The guru of psychiatric radical chic whose pioneering work on the dynamics of troubled families brought him to international prominence in the 1960s, R.D. Laing was something of an enigma to his own family, on whom he walked out when his son Adrian was very young - to become embroiled in a series of relationships whose labyrinthine complexity would defeat even the most determined family therapist. So does this coolly-written biography represent vindication or vengeance? Perhaps a little of both, though its focus is firmly - even in the latter stages of personal and professional disintegration - on Ronnie the romantic hero. Laing's medical training included a stint in an army ward where the standard treatment for disturbed patients was to put them, every morning, into an insulin-induced coma: hero or not, he undoubtedly contributed to the more humane approach to mental illness we take for granted today.
