R. D. Laing Critical Essay | Critical Review by David Ingleby

SOURCE: "Precocious and Alone," in The Times Literary Supplement, No. 4306, October 11, 1985, p. 1130.

In the following review of Wisdom, Madness and Folly, Ingleby contends that, while Laing's autobiography "is absorbing and enjoyable as a story," it fails as a document of his intellectual development because of its exclusive presentation of his own point of view: his life "is presented as a solitary journey, and we hear little … about the fellowship that must surely have sustained it."

As everybody knows, R. D. Laing is a psychiatrist who sees things very differently from his colleagues, many of whom indeed believe him to be crazy. How did he get that way? Here [in Wisdom, Madness and Folly] he sets out to answer this question, by telling us about some of his experiences up to the point when, as a thirty-year-old Senior Registrar, he left Glasgow for London to embark...
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