Robin Cooper

Robin Cooper, who has died in a climbing accident in France aged 57, was one of a handful of psychotherapists who kept alive the ideas of the radical psychiatrist RD Laing and his colleagues. Through his involvement with the Philadelphia Association - which Laing cofounded as a charity in 1965 - Robin developed Laing's thought and practice, especially in relation to asylum and therapeutic practice. Robin insisted on the validity of Laing's ideas; he embodied the best of 1960s idealism and combined this with a principled pragmatism and a fine strategic sense.

Born in Edinburgh, Robin attended Morrison's academy in Crieff before reading psychology at Edinburgh University. It was there he came across the ideas of Laing, especially his 1959 book The Divided Self: An Existential Study In Sanity And Madness. He sought out the author and took to heart his advice to get into therapy.

After graduating in 1968 he moved to London, where he began his analysis with Hugh Crawford, another Scottish psychiatrist and a colleague of Laing, and it was through Crawford that he became involved in the new Philadelphia Association household in Portland Road, in Notting Hill Gate. The PA, whose central objective was "the relief of mental illness of all descriptions, in particular schizophrenia" had opened its first therapeutic community household, at Kingsley Hall, in 1964.

Robin's time at the Portland Road house was later to be the subject of his PhD thesis on dwelling and the therapeutic community. He always believed that the heart of the PA was in its communities and the way they allowed people to find their place in the world.

The thinkers Bachelard, Merleau-Ponty and Heideg ger were all important to Robin for their investigations into the detail of everyday life. It was this attention to the fine texture of an individual's being in the world that really distinguished his clinical and intellectual work.

From Hugh Crawford in particular Robin learned the importance of letting people be - not to be confused with an indifference - of providing a benign context in which people might get on with whatever they had to get on with, or get through, where difficult things in the lives of men and women might be allowed to run their course.

After the closure of the Port land Road house in 1980, Robin continued his involvement in other PA houses, especially the one in Maida Vale, where he worked until the time of his death. Along with his wife Hilary -also a PA psychotherapist - Robin played a crucial role in the development of the PA after the traumatic decision in 1981 to ask Laing - by then a largely absent and erratic figurehead - to step down as chairman.

Right up to the time of his death Robin tried to keep the PA true to its founding spirits - while happily letting go of its wilder ideas. Yet he was also keenly aware that the organisation had to reorient itself in the changed landscape of the 1980s and 90s, to use one of his favourite metaphors. He was a fierce critic of the increasing regulation and bureaucratisation of psychotherapy and was deeply sceptical of the notion that increased regulation would better protect the public. Who, he wondered, would protect the patient from the therapist who was "smug, prim, self-satisfied or joyless... sadistic, or devoid of imagination?" Like his mentors, he continued to believe that madness was always understandable - given enough time and patience - and that those designated schizophrenic (or whatever) were no less deserving of respect than anyone else.

Psychologies and psychiatries, he wrote, were woefully inadequate to the task of describing the human forms of life with which they were confronted. Herein lay the importance of philosophy, especially that within the phenomenological tradition. His articles and book chapters and his teaching, formal and informal, testified to a fine intellect, although he wore his learning lightly.

There was not a hint of preciousness about him. He had a quiet, forceful energy along with humanity, humility and a fine sense of humour, a combination all too rare in the field. The right to a good night's sleep, he once remarked, hadn't been taken seriously enough by the early libertarians of the PA.

Away from work, his passions were his family, music and climbing. He had been a keen climber since his teens and was respected in climbing circles, especially in Scotland. He is mourned in his beloved Glencoe, as much as in the consulting rooms of London and elsewhere.

He is survived by Hilary and their sons, Lewis, Thomas and Joshua.

· Robin Cooper, psychotherapist, born April 8 1945; died July 7 2002

• Mental health
• RD Laing
• obituaries

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