Laing and Rogers in London: An unfortunate meeting or something else?

Abstract

Background:

In the summer of 1978 a large 1-day event was scheduled to take place in the Grand Ballroom at the Hilton Hotel in Park Lane, London between the psychotherapists Carl R. Rogers (1902–1987), and his associates, and Ronald D. Laing (1927–1989) and his group. From among all the eyewitness accounts of that meeting, I have found only the testimonies of Maureen O’Hara, Ian Cunningham, Charles Elliot, and Emmy van Deurzen. According to O’Hara, Laing behaved in a rude, impolite, and aggressive way toward his American colleague Rogers. For his part, Cunningham says that Rogers came over as he had expected: a genuinely nice, caring, humane person. Laing, though, was even more impressive in person than in his books. Similarly, Elliot observes that Laing and Rogers held a genuine encounter, one in which both sat like two real mutually respecting persons who asked each other questions, while the perspective of van Deurzen is more in line with that of O’Hara than that of Elliot.

Aims:

Taking into account the different versions given on the Laing-Rogers event, I will analyze whether this encounter was only an unfortunate meeting or something else.

Methods:

Narrative review; combining eyewitness accounts with the few sources found in the literature on this topic.

Results/conclusions:

As I will show here, all these accounts taken jointly paint a picture of Laing as a brilliant clinician and as a terrible man. Without exculpating Laing for committing all sorts of mischief, I will offer a tentative account of his behavior sustained by his own psychic dynamics. In doing so, I will attempt to explain why Laing reacted in so censurable a way, going beyond Thomas S. Szasz’s (1920–2012) condemnation in his essay on antipsychiatry, which gives credence only to O’Hara’s version without quoting more sources or posing more questions.

Historical background

Many readers will be familiar with Carl R. Rogers (1902–1987), the proponent of client-centered therapy and one the founders of the Encounter Group. Like other leading figures in the field of psychotherapy, he was a clinician of great talent, who created his own school of mental healing, first called ‘non-directive therapy’, later renamed ‘client-centered therapy’ and ‘person-centered therapy’. His career has been analyzed in detail in David Cohen’s book Carl Rogers. A critical biography (Cohen, 1997). Also highly recommendable for readers interested in the life and work of Rogers are The Carl Rogers reader (Kirschenbaum & Land, 1990) and Carl Rogers (Thorne, 2003). In similar fashion, I would speak of Ronald D. Laing (1927–1989), a psychoanalytically trained British psychiatrist, who formulated controversial ideas on the role of family and society in creating and also reverting mental illness (Burston, 1996, 2020; Thompson, 2015). Thus, both contributed to the development of a science of persons where those mentally ill were seen from a different perspective, one characterized by understanding their distress more in terms of living difficulties than by biological abnormalities. Such a shift in the psychiatric establishment was not an easy task, since the conventional psychiatric mentality was reluctant to implement different therapeutic measures to those used until then for alleviating psychic and emotional suffering, I must also cite Thomas S. Szasz (1920–2012), a Hungarian-born naturalized American psychiatrist, who throughout his lifelong championed a campaign in defense of giving more voice and autonomy to mental patients in making decisions concerning their treatments. In his numerous writings on the status of the psychiatric powers and alternative ways of practising psychiatry in favor of those diagnosed mentally ill and in detriment to conventional psychiatry and psychiatric coercion, Szasz developed many ideas with precision and insight, with the rhetorical authority and charismatic voice that fascinated many experts, lay persons, and his lecture audiences. He thus became a voice of psychiatric conscience, which many embraced in a serious attempt to revert how the stigmatized mental patient was treated and seen by others. In engaging with this task, he promoted a different perspective on mental health and psychotherapy, one based on a humanistic model of approaching those affected by emotional suffering and distress (Haldipur et al., 2019; Schaler et al., 2017; Vice, 1992). In parallel, he also expressed considerable animosity against his colleague Laing, which lapsed uninterruptedly from the 1970s (in The New Review) to late 2000s (Balbuena, 2022, 2023). Since this animadversion of Szasz toward Laing has been analyzed in both the above articles, I only will say that it is deeply disappointing that two prominent figures of psychiatry did not work collaboratively in pro of those without a voice and labeled as psychic sufferers. Aggravating this still more is the combative attitude of Szasz toward Laing, as is clearly showed in his Antipsychiatry (Szasz, 2009), where he serves all the arguments to hand to discredit his British colleague. Among such denigrating comments, I will focus on those concerning the Laing-Rogers event, examining first what was said by Szasz (2009; pp. 95–99) through the testimony of Maureen O’Hara, ¹ who was one of the people present in the Rogers group at that time in London. Afterwards I will consider whether there is any verisimilitude between what Szasz reports and the account given by O’Hara (1997). Before ending with my own speculations, I also will analyze the comments of Elliot (1978), Cunningham (1990), and van Deurzen (2012) who also were eye-witnesses of that meeting. There is a disparity between the versions of O’Hara and van Deurzen in comparison with those of Cunningham and Elliot. Complicating the matter further, Cohen (1997, p. 15), the biographer of Rogers, makes only one reference to this meeting, in these terms:

