A Reply to Robert R. Calder

Abstract

Robert R. Calder's review of my book, R.D. Laing (Calder 2006), is a startling contribution to Scottish history of ideas. The book, published as part of the series Edinburgh Review Introductions to Scottish Culture, is 'rubbish' because its author is complacent - 'patting himself on the back'; a rabble-rouser - 'His method throughout is demagogic'; intellectually dependent - 'parasitical on [Daniel] Burston'; and incapable of rational thought - 'eschewing [...] self-doubt and attention to standards of argument, or evidence'. I am mystified by Calder's attribution of demagoguery. I am alleged to have used Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest as 'evidence of the state of current hospitals'; when I both explicitly refer to it as a literary representation, and stress that it was composed in die 1950s. A similar wilful distortion and exaggeration occurs in Calder's claim that my brief reading of Valeriy Tarsis's Ward-7, a satire on Soviet psychiatric repression, 'bawls Stalinists! at [...] orthodox psychiatrists'. It simply does not Abusus non toilit usum; a critique of Soviet abuses could not in itself convict Western psychiatry. But it surely invited concern about the possibility of Western psychiatric misuse. A further allegation is that I fail in intellectual consistency. On the one hand, I laud Laing for his awareness of the 'contrast between the understanding which a patient might share in respect of his condition, and explanation by way of sheerly causative factors'. Yet my brief biographical chapter supposedly provides 'sheer explanation' by referring to Laing's troubled family life. Calder fails to appreciate the distinction that he invokes. Had I argued that Laing's mother, by prohibiting jam and jelly-babies, in some way affected her child's brain development, then I would have provided 'sheer explanation'. But I say no more than what is understandabl e and highly plausible: Laing's family life gave him a motive and material for his intellectually accomplished explorations of madness.