This article offers an introduction to David Cooper (1931-86), who coined the term 'antipsychiatry', and, it is argued here, has not so far received the scholarly attention that he deserves. The first section presents his life in context. The second section presents his work in detail. There follows a section on the critical reception of Cooper, and, finally, a conclusion that sets out ways in which he might be interesting and useful today.
Contributing to renewed scholarly interest in R. D. Laing and his circle, and in the radical therapeutic community of Kingsley Hall, London (1965-1970), this article offers the first article-length reading of Mary Barnes' and Joseph Berke's Mary Barnes: Two Accounts of a Journey through Madness. This text offers views of anti-psychiatry 'on the ground' that critique the 1960s utopianism of Laing's championing of madness as a metanoic, quasi-psychedelic voyage. Barnes' story, too, reveals tensions within the anti-psychiatric movement. Moving beyond existing criticism of the text, Barnes, it is argued here, emerges as far more than an exemplary patient, victim or anti-psychiatric puppet. Particular attention is paid in this reading of Two Accounts to the following: the ways in which the spiritually inclined Barnes and the psychoanalytic Berke differ in this dual narrative text; the ways in which each differs from Laing; the metaphor of the journey; and the setting of Barnes' story in the often conflicted, experimental household of Kingsley Hall.
Despite renewed interest in the radical psychiatrist R. D. Laing (1927-1989), his The Bird of Paradise (1967), published in a single volume with The Politics of Experience, has received scant scholarly attention. Characterized largely as odd, it has even been read as a sign that Laing, deeply sympathetic to the mad, had himself gone crazy. Eschewing biographical criticism, I focus rather on the problem of assigning Bird to a genre (and the significance of this difficulty). Finding the capacious prose poem genre the most appropriate category, I take Bird seriously as a complex literary text, offer an overview of it, relate it to Politics and 1960s counterculture, and attend to Laing's ambivalent attitude towards writing. Bird, I argue, represents an attempt-albeit an ultimately unsuccessful one-at overcoming what Laing understands as alienated self-division ("dismemberment") through a reaching towards wholeness (a "re-membering" of the self).
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