Abstract
Abstract R. D. Laing's relationship with psychoanalysis is enigmatic due to Laing's own ambivalence about his association with the psychoanalytic community, as well as that community's indifference to Laing's views about the nature and practice of psychoanalysis. This article explores the many influences on Laing's clinical philosophy and the central role that experience plays in his thinking, including the philosophers, Martin Heidegger, Jean‐Paul Sartre, Soren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Maurice Merleau‐Ponty, Max Scheler, Paul Tillich, Eugene Minkowski, Martin Buber, G. W. F. Hegel and Michel de Montaigne, as well as the psychoanalysts, D. W. Winnicott, Frieda Fromm‐Reichmann, and Sigmund Freud. Despite Laing's debt to existential philosophy, his principal debt was to the sceptical and phenomenological philosophical traditions.
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