Sanity, Madness And The Family

a Pelican Book Sanity, Madness and the Family R.D.Laing and A.Esterson Digitized by tine Internet Arciiive in 2009 littp://www.arcliive.org/details/sanitymadnessfamOOIain PELICAN BOOKS SANITY, MADNESS, AND THE FAMILY DRR.D.LAiNGwas bom in Glasgow and graduated from the He has worked as an army psychiatrist and university there. with various hospitals and clinics, including the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations, where he did researchintofamilies from 1961 to 1967. He is chairman of the Philadelphia As- sociation, a charity concerned with developing practical social intervention from theories expounded in his book The Politics of Experience, (published in Penguins with The Bird of Paradise), His research is particularly concerned with schizophrenia, and varieties of experience including mind-expanding families, drugs. His other books are The Divided Self Self and Others and Reason and Violence (with David Cooper), and Interpersonal Perception (with H. Phiilipson and A. R. Lee). , A ARON Ester SON was born inGlasgowand, after demobilization from the wartime Royal Navy, entered Glasgow university and graduated as a doctor of medicine in 193 1. He worked in general practice until taking up psychiatry in 1954, and between then and 1962 held a number of appointments in British mental hospitals and psychiatric units. He is a former Research Associate of the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations, and has spent some two years as a kibbutz doctor in Israel. Finding impossible to practice in the National Health service the kind of therapy he believed his patients required, he entered private practice in 1962, as an existential psychoanalyst and family therapist. His new book. The Leaves of Spring: Study in the Dialectic of Madness, to be published this year, embodies more of his work. it A SANITY, MADNESS, AND THE FAMILY Families of Schit^ophrenics R. D. LAING AND A. ESTERSON PENGUIN BOOKS Penguin Books Ltd, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England Penguin Books Inc, 71 lo Ambassador Road, Baltimore, Maryland 112.07, U.S.A. Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria, Australia by Basic Books 1964 by Tavistock Publications 1964 Pelican Books 1970 First published in U.S.A. First published in Great Britain Published in Reprinted 1970, 1971 Copyright © The Tavistock Institute of Human Relations, 1964 Printed in the United States of America by Kingsport Press, Inc, Kingsport, Tennessee Set in Monotype Garamond Contents o Preface Preface to Second Edition 1 Introduction 15 FAMILIES 1. The Abbotts 31 2. TheBlairs 51 3. The Churches 75 4. TheDanzigs 109 5. TheEdens 131 6. The Fields 144 7. The Golds 159 8. The Heads 176 9. Thelrwins 202 10. The Kings 221 11. TheLawsons 232 Appendix 267 Index 279 Preface The data presented in the following pages is part of an in- which the authors began in 195 8. During this time Dr R. D. Laing was a member of the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations and the Tavistock Clinic, and since i960 he has been a Fell