SOURCE: "Homage to Catatonia," in The New York Review of Books, Vol. XVI, No. 2, February 11, 1971, pp. 3-4, 6.

Tyson is a Scottish psychiatrist, musicologist, and author of several studies on Beethoven. In the following review, in which he examines seven of Laing's major works, he discusses such themes as the role of the family and society in the development of an individual's pathologies, the influence of fantasy and spirituality in the development of self-identity, and Laing's abiding effort "to make madness, and the process of going mad, comprehensible."

In theory the publication of a substantially revised edition of R. D. Laing's The Self and Others, and the reissue of his first and I suppose still most celebrated book The Divided Self, now more than ten years old, should provide as good an occasion as any for a retrospective survey of his work and an attempt at a critical assessment...