SOURCE: "The Laingian Family," in Partisan Review, Vol. XLI, No. 1, Winter, 1974, pp. 109-18.

Boyers is an American psychologist and educator whose written works include Psychological Man: Approaches to an Emergent Social Type (1974). In the following excerpt, he discusses the influence of Wilhelm Reich on Laing's work and explores the development of Laing's notion that madness is comprehensible and that the family plays a pivotal role in the creation of a schizophrenic personality.

The attack on the nuclear family will probably turn out to be the most important development of our period, a phenomenon beside which other militancies, of whatever character, will eventually seem ephemeral and even somewhat parochial. What we confront is the general loss of faith in the efficacy of the family unit to nurture the kind of people most of us apparently think we ought to be. With this particular erosion a whole variety of alternate...