The author, who worked alongside R.D. Laing in Glasgow, seeks to put the record straight. From the contemporary perspective, Laing is admired as a pioneer of ideas and a charismatic and prominent anti-psychiatrist. Isobel Hunter-Brown reveals, however, that Laing's view of sanity and insanity as a continuum and his opposition to high-dosage anti-psychotic medication already formed part of the Scottish psychiatric tradition. Hunter-Brown argues that the culture of the Glasgow units in which Laing worked early in his career had already been strongly influenced by the Scottish psychoanalyst, Fairbairn. Furthermore, for decades prior to this, their inspiration had traditionally been drawn from Adolph Meyer, who promoted a holistic view of his patients - exploring biological, psychological and social dimensions as part of their diagnosis - an approach that is widely believed to have originated with Laing. Psychiatrists seldom write about their profession, but this author describes the inner workings of psychiatric practice in Glasgow during the 1950s and the way in which some practitioners in that allegedly barbarous era were already using psychodynamic methods to help their patients.

A century after the appearance of his famous works on religion, William James's philosophy of religion is still the subject of lively debate. James's numerous opponents have repeatedly charged him with abdication of intellectual responsibility, arguing that he advocated the adoption of religious belief without conclusive evidence on its behalf. In this book Hunter Brown shows that critics have consistently distorted James's view in the process of arriving at such charges.The central argument presented here is that critics have failed to look at James's philosophical vision as a whole. This failure is addressed by Brown as he locates James's thought on religion within the wider scope of Radical Empiricism's analyses of experience in general, and subject-object relations in particular. Brown presents the main interpretations and critiques of James's work, and shows that James's views of religious experience, evil and power, human responsibility, and ethical concerns do not in fact lapse into subjectivism and fideism.This penetrating study not only builds upon a long tradition of James scholarship but pushes through to new levels of inquiry and insight. It is a major work that will generate renewed discussion of James's thought along with the approaches and concerns emerging from it.

Now available in paperback, "Images of the Human" addresses the questions human beings have been asking for centuries. Each chapter focuses on the writings of a different philosopher--from Plato to Nietzsche, St. Augustine to Simone de Beauvior. As a distinctive feature, commentaries explore the unique relationship between what philosophers say and what religion teaches.