Eighteen months before she died of leukaemia at the age of 21, Susan Laing, RD
Laing’s second oldest daughter, was interviewed by The Sunday Times Magazine
for a 1974 feature about the children of celebrities. Her contribution was
unutterably sad. She claimed that her father, then the best-known
psychiatrist in Britain bar Jung and Freud, could not get accustomed to his
children being grown up. “We’ve got too many problems for him,” she said.
“He can solve everybody else’s, but not ours.”
It was a rare insight into the chaotic private life of a man lauded as one of
the most controversial and remarkable figures in the history of psychiatry.
RD Laing frequently asserted that mental illness was rooted in the family,
yet he treated his own family abominably. He abandoned his first five
children and left them in penury. He went on to father five more children
with three different women, had innumerable affairs, was subject to violent
drunken rages and became obsessed with his own fame. Yet he treated patients
with extraordinary compassion and empathy, qualities he denied his own
family.
Adrian Laing, the last of his children from his first marriage and now a
London-based lawyer with a family of his own, says it was particularly
difficult for them to reconcile the fact that their father, famous as a
family psychiatrist, chose to have nothing to do with his own family. “Being
the son of RD Laing was neither amazing nor enlightening,” he wrote in a
biography of his father. “For most of the time it was a crock of shit.”
Laing sprang to prominence in the 1960s with the publication of The Divided
Self, a pioneering study of schizophrenia. It became a bestseller and
transformed him from an obscure Scottish psychiatrist into a hero of the
counterculture movement, admired by luminaries such as Sylvia Plath, Ted
Hughes and Harold Pinter, courted by pop stars like the Beatles and Jim
Morrison. He frequented A-list parties, was a guest on talk shows and was
hailed as Britain’s Timothy Leary for his advocacy of LSD. He loved every
minute.
Laing’s message integrated madness, alienation, love, violence, families,
politics and religion. He set out to make insanity understandable to sane
people and put forward the proposition that madness was caused not by some
genetic inheritance, but by other people; that a breakdown could be
considered a breakthrough; and that blame for madness could be attributed to
the lunacy of society.
A prophet proclaiming that the world was mad could not have made a more timely
arrival on what was then known as “the scene”, for it was the
era of “Swinging London”, of Vietnam and flower power, hippies and drugs,
mysticism and astrology, pop and protest. The Divided Self was
unquestionably the book to be seen carrying around. Some people even read
it. A string of other books followed, some written under the influence of
mind-altering substances (he was by then drinking heavily and using LSD),
which consolidated his reputation not just as a radical psychiatrist but a
celebrity in his own right. With his darkly handsome good looks, fashionably
long hair, white linen suits, effortless charm, soft Scottish accent and
wild, romantic imagination, he was also irresistible to women — a fact he
was always happy to exploit.
A young Sean Connery, struggling to cope with fame after the success of his
first film role as James Bond, was one of his early patients. Laing
persuaded Connery that an LSD trip would help him deal with anxiety; Laing
accompanied Connery on the trip, taking a smaller dose of the hallucinogenic
drug, which was legal at the time. Diane Cilento, then Connery’s wife, later
described Laing’s unusual consulting technique: “He demanded a great deal of
money, complete privacy, a limo to transport him to and from the meeting and
a bottle of the best single-malt Scotch at each session.”
I only met Laing once, in 1977, when I interviewed him at his home in north
London. By then his star was beginning to fade, but, still desperate for the
limelight, he had produced a book of poetry, Do You Love Me?, which he was
keen to promote. He claimed readers would find “haunting” its pages the
“cadence of music hall, cabaret, jazz, nursery rhymes and pop music”. What
they actually found was tawdry drivel like this: “I could tell/from your
eyes/you fell/from the skies/out of the blue/there were you/but I knew it
wasn’t true/and away you flew”. Do You Love Me? was not Laing’s
finest hour.
