RD Laing, Feminism and the Politics of Birth and Re-birth

ABSTRACT RD Laing’s phenomenological approach to madness influenced early second wave feminism, since it buttressed the feminist critique of the nuclear family and exposed the abuses of institutional psychiatry in policing gender roles. However, feminist perceptions of Laing’s ‘gender blindness’, as exemplified by Elaine Showalter’s The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture, and the feminist turn towards Freudian/Lacanian psychoanalysis, soon moderated enthusiasm for Laing. In the 1970s, Laing became increasingly incensed about the medicalisation of childbirth, writing an unpublished manuscript, The Politics of Birth, and promoting the practice of therapeutic ‘re-birthing’. The latter practice is relentlessly satirised in Emma Tennant’s speculative novel The Crack (1978). Drawing on Laing’s unpublished papers, I show that even as feminists were disavowing, critiquing and satirising Laing, he was embracing feminist ideas. I argue that Laing’s emergent feminist sympathies underpin his critique of contemporaneous birthing practices and that there is a common thread linking his critique of psychiatric and obstetric abuses as being premised on a denial of the value of ‘unscripted’ human experience. This article thus argues for a more nuanced understanding of feminism’s own intellectual history and a reappraisal of Laing vis-a-vis feminism, which would contribute to the broader re-evaluation of Laing’s work currently underway.