After more than forty years, Vincenzo Caretti’s account of conversations with the Scottish psychiatrist, R.D. Laing, has finally been translated from Italian into English. Earlier translations in French, German and Dutch have been out of print for quite a while. For that reason, this English translation is of special importance. It was edited by Miles Groth, the daseinsanalyst and existential analyst living in New York.
For many years now a psychoanalyst, the probing questions of Caretti, who was then a young therapist in training only in his early 20s but welcomed by Laing for a week of discussions, is as fresh and insightful now as it was when first published in 1979. The translation by Danilo Serra, a brilliant young Italian scholar in philosophy and the humanities, is superb and brings to life the wit and subtlety of the famous radical psychotherapist and author of now classic works of social phenomenology on the family and schizophrenia. This year marks the 95th anniversary of the birth of Laing.
The topics of the conversations range from the Bible to Zen, Freud and Jung, the fate of the family and schizophrenia, language, silence and time, and the place of young people and women in the rapidly changing world ushered in by the Sixties. Their final conversation is characterized by Caretti as “a profession of faith” on the part of Laing. We have in these dialogues an illuminating portrait of the many sides of R.D. Laing the man, the thinker, and the therapist.
Vincenzo Caretti (1953), is psychoanalyst and professor of Dynamic Psychology and Psychotherapy at the Department of Human Science of the LUMSA University of Rome. His research fields cover the traumatic experiences in developmental age, the onset of the antisocial/psychopathic personality disorder, the factors of change in psychotherapy of self regulation.
Miles Groth, PhD, is full Professor (Emeritus) in the Department of Psychology at Wagner College, New York. He is co-founder with Tamás Fazekas and President of the American Daseinsanalytic Institute (2021). Dr. Groth has been in private practice as a daseinsanalyst since 1985. He is the author of seven books and many articles on psychotherapy and Continental philosophy. He has lectured residents in psychiatry on integrating psychodynamic psychotherapy with traditional in-patient treatment.
Danilo Serra ( 1991), PhD, is the author of several books on topical philosophical issues and numerous articles in philosophy journals. Dr. Serra carries out research in the areas of Heideggerian Philosophy, Poetic Phenomenology and Landscape Aesthetics. He is a member of the American Daseinsanalytic Institute (ADI).
