Scottish psychiatrist, the most publicly visible figure of what came to be called the antipsychiatry movement and one of the most widely read psychiatric authors of the 1960s and 1970s. Laing's central claim was a phenomenological one: that the experience of the person diagnosed as schizophrenic is intelligible — often in the detail of its content, always in the fact of its being a response to a real situation — rather than simply a biological disorder to be managed. To make schizophrenic speech legible, he argued, required not a clinical distance but a sustained effort to occupy the patient's point of view, and the family and social situation in which that point of view had had to form.
His first book, The Divided Self (1960), written when he was 28, applied a Sartrean and Heideggerian phenomenology of the self to the schizoid condition — the person for whom the embodied self has become a false, performing front and the real self has withdrawn to an "unembodied" inner sanctuary. Self and Others (1961) developed the interpersonal side; Sanity, Madness and the Family (1964, with Aaron Esterson) presented eleven detailed case studies of families whose patterns of mystification, attributed identities, and incompatible demands made the daughter's schizophrenic breakdown a readable response to an unliveable situation. The Politics of Experience (1967) is the book that carried him into wide cultural reception: an essayistic, polemical argument that the normal socialization of children in the modern family is itself a violation, that much of what psychiatry treats as disorder is in fact insight, and — in its most controversial passage — that psychotic episodes may at times be healing transformations rather than illnesses to be cut short.
From 1965 Laing was central to the therapeutic community at Kingsley Hall in London, an experiment in non-coercive treatment where patients and staff lived together without the structure of hospital hierarchy. The experiment produced the most famous account of a psychotic episode in the English-language literature, Mary Barnes's with Joseph Berke (Mary Barnes, 1971). Laing's later career was more diffuse — influenced by meditation, mysticism, rebirthing — and his reputation within psychiatry, never secure, declined. The influence outside psychiatry remained substantial: on the 1960s counterculture, on Foucault's reception in Anglophone contexts, on family-systems therapy, on later service-user and "mad pride" movements, and on a continuing critical line that asks what, exactly, psychiatric categories are doing when they do their work.
Laing is on the graph because his politics-of-madness argument — that psychiatric diagnosis is shot through with social assumptions, that schizophrenia can be read as an intelligible response to an unlivable family situation — belongs to the 1960s critique of institutions alongside Foucault, Szasz, and Goffman.