SOURCE: "In Place of the Placenta," in The Times Literary Supplement, No. 4144, September 3, 1982, p. 939.

In the following mixed review of The Voice of Experience, Ingleby examines Laing's theory of the mind and suggests that his thinking has undergone a change, even a "regression," taking up positions he had dismissed in earlier works.

No merely human author could have lived up to the leg-end which R. D. Laing generated in the 1960s: yet this was not the only reason why his recent publications have come as a disappointment to many. One sometimes suspected that the promptings of the publisher had been louder than those of the muse. A burnt-out case? On the evidence of The Voice of Experience, far from it; here, finally, is a book both coherent in its design and sustained in its intensity. If, at the end of the day, Laing's argument seems almost to invite...