Published in Psychoanalytic Studies, Vol 3, No.2,
2001, p 268-269, article by
e-mail: russellk@sprynet.com
The Crucible of
Experience, RD Laing & The Crisis of Psychotherapy
Daniel Burston, 2000
pp.168, ISBN0-674-00217-2
At last, is this a book about RD
Laing's therapeutic technique and the crisis in psychotherapy? The book jacket
of The Crucible of Experience, RD Laing
& The Crisis of Psychotherapy by Daniel Burston presents the promise of
detailed report of Laing's practice as a therapist. The title leads us to
believe that Laing's perception of a crisis in psychotherapy will be examined,
as well.
The book opens with a dry
distillation of Laing's life story, followed by an admittedly self-propelled
treatise on existential phenomenology. Although the author's erudition is in
evidence--he is assistant professor of psychology at
One of Laing's most important
therapeutic mentors, the interdisciplinary Eric Graham Howe, who introduced
Eastern philosophy to psychotherapy in England, is not discussed, nor is any
reference to his body of work to be found in this bibliography. Howe hired
Laing as Director of The Langham Clinic in 1962 and then dismissed him in
December of 1965, primarily because he disapproved of his use of drugs. By
1965, Laing's mentor, Howe, had published 9 books and been a member of the
original Tavistock Clinic in 1928. Before their falling out, in 1965, Laing
wrote a glowing forward to Howe's popular book Cure or Heal, referring to him as a master psychologist: "What
we have here is not a synthesis of different schools, but an original
expression in the modern idiom of that which all schools seek to express in
more or less rigid and desiccated ways. But the expression here is supple and
fresh." For himself, he would, no doubt, have preferred this epitaph, to
the series of intellectual debts ascribed to him by Burston. The exciting and
disturbing thing shared by Laing and his mentor, Howe, is that they both
brought to bear on therapeutic issues an understanding derived from spiritual
experience, germinated in flesh and blood reality.
A vital sense of the intuitive
genius of Laing's therapeutic interventions is missing from this account, by
Burston, who never had the benefit of meeting Laing.
In the course of knowing Laing and
observing his sessions during our 9-year project of writing RD Laing & Me: Lessons in Love, a
book that both depicts and describes our therapeutic alliance, much of Laing's
therapeutic style was revealed. Here Laing acted as if discussing method was
like discussing sex, as if it took away from the effect. Laing's reticence on
methodology made Burston's task of describing Laing's method all the more
difficult. His "method" was
more of an attitude, a presence, and a receptiveness to the person called the
patient. It was a suspension of one's own agenda for the purpose of letting
another's out into the light. Both points are illustrated by the fact that he
allowed me to analyze our relationship in our book in psychoanalytic terms as "resistance"
and "transference," while avoiding such terminology himself.
Burston does point out Laing's
emphasis on the present (p47) and
conveniently distills his conception of Laing's therapeutic goals to four
points:
"1. to restore the person's
capacity for relatedness to others and authentic self disclosure
2. to reduce anxiety by overcoming
the person's feelings/fears of engulfment, implosion and petrification.
3. to help patients differentiate
between 'true' and 'false' guilt and to minimize or abolish the latter, and
4. to make the 'unconscious'
conscious, … by illuminating the person's recourse to pretense and
self-deception…and elucidating patterns of collusion and/or
mystification…."(p51)
Burston distills Laing's positive
methodological recommendations to only 2 points:
"1.express
tact, courtesy, and empathy for patients, and
2. be fully awake,
aware, and present to them."
Unfortunately, these points do not
depict Laing's capacity for therapeutic relationship, nor do they sufficiently
differentiate him from most practitioners. In fact, I observed Laing to be
quite unusual in his therapeutic approach.
He might be playful with a
patient, and go with him to watch old war movies, or join him in song with a
piano accompaniment. He was willing and able to participate in another's world.
A believer in the healing benefits that could be found in altered states, he
was not afraid of losing himself in this extension. He tended to the patients
according to their wants and their needs.
Actually, Laing wasn't known for
his courteous behavior, and could be quite confrontational with patients and
friends alike. In therapy or out he didn't hesitate to point out inappropriate
or maladaptive behavior in others.
The uniqueness of his way was that
he could share the experience of others with great compassion, sagacity and
wit, and without distancing himself from them with diagnostic reification. Many
people experienced being closer to him than anyone else. He was quite good at
establishing trust, and his trick there was honesty and attention. After a
strategic therapeutic session with a female patient in
The crisis referred to in the
subtitle, RD Laing and the Crisis of
Psychotherapy, which apparently refers to the impending death of
psychotherapy and a loss of some of the exclusivity of professional practice,
is contrived as it relates to Laing. Laing did not fear accountability. Neither
did he did he try to keep psychotherapy as a closely held profession. On the
contrary, he embraced the opportunity to increase the options for people to
help each other. My first book, Report of
Effective Psychotherapy: Legislative Testimony, summarized and analyzed the
egalitarian findings of psychotherapy outcome research. Laing described it as
"illuminating and insightful," and even used that book with at least
one student who asked for an explanation of psychotherapy. He was holding on
with an opened hand.
Laing's effect still reverberates
through those who have been touched by him. The whole field of psychotherapy
has been altered and empowered by his ideas. Although Burston's book attempts
to place Laing in an intellectual zeitgeist, it suffers from the proverbial
hardening of the categories, and fails to convey the vitality and subtlety that
was Laing's gift.
Co-author with RD Laing
RD Laing & Me: Lessons in
Love, Hillgarth Press,
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