R. D. Laing, The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise

Daniel Burston (Duquesne University); Gavin Miller (University of Glasgow)
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The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise was published in 1967, and was such an astonishing success that it transformed R.D. Laing from the darling of British Left and artistic

avant garde

into an international icon on a par with Jean-Paul Sartre, Marshall McLuhan or Allen Ginsberg by the end of the decade. Sadly, the book's great popularity was not a measure of any lasting effectiveness. Though Laing was celebrated and reviled for this book throughout the 1970s, the substance of his ideas about interpersonal phenomenology, violence and normality, group psychology, schizophrenia, and so on, were grasped dimly, if at all, by most of his younger admirers, many of whom lacked the requisite background to fathom his work, but simply revelled in his anti-authoritarianism and…

2354 words

Citation: Burston, Daniel, Gavin Miller. "The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 29 August 2005 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=16851, accessed 29 March 2024.]

16851 The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise 3 Historical context notes are intended to give basic and preliminary information on a topic. In some cases they will be expanded into longer entries as the Literary Encyclopedia evolves.

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