Knots Mass market paperbound - 1972

First line

They are playing a game.

From the jacket flap

A series of dialogue-scenarios, which can be read as poems or plays, describing the "knots" and impasses in various kinds of human relationships.

Media reviews

"In his earlier work Laing guided the reader to understanding. In Knots he compels him to experience.... To grasp this dense and difficult book one must be willing to follow Laing in his spirals of descent. If Knots is to yield, one must yield to the knots."

-- James S. Gordon, The New York Times Book Review

"Dr. Laing's gentle determination to unpeel the bottom motive, the most inward secret of the heart, produces a curious combination of intensity and compassion....The heartbreaking ironies...belong to an artist rather than a psychiatrist....

"The voices of known demons rise from these pages: demons of guilt, demons of self-justification; demons of perverse will, demons of self-destruction. All the enemies of the human spirit are arrayed here as vividly, as warningly as in a medieval morality play. Those who believe that to unmask the enemy is a first step toward confounding him will find this a practical as well as a moral book."

-- Melvin Maddocks, The Christian Science Monitor