The Politics of the Family

one begins to look more closely at the style, the vehicle, the 'package' which wraps it up (to use a McLuhanism). If the message originally seemed to have dramatic impact did it derive in fact from his insight, or from the punchiness and idiosyncracy of the language used? Laingisms abound (coinherence, nexifjed, postdictions, compossible), giving a general air of somewhat rakish scholarship heightened by a generous use of colloquialisms. Suddenly all this gives way to numerical symbols, and a kind of minor mathematical fireworks display, largely derivative from the field theory work of Lewin in the 1940s.