R.D. Laing: Psychiatry & Apocalypse

RONALD LAING MUST BE ACCOUNTED one of the main contributors to the theoretical and rhetorical armory of the contemporary Left. By the contemporary Left is meant that soft variant of the utopian urge which has jettisoned the Marx of Capital for the spiritual exploration of alienation, which acknowledges that capitalism “delivers the goods to an ever increasing part of the population,” 1 and therefore concentrates its attention on the salvation of the all-too-common man from what Marcuse calls “one dimensionality.”

With the erosion of a proletarian Communism, its confinement to institutional rigidity or its continuing commitment to Stalinoid deformations, one is left with a salon Communism, whereby the Ortega y Gassets of the Left join forces with their conservative opposite numbers on the other side of high table in a lament for the regrettable tendencies of mass society. It is they who— to take an image of Laing’s—are the lonely “survivors” in a neocapitalist civilization which is condemned to swinish contentment; confined to the pleasures of consumption without appropriate refinement of palate. “Consume more, live less,” as one of the slogans has it. So pessimist...