Sanity, Madness and the Family
About this eBook
Sanity, Madness and the Family
was met with widespread hostility by the psychiatric profession on its first publication, where the prevailing view was to treat psychosis as a medical problem to be solved. Yet it has done a great deal to draw attention to the complex and contested nature of psychosis. Above all, Laing and Esterson thought that if you understood the patient's world their apparent madness would become socially intelligible.This Routledge Classics edition includes a new Foreword by Hilary Mantel.
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About the author
R.D. Laing (1927–1989) was one of the best-known and most controversial psychiatrists of the post-war period. After a short period as a psychiatrist in the British Army he moved to the Tavistock Institute in London in 1956, where he worked alongside leading psychotherapists such as John Bowlby and D.W. Winnicott. In 1965 he co-founded the Philadelphia Practice in London, where patients, doctors and staff mixed freely without hierarchy. His many books include The Divided Self, Self and Others and Knots.
Aaron Esterson (1923–1999) was an existential psychoanalyst and family therapist, and with R.D. Laing helped found the Philadelphia Practice.
