Description
Book SynopsisIn the late 1950s the psychiatrist R.D.Laing and psychoanalyst Aaron Esterson spent five years interviewing eleven families of female patients diagnosed as 'schizophrenic'. Sanity, Madness and the Family is the result of their work. Eleven vivid case studies, often dramatic and disturbing, reveal patterns of affection and fear, manipulation and indifference within the family. But it was the conclusions they drew from their research that caused such controversy: they suggest that some forms of mental disorder are only comprehensible within their social and family contexts; their symptoms the manifestations of people struggling to live in untenable situations.
Sanity, Madness and the Family was met with widespread hostility by the psychiatric profession on its first publication, where the prevailing view was to treat psychosis as a medical problem to be solved. Yet it has done a great deal to draw attention to the complex and contested nature of psychosis. Above all, Lai
Table of Contents
Preface
Preface to the Second Edition
Foreword to the Routledge Classics Edition, by Hilary Mantel
Introduction
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- The Abbotts
- The Blairs
- The Churches
- The Danzigs
- The Edens
- The Fields
- The Golds
- The Heads
- The Irwins
- The Kings
- The Lawsons
Appendix
Index
