First published in 1970, Knots is one of R. D. Laing's more unusual and enduring books.

Rather than presenting psychiatric theory in conventional prose, Laing constructs a series of verbal patterns, paradoxes and recursive dialogues that map the impossible structures people become trapped inside. Love, shame, dependence, resentment and identity are rendered as looping linguistic forms that reveal how relationships can become self-sustaining systems of contradiction. Somewhere between philosophy, poetry, drama and psychotherapy, the book remains unlike almost anything else written in twentieth-century psychology.

While Laing is best known for works such as The Divided Self, Knots has become a cult text well beyond psychiatry, influencing artists, writers, systems thinkers and theorists interested in language, cybernetics and interpersonal dynamics. It rewards slow reading, with many passages functioning almost like conceptual poems whose apparent simplicity gives way to remarkable psychological precision.

1978 Penguin paperback edition. Moderate shelf and edge wear to wraps with some creasing and rubbing. Interior is clean and unmarked.