R.D. Laing

Ronald David Laing, commonly referred to as R. D. Laing, was a Scottish psychiatrist who penned numerous works on mental illness, with a specific focus on the subjective experience of psychosis. Laing's conceptualizations of the causes and treatment of severe mental dysfunction were significantly shaped by existential philosophy, which led him to diverge from the prevailing psychiatric paradigm of his time. In stark contrast to the prevailing orthodoxy, Laing's approach entailed recognizing the expressed feelings of the individual patient or client as genuine, first-person accounts of their lived experience, rather than merely perceiving them as symptoms of some underlying disorder.