Laing and anti-psychiatry Book

I have always been interested in R.D. Laing to the point of picking up a few yellowing paperbacks of his from a thrift store. I never could get traction in them though, so when I saw this little yellowing paperback, which promised to give me a crash course in Laing, I was overjoyed. This book is part of the Modern Masters series, which was the 1970s equivalent the Oxford Very Short Introduction Series. (A few of these Modern Masters have even found new life in the Oxford VSI series, such as Jonathan Culler's Barthes: A Very Short Introduction, which retains a few puzzling references to Barthes as a Modern Master in its first chapter.)

This book won't give you a comprehensive introduction to Laing, which was a little disappointing for me. But the book does give an in depth look at a few of Laing's most impactful works and the context in which those works were produced (The book was published in 1973, so there is nothing here of the last 16 years of Laing's life.) This is a dense book, and more than half of it is focused on Laing's relation to philosophy and politics. The first 2 chapters are easier going and they give the best introduction to Laing's psychiatric practice. The book takes a fairly original perspective on its topic, which is something you don't always find in this kind of book. The end of the final chapter was packed with insightful reflections on politics in America and the way governmentality works. There are lots of rewarding tidbits here, even if the density of the prose is hard to get through at times.