Customer Reviews

Politics Of the Family, The

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Never received the item I ordered. When I asked for a refund I was denied.

I own an older version of this, with the Henry More sculpture on the cover. A collection of lectures, altered for book form. Kind of a messy format but not as polemical as the more popular The Politics of Experience.

Notable for some very obvious but otherwise-by-others neglected observations: standard doctors are called in to intervene in medical emergencies; psychiatrists are called in to intervene in social crises PRESUMED to be caused by medical emergencies. What's endearingly called the medical model is not some magical talisman kept in a velvet case until use; it's the set of procedures in which all doctors are trained. Laing just believed it was inadequate when applied to social situations, ones in which some ONE is the problem & if that some ONE "gets right," everything'll be OK.

Whether you believe that a real medical malady called mental illness has a genuine pathological etiology that can be diagnosed & treated, the fact remains that one gets diagonsed on the basis of conduct & not on the basis of that medical malady.

As in the much better-formatted "Sanity, Madness & Family," Laing shows us that once we see what people in those situations are trying to do & what they're succeeding at doing, it's difficult to understand why any one person in that situation gets diagnosed at all.

I could never get this book. It took my twenty years of reading the Divided Self to fully understand this author. This book was also titled the bird of paradise, but is not the book the other reviewer thought it was, that was also a book by RD Laing but with another author and also had the word *family* in the title. This book originally was not like an accounting of families but philosophical and psychiatric speculation. This book is all fine for someone studying psychology or psychiatry but for fellow consumers of mental health or their families I would say avoid this rather weighty tome.

This book is strange of his writings. It is composed simply of interviews about patients and their families. These interviews were recorded by the tape recorders or the hidden observers. It's all of this book. All conversations or their situations, however, talk something important to us silently. No theoretical comments are added, but only the fact. Let the theoretical considerations trusted to others in other places. By understanding the malicious situations of the patients, it will show us the important method of the observation about our unconscious situations of conflicts.

This book is strange of his writings. It is composed simply of interviews about patients and their families. These interviews were recorded by the tape recorders or the hidden observers. It's all of this book. All conversations or their situations, however, talk something important to us silently. No theoretical comments are added, but only the fact. Let the theoretical considerations trusted to others in other places. By understanding the malicious situations of the patients, it will show us the important method of the observation about our unconscious situations of conflicts.