Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History

by Kurt Andersen

And within the psychiatric profession itself, this idea had two influential proponents, who both published unorthodox manifestos at the beginning of the decade—R. D. Laing (The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness) and Thomas Szasz (The Myth of Mental Illness). “Madness,” Laing wrote when Esalen was new, “is potentially liberation and renewal.” Psychosis and schizophrenia are a “potentially natural process that we do not allow to happen,” “an initiation ceremonial,” and a “natural way of healing our appalling state of alienation called normality.” The Esalen founders were big Laing fans, and the institute became a hotbed for the idea that madness was just an alternative and often superior way of perceiving reality.