(. . .) Rogers also debated with the radical psychiatrist R. D. Laing. Their relationship was marred by a dispute over money because Rogers had put up $2000 to help book the London Hilton as a venue for the debate and Laing, who was broke, refused to repay the money.

In relation to this event, John Clay, himself a Jungian analyst and biographer of Laing, speaks of the serious repercussions involved in not meeting the expectations in terms of audience, notoriety, and financial gain that it was hoped the event would generate. Clay (1996, p. 189) also reduces the money invested by Rogers to help book the London Hilton to $1,300, and not to $2,000 stated by Cohen. Also worthy of attention are the serious implications of the event, mentioned by Clay (1996, p. 189), regarding the younger members of the Philadelphia Association (PA) ² and their perception that Laing was deviating from the organization’s original function:

Laing had persuaded the well-known psychologist Carl Rogers to participate and even to invest $1,300 in setting up the event but it failed to take off. Although they had room for eight hundred participants, only two hundred and seventy turned up, only just covering costs. The Hilton event was a fiasco and caused a rift within the Philadelphia Association. Many of the younger members felt that Laing had gone too far and that this wasn’t the direction for the Philadelphia Association to be taking. Laing, as Chairman, still exercised overall control but they felt he was heading too far in the humanistic direction, and away from the Philadelphia Association’s original function as an effective training organization and disseminator of ideas.

For his part, Daniel Burston (1996, p. 129), like Clay another biographer of Laing, says that Laing had hoped the event would be a major moneymaking event. However, as noted above, it did not yield the profits that their organizers had planned. Laing was helped with the organization by Michael G. Thompson, who, curiously, despite this collaboration, did not attend the event itself (M. G. Thompson, personal communication, June 2, 2022).

The Laing-Rogers encounter in Szasz’s eyes

A Szasz-centric account of this meeting is unfair to Laing and to Rogers himself. As mentioned above, Szasz’s (2009) reflections draw on O’Hara’s account as his only source (O’Hara, 1997). Previously, however, in his characteristically sardonic style of writing, Szasz depicts Rogers as a useful idiot (Lenin’s term), an unprincipled ‘humanist’, who made a fetish of the term ‘person’, authenticated the concept of psychopathology, and supported the practice of coercive psychiatry and its alliance with the modern therapeutic state (Szasz, 2009, p. 96). In so doing, he does not quote any source in support of his accusations. Szasz’s clinical judgment on Laing’s behavior toward Rogers and his team also merits attention, because, for Szasz, the response of Rogers and his group (among whom were Maria Villas Boas Bowen, Natalie Rogers, John K. Wood, Jared Kass, Joanne Justin, and Maureen O’Hara) was so timid and masochistic that Szasz was tempted to say that they were asking to be abused and deserved what they got. Burston (1996, p. 129), however, puts this down to Rogers’ emotional response. He suggests that Rogers was so taken aback by Laing’s attack that he was unable to muster a cogent defense, and that even if he had, he probably wouldn’t have had time to deliver it, as Laing then got up and offered to demonstrate his most recent therapeutic techniques. Bearing this in mind, it is surely time to move beyond Szasz’s only reductive version of this event. Thus, in the next section, I will turn my attention to the reminiscences recounted by Elliot, Cunningham, O’Hara, and van Deurzen, who by all appearances seem to have attended a different event.

