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How Scottish was R. D. Laing?

Manchester Metropolitan University, g.h.m.miller{at}mmu.ac.uk

R. D. Laing was indebted, although not exclusively or uncritically, to his early Scottish intellectual context. He engaged, for instance, throughout his life with the ideas of the Scottish philosopher John Macmurray. Despite the relative lack of scholarship on twentieth-century Scottish thought, it is possible to trace Laing's participation in a tradition of the importation and translation of Continental ideas (exemplified by scholars such as the theologian Ronald Gregor Smith). Laing adapted Continental ideas to a particularly Scottish concern with psychotherapy as a form of demythologized Christianity; this is apparent in his latent affinity with the Scottish psychoanalyst W. R. D. Fairbairn, and also in his explicitly Christian reconceptualization of the Jungian concept of metanoia.

Key Words: Abenheimer-Schorstein group • John Macmurray • metanoia • R. D. Laing • Ronald Gregor Smith

History of Psychiatry, Vol. 20, No. 2, 226-232 (2009)
DOI: 10.1177/0957154X08101223


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