the part expected of him. I still seesomething heroic in his incapacity topander to the crowd. I think I lovedLaing for this and will always respecthim for it. But when it comes tocrossing the line, to trespassing againstothers in the guise of teaching themsomething about how to be just asauthentic as he implied he was, I thinkLaing engaged in acts of aggressionthat are impossible to reconcile withhis views about caritas , peace on earth,and the like.

Laing’s last years were not easy. Hispopularity had ebbed, people thoughthe was dead. I suppose in somerespects he was. But his decline wasalso on a deeper, spiritual level. Laing’sfather became psychotic and died in amental hospital. Laing suff ered most ofhis adult life from the fear that he wasprone to the same Scottish involutionalmelancholia that had afflicted hisfather and grandfather before him.He often wondered if he, too, would

some day go stark-raving mad. oughit was a secret, he was already dyingfrom cancer on that fateful day in St. Tropez when his life came to a sudden

Laing and Rogers

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