Self and Others

Laing left the Army in 1953, going to the Royal Gartnavel Hospital & Southern General Hospital, where he worked under Dr Angus McNiven, a humane psychiatrist, & Dr Ferguson Rodger, who was keen to try innovative approaches. In '54, Rodger brought Laing to the attention of an Edinburgh colleague, Dr J.D. Sutherland, who was then Director of the Tavistock Clinic in London. With the help of Sutherland, his successor Dr John Bowlby & Dr Charles Rycroft, Laing came to London in '56 to train as a psychoanalyst. During his analysis with Rycroft, he worked as the Registrar of the Adult Services Section at the Tavistock Clinic & completed his first book, The Divided Self, which was published in '60. In this book, & in Self & Others ('61) & The Politics of Experience ('67) Laing reproached Freud & his followers aligning psychoanalysis with the natural sciences to insure a measure of respectability for his new discipline. In its place, he proposed a rigorous "science of persons", or an "interpersonal phenomenology" which, while allowing for the existence of "the unconscious", owed as much to Hegel, Kierkegaard, Dilthey, Husserl, Heidegger, Buber &, above all, Sartre, as it did to Freud & his followers.