The eyewitness accounts of Elliot, Cunningham, O’Hara, and van Deurzen

According to Elliot (1978, p. 360), on 17 August 1978, 400 people were congregated in a multitudinous encounter between Rogers and Laing at the Hilton Hotel in London. This number of attendees, however, is far from the figure of 270 participants given by Clay (1996, p. 189) above, sufficient to just cover costs. Irrespective of how many were present, one thing that can be said for sure is that, for one whole day, Rogers and his associates, along with Laing and his group, left off their daily activities to take part in a joint workshop oriented toward interacting with each other. It was the first time that the two groups of clinicians from either side of the Atlantic were gathered. As a clear indication of the enthusiasm and high expectations involved in this event, Cunningham (1990, p. 60) remarks that he liked the mélange of Laing’s Glaswegian/European complexity and Rogers’ American simplicity and directness. Despite these stark differences, everyone expected the encounter to go well, since Laingians and Rogerians shared common interests, such as a perspective of being human based on the personal growth of the self and the inherent capacity of people to be able to shift their own stance on their personal and interpersonal world when besieged by mental illness. Coincidental with this, the Rogerian approach (and I might also add that of Laing) emphasized the individual’s inner experience, which became the central focus of therapy, helping the client to move closer to self-acceptance with a sense of freedom (Merrill, 2008). Despite this, the ultimate outcome of the meeting was very different, as I will show. The first mistake made by Laingians and Rogerians was the erroneous attribution of the initial contact and purpose of the meeting (Szasz, 2009). According to O’Hara, her team believed that Laing had originated the contact because he and his team longed for a chance to work with Rogers. However, as it later came to light, Laing’s team thought they were there because Rogers wanted to work with Laing (O’Hara, 1997, p. 314). In full agreement with O’Hara, Clay (1996, p. 189) noted that it was Laing who persuaded Rogers to participate in this event. In any case, this ‘error’ provided Szasz an opportunity—of which he took full advantage—to criticize both Laing and Rogers for avoiding clear and binding contracts (Szasz, 2009, p. 96). Thus, Szasz’s affirmation lacks enough firm ground to be taken seriously. In my view, it would perhaps have been more understandable that Laing and Rogers admitted in their own minds that the one who had initiated the contact was the other, and by extension, this latter was the one who wanted to work with the other. From a very different angle, Rogers and his group spent a painful afternoon getting acquainted with their British hosts, which began when they accepted Laing’s invitation to his home the evening before the workshop. While remaining for a short time in Laing’s home, it became progressively clearer that the two groups of clinicians held polarized perspectives on the human condition, suffering, and especially the concept of authenticity (Thompson, 2012). On reaching this boiling point, it was clearly time to break for dinner and relax. In this context, at the Chinese restaurant near his home on Eton Road, Laing, already pretty drunk, behaved shamefully (Szasz, 2009) without respect for the social conventions habitually required. With his alcohol-loosened tongue, he was insulting and teasing, and, for O’Hara (1997), he was enjoying himself (p. 315). As time passed, the party broke up and both groups began to walk back toward Laing’s home. Laing then announced that Rogers and his acolytes were not welcome in his house. This was the final public humiliation which Rogers was ready to admit, declaring that he would not go through with the event the next day. In fairness to Rogers, he’d had enough of Laing, and his politeness had given way to manifest anger and indignation. O’Hara felt entirely responsible for Rogers’s being in this situation. In O’Hara’s (1997) words, it was like inviting a well-bred classmate to my house only to have a family member get drunk and abusive (p. 319). In an attempt to undo this nasty sequence of pitiful actions and Rogers’ threat to cancel the Laing-Rogers meeting, Laing invited the Rogerians back into his house. Then he was polite and reminded them that many people had bought tickets for the performance and that the show must go on (Szasz, 2009). This wavering back and forth of Laing’s behavior convinced Rogers and the coterie of people that accompanied him to salvage the program. This ritual humiliation of Rogers and his acolytes, as it is labeled by Szasz (2009, p. 99), was witnessed, O’Hara (1997) says, by around 10 of Laing’s people, including Francis Huxley and Hugh Crawford (p. 314). The only thing that I can confirm is that Thompson was not there. I did not get any response from him when I attempted to learn the reasons for this. In his email, he declared:

No, I was not present at either event. What happened at both Laing’s home and at the restaurant was reported to by several of the persons present, including Laing himself, Rogers when I took him to the airport for his departure the day after the Hilton workshop, and several other close friends and colleagues I needn’t name who were in attendance at Laing’s home, the restaurant, and at the Hilton Hotel event.

(M. G. Thompson, personal communication, June 2, 2022).

O’Hara states that there were others present, whose names she never heard, making it a difficult task to identify who they were. All in all, it is worth noting that the picture given by O’Hara of the Laing-Rogers meeting was picked up by Szasz in purely accusatorial, defamatory, and denigrating terms toward Laing, whilst O’Hara confesses that that meeting proved be a psychological and professional turning-point in her life. As she herself says (O’Hara, 1997, p. 322):

(. . .) I realize as I look back, it was after the meeting at Laing’s house, pressed by Laing’s willingness to challenge the boundaries of accommodation, that I began to develop my own voice, my own sense of authority and authorship.

