SOURCE: A review of The Divided Self and The Self and Others, in The New York Times Book Review, February 22, 1970, p. 1-2, 44.

Berman is an American professor of political science, nonfiction writer, and critic. In the following review of The Divided Self and The Self and Others, he favorably assesses the development of Laing's theory and method for the treatment of schizophrenia, contrasting it with "the prophetic, evangelical (some would say, messianic) tone" of The Politics of Experience.

For a great many Americans, particularly young Americans, the 1960's were a time in which two of the deepest streams of consciousness—self-consciousness and social consciousness—converged. The radical vision and energy of the sixties aimed at a fusion of ideas and experiences which the fifties had found either unrelated or incompatible: political freedom and personal ecstasy, activism and mysticism, voter-registration drives and mind-expanding drugs, sit-ins and love-ins.

This fusion...