Abstract

Despite the fact that R. D. Laing was an exceptionally popular intellectual during the late 1960s and early 1970s, his ideas have had minimal impact on the social sciences. Trained in clinical psychiatry, Laing devoted his life to the study of persons, focussing on the family, interpersonal perception and communication, experience, and behavior. This work is a comprehensive explication of his thought and the implications of his ideas for advancing sociological theory. As no intellectual develops in a vacuum, his life and the impact of James' pragmatism, Freud's psychoanalytic and social theory, Sartre's existentialism and phenomenology, and the foci of Szasz, Scheff, and Goffman are the first things covered. These initial chapters explore the complex amalgam of personal and clinical experience and areas of academic specialty which provided the basis for Laing's thought. Next, his works are divided into five groupings and explicated independently. First covered are his early works on the self, others, the impact of the latter on the former, and existential crises. Specifically, Laing's focus on the self and the power of others in shaping or destroying it are presented as needed supplements to traditional analyses of the internalization of the environment. Second, the method of discerning quagmires in interpersonal perception and communication Laing developed, in association with Phillipson and Lee, is covered and demonstrated to be an ingenious attempt at quantitatively dealing with the self and its relations to others. Third, the work Laing did on the family, is detailed. His conceptualization of the family as an internalized set of relations is demonstrated as an advance in symbolic interactionist analyses of the self. Fourth, his societal assaults are covered and shown to be as sound as those developed by other academically acknowledged figures. Fifth, his metaphorical texts are covered and, although they offer little in terms of theory, are considered as original attempts at deconstructing traditional analyses of the self and society. Finally, Laing's works as a whole are briefly discussed and the applicability of several of his conceptualizations and foci is demonstrated by means of an analysis of contemporary urban research