A more metaphysical broadside was launched by R. D. Laing. A rising star in the anti-psychiatry movement, Laing argued that Sargant regarded man as a machine and that, when it went wrong, he used methods that were similar to giving a radio a smack. ‘The justification of this procedure, with man as with the wireless set, is that “it works”, as indeed it does . . . but has the paradoxical result of regression to barbarism.’
