The dialogues could be those between lovers, between parents and children, between analysts and patients or all of these merged together.

They may have been impressed that a liberal arts dabbler and then-English Major was reading abstruse psychological books like Laing’s, I don’t know. Nothing else before or since so perfectly caught the efficiency and momentum and horror of circular thinking. This is a digitized version of an article from The Times’s print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996.Circular thinking doesn't go anywhere, A gyre spins up or down or out or in--the mind at least goes somewhere.

If you can read this book and understand it through to the end, you will be able to understand anything, most of all yourself. He never actually denied the existence of mental illness - indeed he admitted that he was a clinical depressive himself - but unlike his contemporaries Laing believed it could be a transformative experience.Number 48 is on the south side of Bedford Square, a five minute walk from Totten ham Court Road or Goodge Street underground stations and a ten minute walk from Russell Square. But these poems are startling and revealing in their simplicity; in their assertion that any one of us may find themselves in situations which feel impossible because they have no right answer. One feels the connection between the fant's struggle to define what inside his body and what is outside and the mystic's strenuous denial this separation, but both these pur suits are seen as “webs of maya” against a more remote background. One can discern an approximate focus in each—love, possessiveness, under standing, fear, the nature of being— but all these themes are echoed in each knot.