When R D Laing was thirty-six, he wrote in his diary: ‘I feel I am going to become famous, and receive recognition. Most of my work has not “hit” the public yet. Eventually it will, like the light of a dead star.’ Within a year of that entry, the light of the dead star had arrived, and Laing had become one of the gurus of the Sixties – together with Timothy Leary, Alan Watts, Herbert Marcuse and Allen Ginsberg.

The result, as described by his son Adrian in this frank and sometimes brutal biography, was disastrous. For the next twenty years, like a fly hit by fly spray, Laing flew around in a euphoric daze punctuated by broken relationships, drunken brawls and fits of depression. When he died of a stroke at the age of sixty-one, his latest book had been rejected by several publishers, and he had been struck off the Medical Register.

Laing walked out on his young family soon after fame arrived, so he was a relative stranger to Adrian and his brother Paul when he invited them to a conference in a Christian residential community in 1974. It was a memorable occasion. They were already late for dinner when Laing persuaded a Glasgow cab driver to try and find ‘Fatima House’, somewhere near Kilmarnock. By the time they had stopped at every pub on the way, all three were staggering drunk, and Laing had vomited in the back of the cab. At midnight he thundered on the door until everyone in the house was awake; then, admitted to the hall, he rushed up to a statue of Jesus with the comment, ‘Just the man l want to talk to’, and proceeded to fondle the statue intimately and slobber over its behind while his sons screeched with laughter on the floor. Typically, Laing delivered a serious and thoughtful lecture on sin and redemption the following morning.

Understandably, Adrian Laing developed a considerable admiration for his father. This began to wear thin in the mid-Eighties, as he began to gauge the extent of Laing’s self- destructiveness. Called to the Hampstead police station in the middle of the night (Adrian was by then a lawyer), he learned that his father had been arrested after throwing a bottle of wine through the window of the Rajneesh Centre and shouting rude comments about ‘the orange wankers’. He was also found to be in possession of cannabis. A few days later, turning up at the police station to be charged, he was so drunk that the police declined to charge him. ‘Good,’ shouted Laing, ‘then all I have to do is to stay fucking drunk.’ Finally persuaded to plead guilty, he was given a conditional discharge.

In spite of bursts of irritation (‘Ronnie’s nauseating desire to rationalise external events began at a very early age’), Adrian Laing is a remarkably sympathetic biographer. Perhaps the fact that he himself was brought up in straitened circumstances in Glasgow enables him to understand his father’s frantic desire to escape from Scotland. Laing achieved his medical degree with some difficulty (having failed disastrously at the first attempt), then went through his National Service as an army medic in charge of mentally disturbed patients. His experience of meting out electric-shock therapy, lobotomies and knockout drugs convinced him that there was something basically wrong with conventional therapy. The turning point came when instead of giving a violent patient a tranquilliser, Laing went into the padded cell and listened to his ravings. The patient calmed down, and after a few similar sessions, was cured.

In London, Adrian Laing tells us, ‘Ronnie was raw with jealousy over the publication of Colin Wilson’s book The Outsider; the author’s precocity irked him even more.’ So with a conscious attempt to put me and John Osborne in our places, Laing worked hard on his first book, The Divided Self, which started from the proposition that mental illness is not a ‘disease’ but an attempt to adjust to reality, and that the doctor can aid this by treating the patient as basically sane. It came out in 1960, and failed to make the impact Laing had dreamed about. But the Zeitgeist was with him, and as an ‘anti-psychiatry’ movement gained momentum, he suddenly found himself regarded as one of its prophets. By the mid-Sixties he was making regular appearances on television and making American lecture tours, in which he was sometimes brilliant, sometimes verbose and incredibly dull. It made no difference; he was regarded as an inspired teacher, and his audiences would have listened with equal enthusiasm if he had sung his favourite song about twenty-four virgins up against a wall.

Laing was a lifelong depressive. My own view is that although a naturally brilliant therapist, he also had very little to ‘say’ – in the sense that Freud and Jung had so much to say. This explains why some of his most famous books, like The Politics of Experience and Knots, are so short.

He had another problem. His views achieved such an impact because he was prone to exaggerate – as in the famous comment that from the moment of birth ‘the baby is subjected to forces of outrageous violence called love’, and that the mother and father ‘are mainly concerned with destroying most of its potentialities’. All this sounded arresting against the background of the leftist and revolutionary rhetoric of the Sixties, but was bound to sound less convincing as time placed it in rational perspective. So, after a period of meditating in Ceylon and India in the early Seventies, Laing came back to find that his serious reputation was beginning to fade. It was at this stage that he put on dark glasses and went into the guru business, advising his audiences to drink Perrier water, and practising a dramatic form of therapy called ‘rebirthing’ that involves much noise and confusion. But as his second marriage broke up, Laing went into the cycle of depression and heavy drinking that was finally to kill him.

I met Laing only once. In 1985, he, I and the poet David Gascoigne did a day-long seminar together in Plymouth. We liked one another, and when I told him how much I admired The Divided Self, he told me that one of the main influences on it had been The Outsider. But where lecturing was concerned, he was not in good form, rambling and stumbling on in an almost incomprehensible Glasgow accent to a baffled audience. He and David Gascoigne had both recently had depressive problems, and I’m afraid my own natural cheerfulness – I was talking about peak experiences and the future of human evolution – struck them as intolerable, for during the afternoon they ganged up on me, hammering home the view that optimism was another name for shallowness. I followed Shaw’s advice: never argue, repeat your assertion. But when I left, I had the feeling that two friendships had briefly blossomed, then withered away.

If I had known as much about Laing as I do now, I would have seen how much we had in common. We had both experienced sudden celebrity followed by decline. Within eighteen months of the publication of The Outsider my second book had been slaughtered, but it had all happened so quickly that I had no time to become addicted to critical acclaim. Laing’s decline was slow and painful because he had become used to being regarded as a guru, and it was complicated by guilt, alcohol and awful behaviour in personal relationships, including the physical beating of his daughter. Towards the end, he obviously took a Hardyesque view of life, which he felt had turned and bitten him in the leg.

This book made me think of Goethe’s comment ‘Beware of what you wish for in youth, because you’ll get it in middle age.’ But I also found that it brought me a real understanding of a man who was sensitive, decent, and – like so many Scots – too clever for his own good.