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“... schizophrenia as a protest against the feminine mystique’. A final chapter on R.D. Laing and his epigones seems rather anti-climactic. Their anti-psychiatric follies, after all, are by now rather thoroughly discredited. The intellectual vapidity of Laing’s later work, the transparent hucksterism and ...”

“... not inhumane. It is not, that is, to be confused with the evil progressivism of the Little Red Schoolbook, with its instructions to the child on drug-taking, and the therapeutic use of porn and oral sex. One has to equate Anthea’s book with Holbrook’s own English for the Rejected (1964), a work which significantly influenced primary-school teaching ...”

“... First spelled out in psychoanalytic papers by Winnicott, it reached a huge public when R.D. Laing published The Divided Self in 1959. Suddenly everyone realised they had a false self, and wanted to get rid of it. Erikson did not incorporate these ideas; but his description in ‘Reflections on American Identity’ of ...”

“... to make, called Morgan, written by David Mercer, who was at that time heavily influenced by R.D. Laing. Filming began in a café on the Uxbridge Road. I’d never been on a film set before. Karel would stand, surrounded by large men, and slowly they would work out quite elaborate shots. He seemed authoritative and knowledgeable, both part of the world and ...”

“... Open Way’, integrating psychoanalysis with Eastern philosophy (he was to influence R.D. Laing). ‘Learn to make the best of what you have,’ he advises. ‘If you can’t have that, you have this. Learn to love this.’ With war looming, and friends panicking, Jean decides London is bad for her and for her writing. In 1939 she moves to an isolated ...”

“... awareness of one’s desires and beliefs – and while this is a very hard conviction to get rid of, it is possible to imagine self-conscious beings who do not have it. Certain forms of Eastern religious meditation may aim at overcoming this belief about oneself, but mere intellectual conviction that we do not have free will is not enough. By itself it ...”

“... or undosed in manic terror, up and down our high streets to participate in the real world. R.D. Laing, along with others in the anti-psychiatry movement, started well by living with and listening to the speech of the mad, but ended up imposing on them his belief that he too had the gift of tongues and took charge of speaking truth to normality. He began as ...”

“... I had, and I think she had, a sense that she knew it all. She had been pals with R.D. Laing and lived some crazed years with Clancy Sigal. She had read a bunch of Pelican books on the sociology and psychology of behaviour. We all did then, they sat on bookshop shelves like a university course: Laing, David ...”

“... the sort of talent that Jung brought to this delicate, but potent encounter: the young R.D. Laing to a great degree, Harry Stack Sullivan when he was in the mood, D.W. Winnicott with children, and very few others. The patients loved Jung; staff were in awe. For most of this century, the kind of madness people have been willing to settle for has involved ...”

“... in Covent Garden. All the drugs went down the loo and someone took charge of the hoover to get rid of bits of hash on the floor. Kids playing games. Except that some went to prison for a year or two. Not me. Then the methedrine got to be too much. I had to stop it, and while I was at it I might as well cut out the acid and barbiturates, all of it. Cleaning ...”

“... wife Dusty. Naomi Mitchison. Ted Hughes, Christopher Logue (whose recording of poetry and jazz, Red Bird, I’d bought with my pocket money at St Christopher’s), Lindsay Anderson, Fenella Fielding. A Portuguese couple, described to me as ‘a poet in exile and his glamorous wife’, would remain friends of Doris, about the only ones who did, until her ...”

“... seemed to consolidate. Not the extremist accounts of the damaged, beatific self in R.D. Laing and David Cooper, but a running tally of private hurt combined with an inventory of (equally private) need that thrived on a domestication of the visionary beliefs which gained currency in the 1960s. ‘Alienation’ was still being claimed as a negative ...”

“... into the rucksack: UFOs and Yeats, Grace Slick and Maud Gonne, ley lines, Timothy Leary and R.D. Laing, as we struck camp and pitched it a few metres down the road the following evening. It didn’t matter that we were still in the same place: the point was to see it – and ourselves – differently, to change the people we were and the place we were in by ...”

“... face of the black economy. He mingled with poets who dealt sugar-lumps laced with LSD. He met R.D. Laing, Lyall Watson and became involved with P.J. Proby’s management. He was, so he says, ‘trying to create an alternative society, like all the other arseholes.’ Which is why he was recruited by MI6. He was a natural. Hamilton McMillan (‘Mac’), an old ...”

“... a stable masculine voice so much as searching at the edges of sanity with the likes of R.D. Laing. The other affair was with a psychiatrist from the Maudsley who, she said, had been the love of her life, but who was married and not prepared to leave his wife. She was 44 when I arrived at her house. There were a few one-night stands and weekends away ...”