SOURCE: "Things We Don't Talk About," in The New York Times Book Review, September 8, 1985, p. 9.

Tavris is an American psychologist. In the following review of Wisdom, Madness and Folly, she contends that the book is an appealing account of the first part of Laing's career.

The second sweetest set of three words in English is "I don't known," and it is to R. D. Laing's credit that he uses it often. For psychiatry really does not know much about madness. It cannot explain why an American catatonic schizophrenic, crouched in apparently mindless rigidity in front of a television set for a month, can later recite every detail of the World Series he has seen. It cannot explain why Scottish catatonic schizophrenics "come out" on New Year's Eve to smile, laugh, shake hands, and dance, only to revert to apathy the next day. "If any drug had this effect...