- Born
- Died
- Birth nameRonald David Laing
- R.D. Laing was born on October 7, 1927 in Govanhill, Glasgow, Scotland, UK. He was a writer and director, known for Knutar/Knutna (1973), Solmuja (1986) and 2nd House (1973). He was married to Jutta Werner and Anne Laing. He died on August 23, 1989 in Saint-Tropez, Var, France.
- SpousesJutta Werner(February 14, 1974 - 1986) (divorced, 3 children)Anne Laing(October 11, 1952 - 1966) (divorced, 5 children)
- Father of Adrian Laing.
- Laing's last words, while dying of a heart attack in 1989, were that he wanted no doctor to be called.
- Author Clancy Sigal, who had visited Laing's commune at Kingsley Hall, published a novel in 1976 called "Zone of the Interior", about a radical Scottish psychiatrist who runs a commune called "the Manor," and who believes madness to be "a kind of supersanity implicitly superior to the alienation that normals called normality".
- The sane are mad and the mad are sane.
- Attempts to wake before our time are often punished, especially by those who love us most. Because they, bless them, are asleep. They think anyone who wakes up, or who, still asleep, realizes that what is taken to be real is a "dream" is going crazy.
- Long before a thermonuclear war can come about, we have had to lay waste our own sanity. We begin with the children. It is imperative to catch them in time. Without the most thorough and rapid brainwashing their dirty minds would see through our dirty tricks. Children are not yet fools, but we shall turn them into imbeciles like ourselves, with high I.Q.s if possible.
- A child born today in the United Kingdom stands a ten times greater chance of being admitted to a mental hospital than to a university.... This can be taken as an indication that we are driving our children mad more effectively than we are genuinely educating them. Perhaps it is our way of educating them that is driving them mad.
- Asylum, I think, is to say, a safe place to be when you're frightened and alone: In reference to Asylum (1972).
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