His preoccupation with the family was probably rooted in his own emotionally
austere upbringing. Ronnie Laing was an only child, born in 1927 into a
repressed middle-class Presbyterian family in the Govanhill district of
Glasgow. His father was an electrical engineer and a gifted musician (a
talent Ronnie inherited), his mother was over-protective, cold, and viewed
overt displays of affection, particularly with her husband, as distasteful.
Ronnie would later claim his mother made effigies of him into which she
stuck pins, but none of his children believed it. It was, however, certainly
true that he was not allowed to bathe on his own until he was 15.
Six months after graduating as a doctor from Glasgow University, he was called
up for national service and spent the first year working in the British Army
Psychiatric Unit at Netley in Hampshire, where the treatment largely comprised
administering insulin comas, electric shocks and drugs. Laing made friends
with one of the patients, spent hours with him in his padded cell and
realised that the man’s condition improved by just talking to him. It was at
Netley that he began dating a nurse called Anne Hearne, who soon discovered
she was pregnant. They married in October 1952 and their daughter, Fiona,
was born in December. Two more daughters and two sons would follow.
Laing was into his thirties before he compl-eted his training as a
psychiatrist and psychoanalyst — a delay he attributed to the time he had to
spend toeing the line for “a whole hierarchy of idiots and mediocrities” —
but by then he was extraordinarily widely read, having devoured Freud, Jung,
Kant, Nietzsche, Sartre, Socrates and many other works of philosophy,
theology and psychology. “He was tremendously erudite,” says his friend
Brian Bates, a professor of psychology at the University of Sussex. “He
liked to joke that he was the only person in the world who spoke ancient
Greek with a Glasgow accent.”
His first serious experiment was setting up what he called a “Rumpus Room” at
Gartnavel Royal Hospital in Glasgow, which provided a clean, calm and
friendly environment for highly disturbed patients to ride out their
tantrums. He had a rare, intuitive ability to communicate empathetically
with disturbed people. Once, on a tour of a hospital in Chicago, he was
confronted with a young woman crouching in a padded cell, stark naked and
silently rocking to and fro. He stripped off and joined her, crouching
alongside and rocking in time with her. After 20 minutes, to the amazement
of watching doctors, she spoke for the first time in months. “Did it never
occur to you to do that?” he asked them afterwards.
Laing conducted extensive research into schizophrenia and families at the
Tavistock Institute of Human Relations, opened his own consulting rooms in
Wimpole Street, and in 1962 was appointed clinical director of the
prestigious Langham Clinic. He was sacked three years later because of his
increasing drug use. The following year his marriage broke up acrimoniously
after years of vicious marital warfare. Laing was at the height of his
celebrity at the time and earning considerable sums, but he told the lawyer handling
his divorce that he wanted to pay no more than the “legal minimum” to his
former wife. While Laing enjoyed the high life in London, Anne and the five
children returned to Glasgow, where they shared a single room and washed in
“the steamie” — the public baths. Anne had a contemptuous
phrase she used to describe her hated husband: he was, she liked to say,
“the square root of nothing”.
During a trial separation from Anne but before their divorce, Laing had an
affair with the journalist Sally Vincent, whom he met through mutual
friends. She remembers him with great affection. “Ronnie was brilliant, a
complete original, but he desperately overdid the drugs and drink. He was
one of those drunks whose body would jack it in while his mind kept working.
He would be lying on the floor, paralytic but talking nonstop and making
perfect sense.
“He was very Glaswegian. I don’t think he’d ever been in a restaurant before
we got together; he certainly couldn’t read a French menu. If we went to the
theatre it was almost embarrassing — he would be like a child and want a tub
of ice cream in the interval.”
After being fired by the Langham, Laing got together with a group of similarly
radical therapists to set up a charitable organisation, the Philadelphia
Association, named after the ancient city of brotherly love, to provide
asylum for mentally disturbed people who would otherwise be treated in
psychiatric hospitals. The idea was that patients and doctors would live
together, thus breaking down the barriers between them.
A “community house” was established at Kingsley Hall, a former youth hostel in
east London. Sally Vincent was unimpressed. “It seemed to me that the
psychiatrists outnumbered the patients, who were all female and uniformly
good-looking. Ronnie would be pompousing about dressed in white robes
looking like Jesus and I’d be asking him, ‘Why has that bloke got his hands
all over that girl?’ The whole thing stank.”
