R. D. Laing's The Divided Self was never reviewed in this journal. The author's first book, it was published in 1960, and became essential reading in the intellectual counter-culture of the 1960's and 1970's. It is found convincing by critics of psychiatry. By 1965 it was brought out in paperback, and it has remained in print ever since. The current edition has sold over 400, 000 copies, “and continues to sell very well indeed. The book has been translated into virtually every other language in which books are published” (Middleton, 1981). Laing's later books, also, are discussed by sociologists, psychologists, philosophers and historians of ideas. Apart from many articles and essays, books have been devoted to Laing's written work—for example, Laing and Antipsychiatry (Boyers and Orrill, 1971); R. D. Laing: the Philosophy and Politics of Psychotherapy (Collier, 1977); R. D. Laing: His Work and its Relevance for Sociology (Howarth-Williams, 1977) and a volume, Laing, in the Fontana Modern Masters series (Friedenberg∗, 1973). Yet Laing is anathema to many psychiatrists, and his views on schizophrenia and insanity get brief mention in standard psychiatric textbooks, usually dismissed as extreme and/or unscientific.

Stimulated by the improvements contained in the ICD-9 of Mental Disorders, the author ventures to revive certain earlier suggestions aimed at its further simplification and homogenization. The major points are: (1) Three separate lists of items, one for each of the variables—Category, Specified Syndrome, and Aetiology, as well as compulsory registration of aetiology even when merely inferred. (2) Threefold diagnoses, built up by one item from each list, but with no catalogue Of preconceived combinations, the manual containing only the lists. (3) No running numbering of diagnoses, but codification by juxtaposition of three independent numerals.

Enormous industry has been devoted during the last half-century to establishing the genetic contribution to the aetiology of schizophrenia. Demonstration of a familial concentration of the disorder among the blood relatives of schizophrenics is supported by the differential concordance for schizophrenia found between monozygotic and dizygotic twins (Slater and Cowie, 1971; Gottesman and Shields, 1972; Shields, 1978). An alternative explanation offered was that the high familial incidence of schizophrenia was accounted for by the influence of a schizophrenic parent, particularly mother, or a sibling, or by a schizophrenogenic family configuration or pattern of communication. This speculation has been dispelled, however, by the brilliant series of studies which compared the outcome in the offspring of schizophrenics brought up at home with that of those adopted and brought up away from the schizophrenic parent (Heston and Denney, 1968; Kety et al, 1968; Rosenthal, 1970; Rosenthal et al, 1971; Wender et al 1971; Kety and Matthyse, 1972; Wender et al, 1974).