Coming Soon
R D Laing: The Divided Self
An opening camera shot of bare feet strolling along pulls back to reveal a bohemian character walking through an airport departure terminal.
In these few seconds, our anti-hero’s complicated, contradictory, free-wheeling nature is revealed to the cinema viewer in this screenplay of the swinging ‘60s celebrity psychiatrist RD Laing.
This road movie takes its audience with Laing, dubbed the ‘Acid Marxist’, on his frenzied 1972 lecture tour across the US at the height of his fame and influence. His roadie and fixer, Danny Halperin, thought he’d seen it all looking out for The Who. Until he met RD.
Yet this was a man described as an ‘agonised and spiritually tortured’ soul, truly an example of The Divided Self, the title of his 1960 ground-breaking book which made madness comprehensible to the layman. In it he described how the split between our private, inner selves and the face we show to the world was the cause of psychosis.
The film, scripted by David Griffiths, is based on the biography RD Laing: A Life, by his son Adrian Laing, who is also the project’s consultant. The leading television director Sandy Johnson is attached to the project, and The Divided Self will be his first major cinema film.
In spite of Laing’s humane ideas becoming the bedrock for the present-day ‘user-focused’ treatment of schizophrenia and other mental illnesses instead of long-established barbaric practices in prison-like asylums, his unorthodox approach and hedonistic behaviour as a counter-culture hero did not endear him to the senior medical hierarchy.
But buried beneath the media froth and flim-flam was a brilliant man with a truly original mind with which he revolutionised the understanding and treatment of mental illness, dragging it out of the gruesome dark ages of patients locked in padded cells, primitive electric shock treatment and lobotomies.
His desire to break taboos caused a public outcry when he casually used illegal psychedelic drugs like LSD to treat patients.
He also gave LSD to 1960s celebrities like film star Sean Connery and novelist Edna O’Brien as part of his idiosyncratic consciousness awareness programme. These wayward actions combined with his own drink and drug excesses eventually resulted in him resigning from the General Medical Council, and his tragic decline throughout the 1980s.
However, his restlessly enquiring mind also retained a wry, caustic Glaswegian edge, with remarks like: ‘Insanity – a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world.’
Laing dictated his own typically theatrical finale when he suffered a fatal heart attack while playing tennis in the South of France. Hearing a doctor had been called, his last words encapsulated his feelings for the medical profession which had disowned him: ‘What f***ing doctor?’
And he was winning the game – not only on the tennis court, but in the widest sense with the formidable legacy he left behind to save the countless thousands who would once have been lost to the dark age of psychiatric illness.
Adrian Laing, a leading UK media lawyer, combines his life-long interests in law, psychology, and Arthurian mythology to powerful effect in his fantasy novel Kosmos. Adrian is also script advisor for the Ettinger Brothers’ planned film The Divided Self based on his widely-acclaimed biography about his father, the renowned psychiatrist RD Laing: A Life.
Sandy Johnson, co-writer with Adrian Laing on Kosmos, has a phenomenal record in television, having directed numerous top drama series which are house-hold names starring many of our leading actors. These series include: Inspector Morse, A Touch of Frost, The Ruth Rendell Mysteries, Jonathan Creek, Benidorm, and Auf Wiedersehen, Pet.
Putting your father on film
MOST people would cringe at the thought of their father being portrayed on screen warts and all, especially if he’d been a controversial public figure and, perhaps, a less than perfect parent.
Not for Adrian Laing, son of RD Laing, the world-famous counter-culture psychiatrist and, with his seminal 1960 book The Divided Self, which revolutionised attitudes towards mental health; a major player in the profounder end of the swinging ‘60s academic assault on ‘the establishment’.