Given the strong personalities of those involved in the Philadelphia
Association, it was a sure bet they would soon fall out with each other. One
evening during a blazing row about how the project was being managed, Laing
asked one of the group, Aaron Esterson, to stand up.
He leant across to remove the other man’s spectacles, then hit him, hard, on
the jaw with his fist. They ended up rolling on the floor, punching each
other furiously. Understandably, Esterson afterwards would have nothing to
do with Laing, claiming he was “mentally unstable”. Laing took a sabbatical
for a year, travelling with his new girlfriend, a stunning German graphic
designer by the name of Jutta Werner, and their two small children, through
India and Sri Lanka, where he studied Buddhist meditation techniques. On his
return he discovered that his celebrity status was slipping away. His books
were no longer selling as much or being received with the same critical
acclaim and his views were being marginalised.
“Laing had an aching addiction to fame and celebrity and it unquestionably
damaged his reputation,” said Daniel Burston, a professor of psychology at
Duquesne University in Pennsylvania and the author of two books on Laing.
“His need for attention was a lifelong problem and robbed his work of
credibility, particularly after he had a serious midlife crisis of
creativity and felt he had run out of things to say. He became a tragic
figure, his behaviour erratic and self-destructive. There were flashes of
the old brilliance, but much of his later output was of questionable value.
Frankly, it was dreck.”
After a lecture tour in the United States, undertaken solely to earn money,
Laing began to focus his attention on what he called “the politics of the
birth process”. To the dismay of his admirers, he started organising
“rebirthing workshops”, with teams kitted out in pastel-coloured tracksuits,
and took up esoteric causes like shamanism. He was transformed, said
Burston, from one of the most compelling intellectual heroes of the 1960s
into a “gruesome purveyor of mysticism and bad poetry”.
Meanwhile, what remained of his family life was falling apart. In 1973 he
discovered that Jutta was having an affair with a television producer and he
descended into an alcoholic depression. Although they were reconciled (they
would marry the following year), he remained in a fragile state. He was
enraged when he returned to his home in Belsize Park from a visit abroad to
discover there had been “a bit of bother”. Karen, his 17-year-old daughter
from his first marriage, had agreed to baby-sit for Jutta but had turned up
high on drugs. Jutta had freaked out; the police had been called. Laing
overreacted: he travelled up to Glasgow, burst into the family house, Ruskin
Place, in a fury and attacked Karen, beating her mercilessly until her two
brothers intervened.
Karen still lives in Glasgow, now has children of her own and works as a
humanistic psychotherapist, but it has not helped her understand her father.
This is the first time she has talked to a national newspaper about her
upbringing. “There was a lot of violence when we were young — vicious, nasty
stuff — and at times it certainly felt an unsafe place to be. It was an
awful culture shock when my parents separated, leaving our schools and
friends in London and arriving in Glasgow in the early 1960s, which then had
a frightening reputation for gang violence. We had occasional visits from my
father which always ended in rows. I felt hurt, angry and confused he
couldn’t be there for us.
“I have sat in on sessions with my father while he was working with clients
and experienced his genius as a man who could relate to another human’s pain
and suffering. There seems to me to be a huge void and contradiction between
RD Laing the psychiatrist and Ronnie Laing the father. There was something
he was constantly searching for within himself and it tortured him.”
In 1975, Karen’s sister Susan was diagnosed with monoblastic leukaemia and was
not expected to live another 12 months. Her mother, her fiancé and her
doctors all agreed that the diagnosis should be kept from her to spare her
further suffering. Her father disagreed; he took a train from London to
Glasgow, visited his daughter in hospital and informed her that in all
likelihood she was unlikely to live beyond her 21st birthday. He then
returned to London and left the family to cope. Susan’s mother was
incensed and told her children she hoped that her former husband would “rot
in hell”.
