Dismemberment and the Attempt at Re-membering in R. D. Laing’s The Bird of Paradise

Despite renewed interest in the radical psychiatrist R. D. Laing (1927–1989), his The Bird of Paradise (1967), published in a single volume with The Politics of Experience, has received scant scholarly attention. Characterized largely as odd, it has even been read as a sign that Laing, deeply sympathetic to the mad, had himself gone crazy. Eschewing biographical criticism, I focus rather on the problem of assigning Bird to a genre (and the significance of this difficulty). Finding the capacious prose poem genre the most appropriate category, I take Bird seriously as a complex literary text, offer an overview of it, relate it to Politics and 1960s counterculture, and attend to Laing’s ambivalent attitude towards writing. Bird, I argue, represents an attempt—albeit an ultimately unsuccessful one—at overcoming what Laing understands as alienated self-division (“dismemberment”) through a reaching towards wholeness (a “re-membering” of the self).