‘The world is full of big bad wolves’: investigating the experimental therapeutic spaces of R.D. Laing and Aaron Esterson

Abstract

In conjunction with the recent critical assessments of the life and work of R.D. Laing, this paper seeks to demonstrate what is revealed when Laing’s work on families and created spaces of mental health care are examined through a geographical lens. The paper begins with an exploration of Laing’s time at the Tavistock Clinic in London during the 1960s, and of the co-authored text with Aaron Esterson entitled, Sanity, Madness and the Family (1964). The study then seeks to demonstrate the importance Laing and his colleague placed on the time-space situatedness of patients and their worlds. Finally, an account is provided of Laing’s and Esterson’s spatial thinking in relation to their creation of both real and imagined spaces of therapeutic care.

Psychiatric Penguins

“…Laing is now situated within intellectual biography (Burston, 1996;Burston, 2000;Beveridge, 2011), contextualized by Scottish intellectual and cultural traditions (Miller, 2004;Miller, 2009;Miller, 2012) and by the wider 'field of psychiatric contention' (Crossley, 2006: 108), and understood in terms of the spaces and places of his personal and professional development (McGeachan, 2013a;McGeachan, 2013b;McGeachan, 2014 progress' (Blackburn, 2013: 229). …”

‘A Walk 21/1/35’: a psychiatric-psychoanalytic fragment meets the new walking studies

“…15 Tellingly, Laing remained a psychiatrist, even as he critiqued the conformity-inducing dimensions of psychiatry within a capitalist social order, 16 and he was always concerned to interact with the disturbed, often schizophrenic, patients presenting before him. McGeachan explores numerous of Laing's cases, 17 and it is in the spirit of her inquiries that we address below our empirical 'fragment' of psychoanalysis-meetingpsychiatry-meeting-geography, while alsoalso echoing McGeachancontributing to literature on the historical geographies of the 'psy'-disciplines. 18 A second departure-point is work on the cultural geographies of walking, particularly in the guise of what Lorimer has called the 'new walking studies', a 'term 'point[ing] towards a marvellously eclectic array of walking-thinking-practices'.…”

Re-Coopering anti-psychiatry: David Cooper, revolutionary critic of psychiatry

“…In the age of ‘big pharma’, critical perspectives in psychiatry have assumed urgency (Double, 2006; Moncrief, 2009; Davies, 2013), and there has been a revival of interest in the work of R.D. Laing (eg Beveridge, 2011; Miller, 2012; McGeachan, 2014; Chapman, 2015). Laing’s (2010) Divided self is now a Penguin classic, and he is to be the subject of a movie, a biopic starring the former Dr Who star David Tenant.…”