Abstract

By the time of his death in 1989, R.D. Laing was already history. His status as a countercultural legend remained intact, but he had gone from icon to relic. His intellectual and political credibility reached a peak in the late 1960s that he never regained. For many, the publication of The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise in 1967 presaged his critical demise into bad poetry and bellicose shamanism. Laing himself was keenly aware of his fall from popular grace