British Anti-Psychiatrists

<p>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.</p><p></p><p>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 group’s collapse.</p><p></p><p><em>The British Anti-Psychiatrists</em> 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.</p>