Susan died in March 1976. At her funeral her brother Adrian was weeping on his
mother’s shoulder when the social worker assigned to Susan’s case, who had
been invited, told him to pull himself together. Ronnie went berserk,
dragged the woman across the room and began pounding her against the wall,
shouting between thumps: “Don’t you f***ing understand… that what I am
f***ing going on about… is that f***ing social workers have no f***ing right
to f***ing interfere with families!” He then threw her out.
By any measure, Laing was going off the rails. On a visit to New York he
agreed to meet an American psychiatrist, Gene Nameche, to discuss the
possibility of collaborating on a biography of Jung. In Laing’s suite at the
St Moritz hotel the two men began drinking. Something triggered Laing’s
temper and he began beating Nameche, eventually hurling a marble coffee
table at him. Fortunately, it missed, smashing to pieces against a wall, but
then Laing decided that the television must be destroyed and started
throwing shards of the coffee table at it. When it eventually exploded, the
hotel security guards burst into the suite, guns drawn. Laing, suddenly
sober, persuaded them that Nameche was suffering from a psychiatric disorder
and was responsible for the damage. Nameche was handcuffed and escorted from
the premises.
At a conference in Saragossa, Spain, in 1980, Laing discovered Jutta had had
another affair, a brief fling with a German lawyer. He began drinking even
more heavily. At the same conference he met Roberta Russell, a New York
businesswoman involved in psychotherapy. “Laing seemed to me to be a
brilliant, sad, elusive man, fraught with contradictions,” she recalled. “I
felt protectively drawn to him.”
They would later become lovers and write a book together — RD Laing and Me:
Lessons in Love — about their affair. Russell admits that Laing’s motive in
co-operating on the book was to make money, while she wanted to share her
life with him. When she told him she was in love with him he replied, she
said, “with tears in his eyes, as he was no stranger to unrequited love,
that he had nothing to encourage me with in that regard. He just wanted our
book”.
Back in Britain, Laing’s behaviour towards his colleagues became intolerable,
and in 1981 he was obliged to resign as chairperson of the Philadelphia
Association. Jutta finally walked out on him around this time, taking their
three children with her. Her place was taken by Sue Sunkel, a German-born
psychotherapist who would bear his ninth child, Benjamin, born in 1984.
Sunkel’s view that Laing could “manage” his drinking does not bear close
scrutiny. In September 1984 he was arrested for drunkenness after throwing a
full bottle of wine through the window of the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh Centre
in Hampstead shortly before midnight. He was found sitting on the pavement
and muttering obscenities about “orange wankers”. At Hampstead police
station a “brown substance” was found in his pocket. He later pleaded guilty
to possession of 6.98 grams of cannabis resin and was given a conditional
discharge, an event that would have a far-reaching effect on his career.
Two years later, one of his patients lodged a complaint with the General
Medical Council, accusing Laing of being drunk and abusive during a
consultation. The lengthy inquiry that followed took account of Laing’s
conviction for possession of illegal drugs, and in May 1987 he was struck
off the medical register. By this time Sunkel had been ditched and Laing was
living with his longtime personal assistant, Marguerita Romayne-Kendon, a
New Zealander. He moved to America and then back to Europe. He was 61,
without a profession, a fixed address or funds, when he collapsed and died
on the tennis court in St Tropez on August 23, 1989.
“Ronnie was a great figure,” said Dr Joseph Berke, who worked with Laing at
Kingsley Hall. “He opened up the field. Certainly he had a lot of detractors
but it was mainly because they felt terrified and threatened by what he said
and wrote. Yes, he had a complicated personal life, but then many people do.
He wasn’t an alcoholic, he was a Glaswegian. Glaswegians drink.”
Paradoxically, Laing is today much more highly regarded abroad than in
Britain. Nevertheless his works are still required reading for students of
psychiatry and psychotherapy around the world, more books have been written
about him since his death than he ever wrote himself and The Divided Self
has been continuously in print for nearly 50 years. While improved drugs
have meant that a biomedical treatment for serious mental illness is now the
norm (something he would have hated), his influence on the treatment of less
serious conditions remains profound.
