[A] comprehensive and extraordinarily readable study of Laing's life and work.
This new biography is by far the best account of Laing's life and achievements that I have yet read. Daniel Burston is frank about Laing's many personal failings, but also has an impressive intellectual grasp of Laing's legacy to psychiatry.
Boston Book Review - Anthony Storr
The strength of [the book's] combination, of biography and the summaries and reviews of psychological ideas, is that it helps us put the psychoanalytic project into its historical perspective.
Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences
Burston's elegant account of [Laing's] early years has a measured thoughtfulness...The Wing of Madness is...[a] scholarly and articulate book.
The Guardian - Harriet Stewart
Burston makes a plea for judging Laing by his work and achievements. Since we do not condemn painters and scientists for personal indiscretions, why condemn psychiatrists?...This is a searching and critical, balanced and fascinating book, which I enjoyed reading and rereading.
Jerusalem Post - Rachael Chazan
[Burston] provides valuable insights into some of the reasons for Laing's fall from prominence.
[Burston's] timely contribution is a superb intellectual biography whose breadth, balance and depth is not likely to be eclipsed soon...For Laing, the great question was: What is experience, after all? Daniel Burston certainly grasps the significance of this in Laing's life and work, and sets out to explore its intellectual implications in the rich legacy of his writings...Contemporary scholars sill appreciate his keen sense of what is still relevant in the Laing corpus.
Toronto Globe and Mail - Charles Levin
[Burston] provides valuable insights into some of the reasons for Laing's fall from prominence.
Washington Times - Richard Restak
This new biography is by far the best account of Laing's life and achievements that I have yet read. Daniel Burston is frank about Laing's many personal failings, but also has an impressive intellectual grasp of Laing's legacy to psychiatry. Anthony Storr
Burston makes a plea for judging Laing by his work and achievements. Since we do not condemn painters and scientists for personal indiscretions, why condemn psychiatrists?...This is a searching and critical, balanced and fascinating book, which I enjoyed reading and rereading. Rachael Chazan
[A] comprehensive and extraordinarily readable study of Laing's life and work. Perry Meisel
New York Times Book Review
Burston's elegant account of [Laing's] early years has a measured thoughtfulness...The Wing of Madness is...[a] scholarly and articulate book. Harriet Stewart
[An] important and timely study...Burston is intent first on mapping how Laing was able to turn his own background and psychiatric experience into an original philosophy of mind with far-reaching implications. Then he distills Laing's ideas from their milieu to set them in historical and critical perspective...Burston's biography reminds us that to ignore so inventive a thinker as Laing because of changes in fashion is to impoverish our knowledge of ourselves. Michael Vincent Miller
[Burston's] timely contribution is a superb intellectual biography whose breadth, balance and depth is not likely to be eclipsed soon...For Laing, the great question was: What is experience, after all? Daniel Burston certainly grasps the significance of this in Laing's life and work, and sets out to explore its intellectual implications in the rich legacy of his writings...Contemporary scholars sill appreciate his keen sense of what is still relevant in the Laing corpus. Charles Levin
[A] comprehensive and extraordinarily readable study of Laing's life and work.
New York Times Book Review - Perry Meisel
Laing was the psychologist of the left in the 1960s and '70s, an opponent of the Freudians and behaviorists and of lobotomies, electric shock therapies and the incarceration of psychotics. Like Thomas Szasz, he viewed madness as a social construct, and in The Divided Self, his most widely acclaimed book, he characterizes schizophrenia as a sane response to an insane world. People go mad because they involuntarily repudiate the constriction of their social roles, and in the healing process ("metanoia") a new personality may emerge, anchored in the real self. Burston, a psychology professor at Duquesne University, astutely analyzes this view of psychotic breakdown as ontological crisis. He also selects significant biographical events that helped form Laing's ideasincluding his rejection by a disturbed mother who forcefully separated him from whatever he loved. Burston takes us though florid periods of LSD and alcohol, through Laing's neo-Platonism and existentialism, and his superstar identity as therapist, mystic, maverick and guru. He treats Laing's psychological theories respectfully, however, and sees merit in the view that psychotic episodes can lead to a more authentic mode of existence. As Laing wrote: "Madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be breakthrough." (Aug.)
Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly
In the Sixties, works by British psychiatrist R.D. Laing were "required reading" for countercultural types with intellectual leanings. Laing argued that schizophrenia was the result of adaptation to a conflicted family environment and that many schizophrenics would spontaneously recover if provided a supportive but noncoercive environment. Burston (The Legacy of Erich Fromm, LJ 2/15/96) admirably relates the genesis of Laing's ideas, assesses the extent to which they have stood the test of time, and describes Laing's colorful life in straightforward fashion. A good choice for academic libraries, as well as for medium- and larger-sized public libraries serving a clientele interested in the history of ideas.Mary Ann Hughes, Neill Pub. Lib., Pullman, Wash.
"[Burston's] timely contribution is a suepr intellectual biography whose breadth, balance and depth is not likely to be eclipsed soon." -- Globe and Mail
[An] important and timely study…Thurston's biography reminds us that to ignore so inventive a thinker as Laing because of changes in fashion is to impoverish our knowledge of ourselves. Boston Sunday Globe
Burston (The Legacy of Erich Fromm, not reviewed) reevaluates the controversial, best-selling "anti-psychiatrist" of the '60s, explicating his controversial theories and tracing his deterioration into quackery and alcoholism in the years before his death in 1989.
Burston (Psychology/Duquesne Univ.) sets out Laing's confused and miserable life before he tries to reappraise his work. After an unhappy, impoverished childhood in Glasgow, with a distant father and an uncaring motherapparently a borderline psychoticthe brilliant young Laing flourished at university, eventually choosing psychiatry as his profession. Laing's apprenticeship occurred at a time when lobotomies and insulin comas were applied regularly as treatments for mental problems, and the practices appalled him. Laing became further disillusioned with his profession during his compulsory military service, when he was given the job of determining if soldiers were sane enough to fight in the Korean War. Combining Freudian theories and existentialism, Laing's first works, The Divided Self (1960), Self and Others (1961), and Sanity, Madness and the Family (1964), stressed the burden of insanity on the families of those afflicted and on society, albeit with sympathy, even respect, for the insane. His more strident works, such as The Politics of Experience (1967), which asserted that society itself was dangerously delusional, made him one of the gurus of the rebellious '60s. The following decades, however, brought only personal, professional, and financial setbacks until he finished by espousing prenatal memory and "rebirthing" techniques. Burston cogently places Laing among the heated debates and schisms within psychoanalysis, and he offers a careful reading of Laing's theories. As for contributions to psychiatric care, Burston's case for the relevance of Laing's therapy commune for today's community care is less convincing.
If the biographical side verges on special pleading, Burston's critique of Laing's writings manages to salvage some philosophical cohesion, though not quite enough to offset the sad record of Laing's peculiar life and headlong decline.