000			01542cam a2200181 4500
008			090401t1964 xxu||||| |||| 00| 0 eng d
020			_a0140211578
060			_aWM 203.
100			_aLaing, R D
245			_aSanity, madness, and the family : _b families of schizophrenics
260			_bPenguin, _c1964
300			_a282p
520			_aIn the late 1950s the psychiatrist R.D.Laing and psychoanalyst Aaron Esterson spent five years interviewing eleven families of female patients diagnosed as 'schizophrenic'. Sanity, Madness and the Family is the result of their work. Eleven vivid case studies, often dramatic and disturbing, reveal patterns of affection and fear, manipulation and indifference within the family. But it was the conclusions they drew from their research that caused such controversy: they suggest that some forms of mental disorder are only comprehensible within their social and family contexts; their symptoms the manifestations of people struggling to live in untenable situations. Sanity, Madness and the Family was met with widespread hostility by the psychiatric profession on its first publication, where the prevailing view was to treat psychosis as a medical problem to be solved. Yet it has done a great deal to draw attention to the complex and contested nature of psychosis. Above all, Laing and Esterson thought that if you understood the patient's world their apparent madness would become socially intelligible.
650			_aSchizophrenia
650			_aFamily
700			_aEsterson, A
942			_n0
999			_c1749 _d1749