Sanity, Madness and the Family

In the late 1950s the psychiatrist R.D.Laing and psychoanalyst Aaron Esterson spent five years interviewing eleven families of female patients diagnosed as 'schizophrenic'. Their question was: are the experience and behaviour that psychiatrists take as signs of schizophrenia more socially intelligible than supposed?

Sanity, Madness and the Family is the result of their work. Eleven vivid interviews, often dramatic and disturbing, reveal patterns of affection and hatred, manipulation and indifference within the family. But it was the conclusions they drew from their research that caused such controversy: they suggest that some forms of mental disorder are social creations, their symptoms the manifestations of people struggling to live in unliveable situations.

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 listened to the patient, she would tell you how her world worked and enable change to take place.

This Routledge Classics edition includes a new Foreword by Hilary Mantel.

R.D.Laing (1927-1989) was one of the best-known and most controversial psychiatrists of the post-war period. After graduating from Glasgow University as a doctor of medicine he spent two years a psychiatrist in the British Army before moving in 1953 to the Glasgow Royal Mental Hospital, then the youngest consultant in the country. In 1956 he moved to the Tavistock Institute in London where he worked alongside leading psychotherapists such as John Bowlby and D.W.Winnicott, remaining there until the mid-1960s. In 1965 he co-founded the Philadelphia Practice in London, where patients, doctors and staff mixed freely without hierarchy.