The Politics of the Family and Other Essays examines how relationships influence the experience of being a person. R. D. Laing asks how families define their members, transmit expectations, organise what may be felt and said, and participate in the interpretation of psychological distress.
Why call family life political?
The politics in the title concerns power within relationships: who may define an event, whose feelings are treated as credible, what counts as loyalty, and who can question the accepted account. These questions can arise in ordinary exchanges, without being stated as a dispute about authority.
Laing introduces the difficulty of knowing a family from within:
The first family to interest me was my own. I still know less about it than I know about many other families.
R. D. Laing — The Politics of the Family and Other Essays, p. 67 [1]
The book brings together essays and talks rather than presenting a single, uniform research report. Its opening part considers the internalised family, intervention in social situations, and the study of family and social contexts in relation to schizophrenia. The second part develops invalidation, family scenarios, operations, rules and metarules, and mapping. The edition discussed here is the 1971 text reprinted by Routledge in 1999. [1]
Laing’s preface says that the talks were intended to provoke questions. This matters for interpretation. A proposal for investigation, a speculative model, and an established empirical result have different statuses, even when expressed in equally confident language. [1]
The family and the internalised “family”
Laing distinguishes a family as an observable network of people from the family as it is internally organised in experience. People take in relationships: who is close to whom, who is excluded, who protects whom, who belongs with whom, and what particular alliances mean. The internalised structure need not be identical for every member. [1]
A person’s sense of belonging therefore involves more than knowing the names on a family tree. It can include expectations about how everyone else understands the family and about what they require the person to feel. Differences between these internal versions may remain hidden until an event exposes them.
Laing also cautions against assuming that all families have the same structures across societies and periods. His opening discussion makes comparisons provisional. The book should consequently not be converted into a universal template into which every family must be fitted. [1]
Public events and lived experience
In the discussion of invalidation, Laing shows how a public event and its personal meaning can diverge. An official relationship can exist while its expected emotional significance is absent. If the accepted description is treated as the only permissible one, the discrepancy becomes difficult to speak about. [1]
For example, a celebration can be experienced as joyful by one participant and lonely by another. This invented illustration does not make either feeling a complete description of the event. It demonstrates why an account of what happened and an inquiry into what it was like both matter.
Laing’s sharper concern is with situations in which the divergence itself becomes unacceptable. The person is required to experience the occasion as the group defines it. Their difficulty in doing so may then be taken as a defect within them, without investigating the relationship between the definition and their experience.
Family scenarios and identity
Family scenarios concern patterns carried between people and generations. Laing describes the mapping of earlier relationships onto later ones, together with attempts to induce others to occupy the positions assigned to them. A person may be experienced through a previous relationship and then pressured to behave in accordance with it. [1]
His distinction between projection and induction is useful here. Projection concerns how one person experiences another. Induction concerns action upon the other’s experience: an attempt to bring about the role or response that the first person expects. A mistaken impression and a sustained effort to make someone embody that impression are different processes. [1]
Laing also examines instructions carried by identity claims. Describing someone as sensible, fragile, selfish, or dependable may function as a demand about how they must behave. Whether that function is present cannot be decided from the adjective alone. It depends on the relationship and on what happens when the person departs from the assigned role. [1]
Rules and metarules
A family may have explicit rules about conduct and less explicit rules about the meanings attached to it. A metarule governs how rules are recognised, interpreted, or questioned. Laing examines the organisation of values: which people and actions must be regarded positively, negatively, or neutrally, and how these assignments shape perception. [1]
His compressed formulation distinguishes examining a rule from seeing the world through it:
Unless we can ‘see through’ the rules, we only see through them.
R. D. Laing — The Politics of the Family and Other Essays, p. 105 [1]
An invented example is a household in which disagreement is permitted in principle but any disagreement about the household itself is treated as betrayal. The rule about loyalty governs whether the apparent permission can be used. This illustrates the importance of examining the relationship between a stated rule and the responses that enforce it.
The difficulty extends to observers. A professional has their own assumptions about proper families, appropriate feelings, and reasonable conduct. Laing’s argument asks how those assumptions influence what the professional recognises as evidence. [1]
The psychiatric argument and its limits
The essays also challenge the use of schizophrenia as a self-explanatory label. Laing asks how an attribution is made, who sustains it, and what effects follow when everyone relates to a person through it. He proposes that aspects of behaviour may be shaped by the social response to the diagnosis. These are historical arguments and research hypotheses; they should be identified as such. [1]
Examining the effects of a label does not settle the question of the condition to which it refers. Nor does an intelligible family interaction establish that a person’s difficulties disappear in other environments. Cooper’s critique of Laing and Esterson focuses on precisely this gap between showing an adverse context and demonstrating that the disorder is located wholly outside the individual. [2]
Current NHS information describes schizophrenia as involving multiple interacting kinds of factor. Contemporary NICE guidance includes supportive family intervention as part of care. Neither point requires a theory that places sole responsibility on families. [3] [4]
What remains useful
The book supplies a vocabulary for examining relationships without taking their official descriptions as exhaustive. It can prompt closer attention to attribution, permission, loyalty, and the difference between an event and its lived significance.
Its usefulness depends on allowing those questions to remain open. If the family is automatically treated as guilty, or the professional as uniquely able to see the truth, the inquiry has been decided before it begins. The stronger approach compares accounts, looks for evidence, and asks what each proposed interpretation explains and leaves unexplained.
Continue with mystification and invalidation or Laing’s approach to psychotherapy. For a related historical discussion, see the article on Bateson’s double bind.
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References and source notes
- Laing, R. D. (1971). The Politics of the Family and Other Essays. References use the Routledge 1999 reprint of the 1971 edition; first publication recorded as 1969.Cited: p. 67; publication details, preface and contents; preface; “The Family and the ‘Family’,” pp. 3–5; “The Family and the ‘Family’,” p. 3; “The Family and Invalidation,” pp. 67–69; “Family Scenarios,” pp. 77–79; “Mapping,” pp. 118–119; “Mapping,” p. 119; “Family Scenarios,” pp. 78–79; “Rules and Metarules,” pp. 103–116; p. 105; “Rules and Metarules,” pp. 104–105; “The Study of Family and Social Contexts in Relation to ‘Schizophrenia’,” pp. 43–45.
- Cooper, Rachel (2017). “Where’s the problem? Considering Laing and Esterson’s account of schizophrenia, social models of disability, and extended mental disorder.” Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics, 38, 295–305. DOI: 10.1007/s11017-017-9413-0.Cited: abstract and discussion. Online source
- NHS. Schizophrenia: Causes. Consulted 14 October 2026.Cited: “Causes”. Online source
- National Institute for Health and Care Excellence. Psychosis and schizophrenia in adults: prevention and management (CG178), recommendations. Consulted 14 October 2026.Cited: recommendations 1.3.7.2 and 1.4.4.2. Online source