As a psychiatrist, R.D. (Ronnie) Laing was to the 1960s what Herbert Marcuse was as a philosopher, or Timothy Leary as a psychologist. These were opinion-makers with attitude, some interesting ideas, a capacity to personalise those ideas, a measure of self-indulgence, an openness to being celebrated as "seers" despite half-hearted gestures to the contrary, and an intersection with a period of history with new means and a large appetite for making icons. Laing stares at us from the dustjacket of Mullan's book, in fashionable 1970s dress, the left shirt-cuff studiedly adrift of his jacket sleeve, suggesting an insouciance about his appearance, the sensuous mouth counter-pointing those dark eyes which simultaneously penetrate the viewer and yet seem abstractedly inward. Here he is again on the back, naked from the waist up, from the same photographic sitting but with a somewhat more doleful expression: "The Thinker Vulnerable."
In yet another photo those same eyes are obscured by a trick whereby the sockets contain reversed spectacle lenses, as though it is we who are looking into his eyes. These are all photos for the sleeve of a record - Life before Death - and were taken in 1978 when Laing was 51, still feted, but the means of productive work much diminished and the tide of respectful celebrity ebbing fast.
What Laing encountered during his training as a psychiatrist in the 1950s reminds us just how crude and arrogant were many of the so-called "therapeutic" practices from which we are only now escaping. The gross destruction of the frontal lobes in lobotomies was no more sophisticated in terms of understanding or execution than denting a computer with a hammer to make it work. The widespread use of electric-shock treatment had no coherent intellectual basis to it other than that some people seemed sometimes to improve somewhat after it. The psychiatric system was nonetheless premised on the belief that the patient could best be understood as an object of medical science, rather than as a person with rights to dignity or, in more recent language, a "client" with a right to good service.
There is an older meaning of "patient" which is "a sufferer or victim", and it was an achievement of Laing's, and of other critics, to recover that meaning and challenge the forces of the status quo, which doubly victimised those who came into its "care" in big, inhuman mental hospitals. Laing became particularly associated with the idea that it is "normality" which can be pathological and absurd, and that those deemed "mad" by the normal consensus may well be coherent in ways that normality refuses to understand because if it did it would have to change, and the inertia of conventional respectability was sure to mass its full artillery against that prospect.
The problem with Laing was that he himself began to exhibit symptoms of victimhood, and the great weakness of Mullan's book is that he both accepts this in Laing and, with a reverence and subservience to a man whom he obviously adores, sees his role as defending Laing against all-comers, no matter what. His ability to make that defence, however, falls below what is needed.
The Irish public's acquaintance with Laing will have come largely from an appearance on the Late Late Show in which Laing was pathetically drunk, and a radio interview with Anthony Clare in which he came across as deeply depressed. Mullan italicises his anger at Clare for the extent to which Laing revealed himself, but this is entirely misplaced. As I listened to that interview on its first broadcast it had genuine pathos. Laing was using the airwaves to talk to his mother, an unusual and difficult mother to have, who had told him never to contact her again.
Laing himself would seem to have had his finger pressed on self-destruct. As he turned sixty, he had symptoms of a potential cancer and of a serious heart condition but refused to seek medical attention. At around the same time he had his tenth child (in all, there were four mothers involved). Laing was a complex, gifted, angry man who made positive contributions to a moral Zeitgeist.
Bob Mullan's terrier-like snapping at the heels of anyone who is critical of Laing is made intelligible by his revelations of his own vulnerabilities, but that, unfortunately, results in a book that illuminates the prism somewhat more than the light source.
Ciaran Benson is Professor of Psychology in the National University of Ireland, Dublin, and a former Chairman of the Arts Council