[RodericDay]

I think you're projecting a bit. You're talking about Curtis' The Trap. According to the wiki summary:

A separate strand in the documentary is the work of R.D. Laing, whose work in psychiatry led him to model familial interactions using game theory. His conclusion was that humans are inherently selfish, shrewd, and spontaneously generate stratagems during everyday interactions. Laing's theories became more developed when he concluded that some forms of mental illness were merely artificial labels, used by the state to suppress individual suffering. This belief became a staple tenet of counterculture during the 1960s. [1]

I don't remember Laing being particularly lambasted in the documentary as you do, and I don't recall Curtis simplifying things so much. If so, the above summary is being really charitable.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trap_%28television_document...

[gruseom]

That's possible, because I don't remember the details. But I distinctly remember the feeling that Curtis' portrayal of Laing was badly distorted, and I recall that a commenter who had known Laing personally said the same thing. If I have time later, I'll try to take another look.

[RodericDay]

If you go on YouTube and search for the doc (The Trap), and speed up to 36:50, they start on Laing.

Quote from the doc: He was about to use his growing power to attack one of the most powerful professions in America: The Medical and Psychiatric establishment. The result would be dramatic, but the outcome would be very different from what Laing intended. His ideas would undermine the old controlling medical elite, but far from liberating people, what would actually emerge would be a revolutionary new system of order and control, driven by the objective power of numbers.

He doesn't portray Laing as in cahoots with some evil plutocrats, although he does talk about the Rosenheim (sp?) experiment separately.