Specifically, in his illuminating and inspiring paper, ‘A Road less traveled: The dark side of R. D. Laing’s conception of authenticity’, Thompson (2012) expounds on the impact that Laing’s rude behavior had on O’Hara. Summarizing this, Thompson commented to me:

I especially emphasized O’Hara’s role in the event—though minor—because of the profoundly positive effect Laing’s behavior subsequently had upon her. This was the point of my article: that despite Laing’s oftentimes rude and seemingly callous behavior, it was rare that he didn’t know what he was doing. In O’Hara’s case, the result was profoundly therapeutic.

(M. G. Thompson, personal communication, June 2, 2022).

For his part, Elliot (1978) does not refer to errors of any kind linked to the organization of the event, or to Laing’s behavior during or after the meal. He only describes his experience and feelings, saying that Rogers gave them his most recent ideas about his own experience. Laing, he notes, showed a real desire to understand Roger’s way of functioning, and was interested in knowing whether Rogers ever felt really evil and how he dealt with the antisocial impulses in himself. In this regard, Elliot (1978, pp.360–361) observes:

Rogers confessed to his strong dislikes of institutions and gate keepers in institutions but said he had really been lucky. Most of his experiences of feeling evil came through his clients as he empathized with their feelings and experiences.

Laing (Mullan, 1995, pp. 209–210), however, seemed to be astonished by Rogers’ affirmation, for in Laing’s view, Rogers simply would not admit to a trace of evil in himself, or knowledge of it, or sensibility of it, and would thus necessarily regard all the tragedy that playwrights had written about as pathological. These statements of Laing seem be in line with Burston’s (1996) ideas, who affirms that Laing spent over an hour ridiculing Rogers for denying the existence of evil and for the banality of his other ideas (p. 129). As Laing recalled later in an interview with Richard Simon, he asked Rogers about his relationships with really disturbed people, eliciting from Rogers that he had no experience of psychosis, bar one psychotic client who had driven him crazy (Simon, 1983). In relation to this, Rogers confessed that after 6 weeks or so of seeing this female client, he was driven so crazy that he took a car and just drove north up to Canada, and then took another 3 months to recover. Apparently, it was as a major event in his life. As a corollary to all this, Burston (1996, p. 172) points out three things about Rogers that alienated Laing:

His characterization of schizophrenics as evil, his refusal to listen to them, and his holier-than-thou self-appraisal, which to a skeptic like Laing could only suggest someone who is very repressed, very dull, or very dishonest. Laing also implied that Rogers lacked the inner strength to listen to someone who was disturbed without “losing it” himself.

In reference to Roger’s ideas on people diagnosed with schizophrenia, it is worth noting that when he met with Martin Buber in the late forties, this latter told him that people diagnosed with schizophrenia were the evilest people in the world. Buber was very much in agreement with that and told Rogers people with schizophrenia were incapable of an I-Thou relationship (Simon, 1983). In Burston’s (1996) view, under the surface, there is another element that should be given attention for understanding Laing’s contempt for Rogers: his Eurocentrism. Elaborating on this observation, (p. 172) considers that, like Fromm, Laing felt that mainstream psychology in America was a flimsy affair, intellectually speaking, and he attributed the weight of his own ideas and convictions, right or wrong, to his immersion in continental philosophy, and literature. From a different perspective, Elliot eulogized Laing, saying that he was rather difficult to follow but worth the effort. In Elliot’s (1978) words, Laing is sort of like a projective test where meanings ‘come through’ . . . someone who moves restlessly and rather fearlessly around the group of 350 and seems very much at ease, enjoying the scene without being phony about it (p. 361). Elliot also alludes to the birth trauma, namely, an experimental way of healing through going back in the inner life of one person, specifically to his or her fetal life and the birth canal, in an attempt to provoke a rebirth and different access to extra-uterine life. In this respect, Elliot (1978) says that the experience lasted for a long hour and was thoroughly exhausting. Describing in detail this experience, Elliot (1978, p. 361) explained:

We set up in groups of six on the floor to give birth primals to volunteers. I [Elliot] was in one of the groups. We put hands on the body of the foetus (lying on the floor in a foetal position) in front of us and held firmly as the foetus tried to get born. We struggled hard against and with the baby. . . who was a grown man in both cases I worked on.

