R.D. Laing in NYC

"Did You Used to be R.D.Laing?" is a play by Mike Maran celebrating controversial and radical psychiatrist, R.D.Laing, NYC Mar 30-April 7 www.smarttix.com

Category:

Entertainment

Tags:

• Mad
• is
• normal

[laynasor]

is it coming to uk?

[Bampod]

laynasor,

Writer & performer Mike Maran is based in UK.

Please go to mikemaran website to find out his UK performance schedule.

[whiff1962]

You ought to read Thomas Szasz' "Anti-psychiatry: quackery squared" to get a good deal of insight into the life and work of a charlatan, "renegade" psychiatrist, who, to the end, was unapologetic about his moral and ethical inconsistencies.

The toadyism of Laing:

watch?v=hsJ5C1dyNMI&feature=re­lated

The fundamentally anti-democratic, FS Marxist, Fromm:

comment_servlet?all_comments=1­&v=mPw5prYLc5w

Feel free to read and respond. Cheers.

[erp65]

@whiff1962 -- Rollo May, Erich Fromm, Clark Moustakas ... are they too solipsistic peddlers of Marxist gobbledygook? Serious question. Trying to ferret out if it's Laing's head alone you have on a stick, or if you ultimately have it out for all existential, humanist social-psychologists.

(For the record, I do not rank Laing's career -- as writer, as practitioner -- with any of the aforementioned, and I am not familiar with Szasz' work, though I'll be making up for that anon. )

[whiff1962]

@golsno147 Laing was certainly a master of deception and duplicity himself. His "politics" of experience is a rip off from such noted philosophers as Satre. There is little in the way of any meaningful clarity in the works of Laing, and certainly as pertains to his psychiatric practices, he was no less an arch coercer and statist! In short, his experiences are solipsistic and Marxist gobbledygook.

[whiff1962]

@golsno147 "heavily influenced by political prejudice."

This is an interesting though unwitting point you make. Is psychiatry, which calls itself a branch of medicine, anything remotely construed with the political? A: Yes. Any critical examination of what the psych enterprise says, and what it actually does, is most revelatory.

[whiff1962]

@CocteauDalighari You make the same category mistake as do many others. As for the moniker of "anti-psychiatry", again, Dr. Szasz' lifetime of published works will clearly vindicate his name. It is this needless confusion and fussing over the semantics that distracts from the real attention of present psychiatric practice. I suggest that you take up reading Szasz' works.

[CocteauDalighari]

@whiff1962 Szasz's original paper was called The Myth of Mental Illness; later turned into a book. Laing cited it in several of his own works.

These days, tho, Szasz is little more than a polemicist; much like Laing in his Politics of Experience. Szasz peddles the antipsychiatry movement like the pop press; there was never a movement, & even the originator of the term, David Cooper, never really defined it. As far as I can tell, antipsychiatry referred to what standard psychiatrists were doing.

[golsno147]

whiff1962 Laing was vilified by an Establishment who were envious of his success & popularity. He claimed no "achievements". His personal life and your assertion of

"moral failings" are completely irrelevant to an assessment of his intellect and wisdom.

Even Einstein's life and professional career were marked by ignorance, and lapses

in consistency and constancy. So what? Your deluded pseudo intellectual assertions are heavily influenced by political prejudice.

[whiff1962]

@golsno147 I suggest you read "Anti-psychiatry: quackery squared", by Thomas Szasz. Such sycophantic fawning does little to expose the fact that Laing did not do anything to reform psychiatry, especially of its carceral-coercive practices, as he, too, took part in same. His whole life, both personal and professional, was marked by lapses in consistency and constancy. Laing's personal moral failings are a matter of public record, and cannot be ignored when discussing his so-called renegade self.