Sanity, Madness and the Family

In the late 1950s the psychiatrist R.D.Laing and psychoanalyst Aaron Esterson spent five years interviewing eleven families of female patients diagnosed as ''schizophrenic''. Their question was: are the experience and behaviour that psychiatrists take as signs of schizophrenia more socially intelligible than supposed? Sanity, Madness and the Family is the result of their work. Eleven vivid interviews, often dramatic and disturbing, reveal patterns of affection and hatred, manipulation and indifference within the family.

This Routledge Classics edition includes a new Foreword by Hilary Mantel.