According to Elliot, it was Laing who directed them on how to hold the body and how to massage the base of the neck and lower back to get the birth contractions started. In his concluding comments, Elliot observes that Rogers and Laing provided them with a fine 8-hour session. It was really a most moving and satisfying experience which Elliot highly recommended to others, where togetherness and communication took place. In sum, an experience characterized by a meaningful dialog, and an interplay of emotions and ideas, where all shared and expressed their views. Elliot’s account is very different to that given us by Burston (1996, pp.129–130), who observes:

With the aid of several assistants, Laing then proceeded to “rebirth” two hundred people, many of whom had come just for that purpose. This bizarre spectacle turned a modest flop into a total disgrace. Many observers saw the proceedings as nothing more than an exercise in mass hypnosis and a mercenary way to make some money. The idea of doing psychotherapy en masse disturbed many members of the P. A., who felt that their name had been used to betray everything they stood for – and what Laing, in better days, had stood for as well.

Among the participants in this rebirthing event on the dance-floor of the Hilton Hotel, deeply disappointed with everything that happened there, was Emmy van Deurzen, one of Laing’s therapists, who 34 years later felt that, somewhat to her shame, she was part of the Laing/Rogers encounter (van Deurzen, 2012, p. 149). In attempting to satisfy my curiosity about this statement, I emailed van Deurzen on 13 April 2022, receiving the following response:

I said this was somewhat to my shame, because Laing acted disgracefully with Rogers and the great rebirthing event was a show piece, which was far from helpful to its participants. I had to spend a long time with some people, who felt their intimate emotions had been awakened and exposed, but not received with care. In this exhibition of therapeutic endeavour, it was all a lot more about brinkmanship than about professionalism and care. I felt uncomfortable having participated in it, for that reason. It offended my sense of integrity and fairness. It was the final straw that broke my trust in anti-psychiatry and decided me to go on my own path.

(E. van Deurzen, personal communication, March 16, 2022).

From this perspective, van Deurzen’s personal reflections on the professional attitude of Laing and her profound disappointment in the rebirthing event adds more negative elements to the picture painted here of Laing.

In relation to rebirthing it is worth noting that Laing’s interest in it began after his return from the United States in 1972, 6 years before of his encounter with Rogers in London. As Laing himself said, he derived the inspiration for the practice of rebirthing from a variety of sources, including S. Freud, O. Rank, F. Mott, E. G. Howe, A. Janov, and especially from E. Fehr (B. Mullan, 1999). If this is so, it begs the question of why he felt interested in rebirthing. In this respect, Burston (1996, pp. 125–126) tentatively offers two accounts. First, he suggests that rather than blazing a new path into unknown territory, Laing was now following in the footsteps of all those pioneering figures cited above. Following this line of reasoning, Burston hypothesizes that Laing perhaps hoped to put an original spin on their work, namely, capitalize on the craze for birth-oriented therapies that followed upon Janov’s (1968) bestselling The primal scream. Second, he speculates that Laing hoped that he could use the new approach on himself, to gain some leverage against his own inner demons. In support of this second account formulated by Burston is the tour that W. Swartley undertook, at the head of a network of primal-therapy practitioners, from Canada and the United States (the Center for the Whole Person) to Europe (where he visited London, Paris, and Rome) in the fall of 1975. During his stay in London, Swartley (1976) ³ reproached Laing (1976) in a newsletter to his colleagues for claiming to have discovered the ‘implantation primal’ (a term coined by Swartley and not Laing) in the galley proof of Laing’s forthcoming book The facts of Life (Laing, 1976). At a more personal level, Swartley (1976, p. 5) confessed:

In any case, Ronnie had a lot of trouble attaching himself to the wall of his mother’s uterus eight days after his conception. We worked for several hours on “his new birth” a term which he uses to distinguish it from a rebirth. All that was clear is that Ronnie had such a will to be born from his mother’s womb that he overcame all her strong resistance to the idea.

