Book Review: Portrait of the Psychiatrist as a Young Man: The Early Writing and Work of R.D. Laing. 1927-1960

Abstract

Reviews the book, Portrait of the Psychiatrist as a Young Man: The Early Writing and Work of R.D. Laing. 1927-1960 by Allan Beveridge (2011). Allan Beveridge's new book, Portrait of the Psychiatrist as a Young Man, is the latest in a series of biographical studies of Laing, most of which date back to the Nineties. Unlike those efforts, however, this one focuses primarily on Laing's life and career from his high-school days to the publication of The Divided Self. Unlike many of his predecessors, Beveridge, a psychiatrist who practices in Dumferline, Scotland, had unobstructed access to all the papers and correspondence now housed in the Laing Archive at the University of Glasgow, and makes excellent use of these resources throughout. Beveridge explores Laing's debts to various existential and phenomenological thinkers, and American (or American based) pioneers in the psychotherapy of schizophrenia such as Sullivan, Fromm-Reichmann, Sechehaye and John Rosen, and his vivid-and surprisingly early-love of European and Russian literature. Beveridge describes Laing's ideas about dream analysis, group psychotherapy, and analyses the nature and extent of Laing's relationships with psychiatric colleagues, demonstrating that Laing's autobiographical accounts of his extreme isolation early on in his career were exaggerated for rhetorical effect-again, like Freud's. By way of conclusion, Beveridge gives us a measured and thoughtful commentary on some of the controversies surrounding the work of Gavin Miller, an extraordinary Laing scholar who stresses the Scottish character of many of Laing's early influences and ideas. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved).