The British Anti-Psychiatrists

The British anti-psychiatric group which formed around R. D. Laing David Cooper and Aaron Esterson in the 1960s burned bright but briefly and has left a long legacy. This book follows their practical social and theoretical trajectory away from the structured world of institutional psychiatry and into the social chaos of the counter-culture. It explores the rapidly changing landscape of British psychiatry in the mid-Twentieth Century and the apparently structureless organisation of the part of the counter-culture that clustered around the anti-psychiatrists including the informal power structures that it produced. The book also problematizes this trajectory examining how the anti-psychiatrists distanced themselves from institutional psychiatry while building links with some of the most important people in post-war psychiatry and psychoanalysis. The anti-psychiatrists bridged the gap between psychiatry and the counter-culture and briefly became legitimate voices in both. Wall argues that their synthesis of disparate discourses was one of their strengths but also contributed to the groupâs collapse. The British Anti-Psychiatrists offers original historical expositions of the Villa 21 experiment and the Anti-University. Finally it proposes a new reading of anti-psychiatric theory displacing Laing from his central position and looking at their work as an unfolding conversation within a social network. . Language: English