Sanity Madness And The Family

With the help of his good friend and her three-legged dog, Leftovers, ten-year-old Keath learns how to handle the class bully and deal with being the only white boy in his class.

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'. Sanity, Madness and the Family is the result of their work. Eleven vivid case studies, often dramatic and disturbing, reveal patterns of affection and fear, 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 only comprehensible within their social and family contexts; their symptoms the manifestations of people struggling to live in untenable 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 understood the patient's world their apparent madness would become socially intelligible. This Routledge Classics edition includes a new Foreword by Hilary Mantel.

This volume traces the modern critical and performance history of this play, one of Shakespeare's most-loved and most-performed comedies. The essay focus on such modern concerns as feminism, deconstruction, textual theory, and queer theory.

In ‘The Politics of Experience’ and the visionary ‘Bird of Paradise’, R.D. Laing shows how the straitjacket of conformity imposed on us all leads to intense feelings of alienation and a tragic waste of human potential. He throws into question the notion of normality, examines schizophrenia and psychotherapy, transcendence and ‘us and them’ thinking, and illustrates his ideas with a remarkable case history of a ten-day psychosis. ‘We are bemused and crazed creatures,’ Laing suggests. This outline of ‘a thoroughly self-conscious and self-critical human account of man’ represents a major attempt to understand our deepest dilemmas and sketch in solutions. ‘Everyone in contemporary psychiatry owes something to R.D. Laing’ Anthony Clare, the Guardian.