So yes, you CAN untie your Knots. All of ‘em. Not overnight, not in five or ten years, but Eventually. The door of Hades has since been barred in retreat from empaths like him. But the infernal powers are simply retrenching...

Laing had already started an affair with Jutta Werner, a German graphic designer who would become his second wife. Despite his burgeoning career, he paid only the legal minimum in child maintenance to his first family. 'He adopted an "out of sight, out of mind" mentality,' says Adrian, who started taking odd jobs aged 13 to contribute to the family income. 'In my mind, he confused liberalism with neglect. My mother was furious about it. She had an unfathomable amount of resentment. Her expression for him was "the square root of nothing".'

R.D. Laing published 15 books which sold worldwide in their millions, the most celebrated of which are: 'The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness'; Itten, Theodor, The Paths of Soul Making, archived from the original on 16 October 2007 , retrieved 17 October 2007 a b c Day, Elizabeth; Keeley, Graham (1 June 2008). "My father, RD Laing: 'he solved other people's problems - but not his own' ". The Observer . Retrieved 10 November 2022.

R. D. Laing", in The New Left, edited by Maurice Cranston, The Library Press, 1971, pp. 179-208. "Ronald Laing must be accounted one of the main contributors to the theoretical and rhetorical armoury of the contemporary Left". Various – Miniatures (A Sequence of Fifty-One Tiny Masterpieces Edited by Morgan Fisher) (Vinyl, LP, Album)". discogs.com. Discogs . Retrieved 4 October 2016. In The Politics of Experience (1967) Laing argued that it is not people who are mad, but the world.His own family was the first casualty of Laing's increasing celebrity. The reissuing in 1965 of his most famous work, The Divided Self, led to frequent television and radio appearances. In many ways his existentialist approach - he believed that social 'sanity' was fabricated by mutual consent; that the mentally ill were as fully human as the medics who were classifying them - captured the countercultural zeitgeist of the 1960s. His radical rejection of convention ensured he became the most famous cult psychiatrist in the country. Charismatic, darkly handsome and possessed of an innate sharpness of mind, he soon embarked on several extra-marital affairs, spending weeks and months away from the family home in northwest London. Anne was left behind, treading water in the wake of his success. The marriage finally came to a juddering halt in 1967, by which time, says Adrian, 'my mother had totally lost it. She found it so humiliating because he was becoming so well-known but he wasn't living with us.'

Adrian says he has now made his peace with the infamous RD Laing, especially since becoming a parent himself (he has five children). In his biography of his father, Adrian drily notes that his relationship with him 'has improved greatly since his death'. 'I'm very relaxed about him now,' he says. 'I had enough occasions before he died to let him have it. We were friends.' And by failing and failing, again and again, to undo the Knots mean folks keep tying up again - and getting up again from the dust of our defeated rebooting each time, knowing there IS a way through it all - we WILL succeed.But once we’ve heard that Call - and understand that we’re saved by Hope - we’ll gain the humility to continue. In Self and Others (1961), Laing's definition of normality shifted somewhat. [31] [ unreliable source?] Mad to Be Normal (2017). A fictionalised account of the Kingsley Hall project, starring David Tennant as Laing and directed by Robert Mullan. [39] Laing saw psychopathology as being seated not in biological or psychic organs — whereby environment is relegated to playing at most only an accidental role as immediate trigger of disease (the "stress diathesis model" of the nature and causes of psychopathology) — but rather in the social cradle, the urban home, which cultivates it, the very crucible in which selves are forged. This re-evaluation of the locus of the disease process — and consequent shift in forms of treatment — was in stark contrast to psychiatric orthodoxy (in the broadest sense we have of ourselves as psychological subjects and pathological selves). Laing was revolutionary in valuing the content of psychotic behaviour and speech as a valid expression of distress, albeit wrapped in an enigmatic language of personal symbolism which is meaningful only from within their situation.