Of Scotland’s Dr Strange
Topic of the week: politics and psychiatry
IS INSANITY sweeping the planet, or is just flashes of bizarre “news” wrestling for headlines? Certainly a read of last weekend’s Sunday Herald raises that question. Without doubt it was an appropriate week to highlight RD Laing, a self-publicist with good reason to know something about madness (Mad, bad and dangerous to know, The big read, February 19).
As Iain Macwhirter points out, the connection between “coal-rolling jeeps” and the Trump syndrome has more than a hint of instability (Trump rules over the age of unreason, Comment, February 19).
As the environment becomes a trash bin for cast-offs from “the American dream”, a fight between the haves and have-nots is stoked no less by the megalomania of our homegrown saviour of mankind who, redacting Iraq from his CV, extorts the nation to “rise up”. Ultimate power is passing into fewer hands. It might be advisable for some of the world’s leaders to retire to a psychiatrist’s couch. The folly of nuclear energy, from waste to bombs, is a fingertip away. Never in the planet’s 4.5 billion years has a single species been better equipped to shape its own downfall.
A gleam of hope for an intelligent moulding of human behaviour could spring from the democratic leadership of a small independent nation governed by the first principle of survival, environmental morality. Be it the atmosphere we breathe or the soil bacteria that help feed us, unless we the invasive species adopt a holistic, less self-centred approach to handling the planet, the microbes will have the last laugh. I HAVE no way of knowing what age Mad To Be Normal director Robert Mullan is, but if he was quoting Laing when he said the late psychiatrist’s mother’s attempted concealment of her pregnancy (how did he know?) reflected her attitude to motherhood, this is a clear misrepresentation on Laing’s part, since in those days [the 1920s] it was normal practice for expectant mothers to deny intercourse by dressing in such a manner (Mad, bad and dangerous to know, The big read, February 19). This extended to avoiding being photographed and rarely going out of doors in the later months.
It was also commonplace when referring to expectant mothers to say they would “soon be better”, meaning that the birth was imminent, another avoidance of a taboo subject.
For Laing to flout this convention would have been next to unthinkable, particularly since Ardbeg Street [where RD Laing was born], although Corporation housing, was regarded as a genteel part of Glasgow’s Govanhill. This invention on Laing’s part suggests to me that his descriptions of his childhood should be accompanied by varying amounts of salt.