Not long after his death, his son Adrian began researching a biography of his
father. He admitted to intense negative feelings towards him, but says
writing the book proved cathartic, and he developed a better relationship
with his father after his death than he ever had during his life.
Demons continued to pursue the family. In May last year, the decomposed body
of Adam Laing, one of RD Laing’s three children with Jutta Werner, was found
in a tent pitched in an isolated field on the Balearic island of Formentera.
A discarded vodka bottle and an almost empty bottle of wine were found
nearby. Adam, who was 41, suffered from depression and, like his father, was
a heavy drinker. He had been badly affected by the break-up of his parents’
marriage in 1981, never settled down to a regular job and had grown
melancholic after splitting up with his long-term girlfriend. A postmortem
revealed he died from a heart attack, also like his father.
Most of Laing’s other children, now, of course, all adults, are in touch.
Marguerita Romayne-Kendon and her son, Charles, have returned to New
Zealand, but Fiona and Karen still live in Glasgow. Their brother Paul, an
executive of an oil company, lives in Devon. Natasha and Max, the surviving
children of Jutta, live in London, where Max works in a bike shop and
Natasha teaches yoga. Benjamin Sunkel-Laing is studying for an MSc at King’s
College, London, and is planning to organise a conference later this year,
bringing together some of his father’s old colleagues with the new
generation of critical psychiatrists. Now there is to be a movie about RD
Laing, provisionally titled Mad to Be Normal and apparently with Robert
Carlyle playing the lead. Since Laing attracted controversy throughout his
career, it is entirely appropriate that a film about his life should be the
subject of a bitter feud long before a single reel is in the can. Bob
Mullan, Laing’s “official biographer” and putative director of the project,
says it is ready to roll; Adrian Laing believes the Mullan project will
never get off the ground because Mullan is insisting on being the director.
Adrian wants the film to be based on his own warts-and-all biography.
When the movie project was announced in a small flurry of publicity in
December, both Bob Mullan and Adrian Laing agreed that Robert Carlyle was
the perfect choice to play Laing. But that is about all they agree on.
Their animosity dates back more than two decades to the last years of Laing’s
life, when Mullan, a freelance writer and documentary film-maker, got
himself appointed as Laing’s official biographer. Adrian was not pleased,
particularly as he had had a kind of rapprochement with his father and his
father knew that he, Adrian, was planning his own book. He also thought his
father had been taken for a sucker, signing away the rights to his life
story for a paltry £2,000 plus a percentage of the royalties, and refused to
co-operate with Mullan.
RD Laing: A Life, by Adrian Laing, was published in 1994 and widely praised
for being a brutally honest and objective portrait. Curiously, in the end
Laing’s “official biographer” never actually produced a proper biography.
Mullan wrote three books about Laing, based on extensive interviews with
Laing himself, his friends and colleagues, but none could be described as a
full account of Laing’s life and times. He did, however, write a
screenplay for a film about three years ago and claims to have got Robert
Carlyle interested.
Now nobody really wants to talk about the movie. Carlyle’s agent said she had
“no comment” to make. When I approached Mullan his initial response was: “To
be honest, I’m not too enthusiastic about talking about Ronnie Laing” — very
odd, considering he wanted to make a movie about him. Adrian Laing was
friendly but guarded, at first agreeing to talk off the record while making
it clear, not unreasonably, that he believed a movie about his father’s life
should be based on his book.
Mullan opened up a bit when he learnt I had been talking to Adrian. “I am
going to maintain a dignified silence on the subject of Adrian Laing,” he
said. “All I want to say about the film is that the screenplay is loosely
based around Ronnie’s Kingsley Hall days, Robert Carlyle has signed up for
it and three-quarters of the finance is in place. I am quietly confident it
will be made.”
Adrian Laing begs to differ. “I would be delighted to see Robert Carlyle play
my father,” he said, “but Bob Mullan does not inspire me with confidence. He
has not been in contact with me and I have not seen the script. To be
honest, I think his project is wishful thinking.”
It is all very complicated, very Laingian. Ronnie would have loved it.
