Sanity Madness and the Family

<p>In the late 1950s the psychiatrist R.D.Laing and psychoanalyst Aaron Esterson spent five years interviewing eleven families of female patients diagnosed as 'schizophrenic'. Their question was: are the experience and behaviour that psychiatrists take as signs of schizophrenia more socially intelligible than supposed? <i>Sanity Madness and the Family</i> is the result of their work. Eleven vivid interviews often dramatic and disturbing reveal patterns of affection and hatred manipulation and indifference within the family. <p></p>This Routledge Classics edition includes a new Foreword by Hilary Mantel.