Product Description
A series of dialogue-scenarios, which can be read as poems or plays, describing the "knots" and impasses in various kinds of human relationships.

CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 4.0 based on 18 reviews)

extreme caution

this book is diabolically brilliant......it will mess with your head and you might never be the same......I love it....and if you dare....go for it......
June 04, 2008

Review of paperback Knots by R D Laing

I returned the first two copies (which were to be gifts) because the print was almost totally illegible; a second shipment had the same dreadful print job and I returned them as well.

December 08, 2007

r.d. Laing

IT was ok excpet for the book itself. It was printed on cheap paper with a bad font. That would be ok if you had just mentioned it.
January 10, 2007

Indispensible

I have been in a profession 29 years in modern USA encountering hundreds of people and their varying issues, demands, needs, knots. I did not encounter this book in my education, even in psych, sociology or education courses. I picked it up at the school bookstore, and it has ended up about the most frequently re-referenced book in my library since -- for practical reasons. The book, simply, has been indispensible.

Not every situation imaginable, obviously, is outlined here, but the patterns are true and revealing. Laing was a great man, pioneer and rebel in a field brand spanking new that too quickly developed set and shared beliefs. He jumped into the chaos despite his own flaws, well known and well documented, but they do not detract from his contributions and uncanny insights into human relationships and what goes awry with them -- here laid out in poetic scenarios like a collection of butterflies. Laing hated the DSM manual, calling it the verbal equivilent of a straight jacket. In how many cases have I seen this bold and broadly human view confirmed, I cannot say -- many, many. The human psyche is a wildernesss, beautiful and potentially dangerous, full of pitfalls unknown to ourselves. Laing and his pioneer compatriots humanized mental illness and took it out of the closet; they dared to attempt to communicate with those written off and locked up in bare rooms. Laing's writings are also increasingly prophetic of our sad, manically unraveling moment of history. The line between those diagnosed insane (increasingly, too many) and sane is indeterminate and grey, certainly no bright line, and shifts continually. The "family" and "love" are often words sucked of all meaning in our lunatic freeways, life "choices" and "styles," our rush for the $$$ and "self" fulfillment.

This book would help just about anyone -- just remember its exploratory and tentative, the product of close personal & clinical study, not written in stone. Everybody's own knots are as singular as their fingerprints.
January 09, 2007

One for the ages

Knots is one of those books that you not only can but need to read and re-read throughout a lifetime. Laing really points out the ways in which we hinder ourselves, our relationships and our lives through these 'knots.'
For those out there who need a book with examples to see Laing's point more clearly, I would recommend 'Sanity, Madness and the family,' where one can see in concrete terms the things Laing points out "only" abstractlt in Knots.
HOwever, do not get me wrong, Knots is one of the best books ever written
December 27, 2004

SIMILAR PRODUCTS

Politics of Experience
by R.D. Laing

The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness (Penguin Psychology)
by R. D. Laing

The Politics of the Family: And Other Essays (Selected Works of R.D. Laing, 5)
by R. D. Laing

Do you love me?: An entertainment in conversation and verse
by R. D Laing

Mad to be Normal: Conversations with R.D. Laing
by Bob Mullan, R. D. Laing