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Mathew Thomson, Allan Beveridge, Portrait of the Psychiatrist as a Young Man: The Early Writing and Work of R.D. Laing, 1927–1960, Social History of Medicine, Volume 26, Issue 2, May 2013, Pages 335–336, https://doi.org/10.1093/shm/hks087
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Ronald Laing is the most written about figure in the history of British psychiatry, subject of three biographies in the 1990s, numerous biographical essays, a book of interviews and Laing's own autobiographical account. One of the achievements of psychiatrist and historian Allan Beveridge's Portrait of the Psychiatrist as a Young Man is to guide us through this literature and to set the mythology alongside detailed analysis of previously unexamined evidence now available in the Laing archive at Glasgow University: in particular, private notebooks that offer insight into the making of Laing as an intellectual; and clinical notes relating to his early work in Scotland and then London. The young Laing—the book tells his story from 1927 to his early thirties in 1960—emerges as a driven figure, with a burning intellectual ambition. His adolescent and student notebooks offer a fascinating record of targets: to read through the classics of literature and philosophy from A–Z, to learn yet another language, to fit more into the day through limiting his sleep. He missed his target of writing a book by the age of thirty, but only just. This book, The Divided Self, in which Laing set out to portray madness as a comprehensible state of mind, turned out to be the most celebrated of all his works. It was a book and a position that helped make Laing an international celebrity and a hugely controversial figure within the history of psychiatry. It provides a point of closure and culmination for Beveridge's account.
