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.

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

Klappentext

One of Laing's key works.

Autorentext

R.D. Laing (19271989) was one of the best-known and most controversial psychiatrists of the post-war period. After a short period as a psychiatrist in the British Army he moved to the Tavistock Institute in London in 1956, where he worked alongside leading psychotherapists such as John Bowlby and D.W. Winnicott. In 1965 he co-founded the Philadelphia Practice in London, where patients, doctors and staff mixed freely without hierarchy. His many books include The Divided Self, Self and Others and Knots.

Aaron Esterson (19231999) was an existential psychoanalyst and family therapist, and with R.D. Laing helped found the Philadelphia Practice.

Inhalt

Preface
Preface to the Second Edition
Foreword to the Routledge Classics Edition, by Hilary Mantel
Introduction

1. The Abbotts
2. The Blairs
3. The Churches
4. The Danzigs
5. The Edens
6. The Fields
7. The Golds
8. The Heads
9. The Irwins
10. The Kings
11. The Lawsons Appendix
    Index