The Bird of Paradise From comical horror stories of his medical school training at the birth of the NHS in the 1940’s, to becoming the most famous practicing psychiatrist in the world – R.D. Laing leads us out of the gutters and through the streets of Glasgow, on up to the proverbial mountaintop – to a ritual invocation and hallucinatory vision of The Bird of Paradise – challenging the audience to embark on their own journey of inner self discovery along the way. Told in reference to the narrator’s own experience of Psychiatry, and how R.D. Laing’s ideas, embedded in his writing, gave him the key to understanding it. 35 stanzas in 15 pages, with a dozen added extracts - charting the radicalising life journey of Scotland's most prolific 20th century thinker, the revolutionary Psychiatrist R.D. Laing.

Based on his abstract prose poem published in 1967 as the final chapter of campus classic The Politics of Experience.

Adapted by Garth Williams with publisher and estate permission. Framed in the light of lived experience.
The Bird of paradise "There is the story of the patient in a lie detector who, when asked if he was Napoleon - replied 'No!'
The lie detector recorded that he was lying..." Go Back Contact For more information or if you have any questions
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