The British Antipsychiatrists From Institutional Psychiatry To The Counterculture 19601971 1st Edition Oisn Wall by Oisín Wall 9781138048560, 1138048569 instant download after payment.

The British anti-psychiatric group, which formed around R.D. Laing,
David Cooper, and Aaron Esterson in the 1960s, burned bright, but
briefly, and has left a long legacy. This book follows their practical,
social, and theoretical trajectory away from the structured world of
institutional psychiatry and into the social chaos of the
counter-culture. It explores the rapidly changing landscape of British
psychiatry in the mid-Twentieth Century and the apparently structureless
organisation of the part of the counter-culture that clustered around
the anti-psychiatrists, including the informal power structures that it
produced.

The book also problematizes this trajectory,
examining how the anti-psychiatrists distanced themselves from
institutional psychiatry while building links with some of the most
important people in post-war psychiatry and psychoanalysis. The
anti-psychiatrists bridged the gap between psychiatry and the
counter-culture, and briefly became legitimate voices in both. Wall
argues that their synthesis of disparate discourses was one of their
strengths, but also contributed to the group’s collapse.

The British Anti-Psychiatrists
offers original historical expositions of the Villa 21 experiment and
the Anti-University. Finally, it proposes a new reading of
anti-psychiatric theory, displacing Laing from his central position and
looking at their work as an unfolding conversation within a social
network.