SOURCE: "Two Ronnies," in London Review of Books, Vol. 7, No. 12, July 4, 1985, p. 12.

In the following review of Wisdom, Madness and Folly, Barham disputes many of Laing's assertions about his work and the state of modern psychiatry. He also negatively assesses the quality of the writing in this and much of Laing's later work.

Schizophrenia is now held to be one of the major illnesses of mankind, but its recognition as a clinical syndrome is of relatively recent origin. There is something very odd about the sudden arrival of the chronic schizophrenic on the stage of history at the end of the 19th century. One hypothesis which has been canvassed recently is that schizophrenia was a novel condition, unknown before the end of the 18th century, which spread as a slow, possibly viral epidemic across Europe and the United States in the 19th century, contributing in large measure to...