Besides these reflections, Swartley (1976, p. 6) also wanted to know how Laing actually applied the therapy to which he alluded in his books. In reply, Laing answered ‘We all stand around the patient in a circle and then I say “Go!”’ Without having had a chance to observe him at work, in Swartley’s view, it still appeared that Laing’s genius was to leave patients alone and to simultaneously allow himself to be as crazy as they were. To complicate matters, some of Laing’s associates in the Philadelphia Association (PA), viewed his rebirthing interest with suspicion and, in due course, with outright hostility. The main reason for this was that many saw it as a lamentable departure from the philosophical groundwork Laing had laid in the previous decade. There were, however, some, like Francis Huxley, for whom this departure represented a deepening of Laing’s shamanistic consciousness. In like fashion, Arthur Balaskas and the body-oriented therapy faction in the PA embraced the new ideas enthusiastically and incorporated them into an eclectic repertoire of yoga, meditation, and primal screaming sessions (Burston, 1996).

Personal perspective and concluding remarks

As has been corroborated here by the few available testimonies and literature, the encounter between Laing and Rogers in 1978 was something more than a mere unfortunate meeting. Since there is no record of Laing’s version of events, it seems interesting to reproduce Thompson’s (2012, pp. 26–27) comments about Laing’s reaction:

Later, Laing held his conviction that making Rogers and his group feel intensely uncomfortable with his rude and provocative behaviour was his way of being authentic, or real, in a way that they were not being with him and his group, because they were being ‘nice’ in a way that was socially desirable, but blatantly artificial. Rogers had cut his teeth on his own conception of authenticity and Laing thought he needed to be taught a lesson or two.

Despite this, Thompson is not convinced that Laing really believed this in his own mind, but he fell prey to this behavior on certain occasions when he simply lost it. In another respect, in my view, this event also invites us to question how it resonated in O’Hara life. In her own words, it was a life-changing experience, such that after she returned to United States, she began to see Rogers in a new light. If she had idolized Rogers, after the experience at Laing’s home she was aware that she no longer needed Rogers as a crutch and that she was now able to stand on her own feet. In this respect, Thompson (2012, p. 27) cleverly wonders if this change of mind in O’Hara was a result of Laing’s ‘authentic’ acting out an agent of therapeutic change or a mere coincidence. Whatever the response to this enigma, it is clear that Laing never left anybody indifferent. In connection with this, in line with Thompson’s (2012) ideas above linking Laing’s aggression and rudeness to his search for authenticity, I think of Laing as a person with many private personas, some of them characterized by creative impulses, whereas others tending toward harm. A vivid example of how Laing set into motion his creative impulses is exemplified in the way in which he mobilized O’Hara’s emotions with a therapeutic end. In behaving so, he deliberately allowed emotions to run high. As Thompson clearly explains:

When he was being deliberately provocative - as he was with Rogers as well as O’Hara - he was doing so for a purpose. The only time that I saw Laing out of control was when he was upset with someone in a social situation and lashed out in anger. Sometimes he was drunk, and sometimes he was dead sober. He invariably apologized for that behavior subsequently.

(M. G. Thompson, personal communication, June 2, 2022).

I do not really know what motives drove Laing to play this role. In my view, this role seemed be the only refuge he knew from being entirely engulfed by the human being who was inside him. In doing so, Laing found recourse in a creative relationship with others, modes of relationship that required the effective presence to him of other people and of the outer world. From this perspective, although his presumption and apparent self-confidence would offend some people as hubris, Laing embodied a person comprised of his own volatility and vulnerabilities, his culpability, and insecurities. Tender to the core, a talented therapist, he thus lived the lives of so many others through therapy; a life of hope, misery and sorrow, complex, and urgent, which needed to have a purpose. Struggling against his own inner demons Laing also struggled again and again to establish his personal identity, although he failed in his attempts throughout his life. His recurrent search for himself, back and forth, instilled in him a sense of uneasiness, of unquietness, causing him to bare his more vulnerable self under the effects of alcohol. All in all, this neither belittles Laing’s achievements nor impede his name—and that of Rogers—remaining firmly consolidated as seminal thinkers as well as clinicians of great talent and prestige. In this vein, this paper has attempted to show the reader a more faithful picture of how Laing was as a clinician as well as a human being. Both roles markedly characterized his life and work. However, as I have reflected here, his analytic training did not prevent him becoming prey to his early unconscious conflicts, stemming from being an unwanted only child born into a marriage without love (Clay, 1996). This might explain his strong desire for feeling loved, admired, and connected to others, and for creating his own of a family, a failed life project characterized by fractured family relations, which culminated in having ten children by four women and an agitated emotional instability throughout his life, unappeased by his many achievements and international fame. As a result, without revealing specifics of which he himself was possibly unaware, I think that this adds a tinge of unhappiness to that already existing in his alert but depressive mood. His life thus represents an example of the fragility and brevity of life, his own limits and limitations, transience, and perpetuity.