The poloitics of the family and other essays.

R. D. Laing was born in Glasgow in 1927 and educated at a grammar school and at Glasgow University where he graduated as a doctor of medicine in 1951. From 1951 to 1953 he was a psychiatrist in the British Army, and then worked at the Glasgow Royal Mental Hospital in 1955; the Department of Psychological Medicine at the University of Glasgow in 1956; and the Tavistock Clinic 1957-61. He was director of the Langham Clinic, London, 1962-5. From 1961 until 1967 he did research into families with the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations, as a Fellow of the Foundations Fund for Research in Psychiatry.

*Since 1964, Dr Laing has been Chairman of the Philadelphia Association Ltd, a charity whose members, associates, students, and friends are concerned to develop appropriate human responses, to those of us who become distracted and frantic by misery, which, in our present state of knowledge, is not mitigated, or is, sometimes, aggravated, by most forms of psychiatric intervention.

'As a psychoanalyst and psychiatrist, his research and therapy has focused for some years on very disturbed types of interaction in institutions, groups, and families.