BIOGRAPHY
R D LAING: A Divided Self
John ClayHodder & Stoughton, #20
AS this book is largely anecdotal - Glasgow guru Ronnie Laing has an argument with Edinburgh icon Sean Connery and all because, according to John Clay, Connery consulted Laing during his difficult marriage to Diane Cilento - let me tell my own story.
I met Laing in 1985 when he came to the National Portrait Gallery of Scotland to be seen beside a portrait of himself by Vicky Crowe. Laing was supposed to be a permanently plastered psychiatric saint but on that day he was tea-totally sober, playing jazz piano to the gallery then speaking eloquently about his newly published autobiography Wisdom, Madness and Folly.
Talking to him was a treat. He was wise after the traumatic events of his life, telling me Glasgow was the place where he had the worst and best insights into his troubled existence as an only child. His mother, Amelia, was regarded as mad by her neighbours in Govanhill; his father, David, was a diffident fellow who nevertheless battered Ronnie regularly. No wonder Laing felt that madness was conceived in the context of the family. His motto was that families drive folk mad.
As fallible as Freud, Laing was another guru with the literary gift of sounding right when wrong or not quite right. Laing claimed Freud's importance was ``his demonstration that the ordinary person is a shrivelled, desiccated fragment of what a person can be''. Laing, like Freud, felt society was so sick it was mad not to be crazy. Laing was crazy about his patients.
His first book, The Divided Self (1960), argued that schizophrenics should be treated with love rather than shocked by dehumanising treatment, should be ``known without being destroyed''. The problem with this approach is the possibility of self-destruction through self-indulgence.
In The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise (1967), Laing suggested schizophrenics were broken-hearted, not psychologically split, deplored the denial of their human rights through prescribed drugs, then - shades of Sergeant Pepper - talked of turning on society. The eccentric implication was that individuals should eschew prescribed drugs but enjoy illegal drugs.
The Politics of the Family (1969) accused families of creating the conditions for schizophrenia. Families were ``the slaughterhouses of our children''. If true in some cases, the theory was falsely simplistic as an explanation of the massacre of innocence.
Laing made valuable contributions. He pointed out that schizophrenia was little more than a label applied by self-styled experts to suffering souls who were then conditioned to conform to soul-destroying standards. He intelligently analysed the politics of psychiatry. He alienated the medical establishment, thereby forcing it to doubt some vicious dogmas.
Laing practised what he preached - at the Tavistock Clinic and Philadelphia Association - if not always in his private life. He acknowledged he was a vulnerable individual: Wisdom, Madness and Folly lamented the vomit and violence of his native Glasgow and the way he was brutalised by his parents.
Adrian Laing, the second of Ronnie's six sons, published (1994) a highly critical biography showing Laing was no perfect loving parent. A public enemy of electric shock therapy, Ronnie apparently allowed it to be inflicted on his first daughter when she suffered from depression.
His second daughter had to learn the only way to get close to Laing was to share at least one bottle of whisky with him. His third daughter, Karen, was battered by the champion of interpersonal relationships to the understandable fury of Clay, taking his cue from Adrian: ``This act of violence on his daughter was unforgivable, and shows how paper-thin his defences were''.
Clay's biography is a variant on the version by Adrian who admitted: ``My relationship with Ronnie has greatly improved since his death.'' Before his death on August 23, 1989, Laing - frequently ``steaming drunk'' - was often a trial and trauma to Adrian.
In 1984 Adrian, then practising as a criminal barrister, was contacted by Hampstead police: Laing had been arrested after throwing a wine bottle through the window of the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh Centre, and cannabis had been found in his pockets. The window-smashing charge was dropped and, on the advice of Adrian, Laing pleaded guilty to possession of cannabis. ``Ronnie's behaviour'', wrote Adrian, ``was alienating almost everyone around him.''
Adrian made much of Laing's drinking and drug-taking. Coming from the alcoholic culture of Scotland, Laing drank heavily in Glasgow as a student and psychiatrist but did not start taking drugs until 1960 when, aged 33, he experimented with psilocybin, mescaline, heroin, opium, amphetamines, and LSD. Laing used drink and drugs to cope with his depression. Adrian found it difficult to sympathise with his father's defeatism.
Laing blamed his Glasgow up-bringing for bringing on insecurities but Adrian disagreed: ``Ronnie was an only child who received endless attention from both his parents ..... despite his parents' lower-middle-class standing they made sure - at great personal sacrifice - that ``wee Ronald'' received the best education from the best schools.......'' According to Adrian, Laing was author of his own insecurities.
Adrian told entertaining tales against his father. In 1977 Adrian went with Laing to see Jesus Christ, Superstar in London. At the end of the show, the boozy Laing abused the cast with 10-minute boos. Laing loved making an alcoholic exhibition of himself and enjoyed demonstrating he belonged to the cursing, not the chattering, class.
In 1984, Laing attended a conference at the Ojai Foundation in California. Participants were invited to attack each other and Laing, drunk in a bar and howling madly at the moon, was duly attacked. In Glasgow style he went out with his attacker but, too drunk to defend himself, accepted defeat. He later judged the conference ``enjoyable''. Laing could easily appear as a caricature. As Adrian put it, old Ronnie was ``the psychiatrist who was mad''.
No anecdote can invalidate the writing for which Laing will be best remembered. He might have been a monster at times, but many monsters have been literary masters and Laing was one of those. Adrian's biography stressed the sins of the father and Clay's Adrian-orientated biography - ``I am indebted to Adrian Laing for his help and for allowing me to draw upon his pace-setting biography of his father'' - is rough on Ronnie and rough on the causes of Ronnie's ``self-destructive'' way of life.
Laing may have been a lost soul, as Clay claims, but his innovative ideas and radical actions succeeded in restoring love to a lot of lives.
