Ronald David Laing
18 quotes
Biography
"Existential phenomenology attempts to characterize the nature of a person's experience of his world and himself. It is not so much an attempt to describe particular objects of his experience as to set all particular experiences within the context of his whole being-in-his-world. The mad things said and done by the schizophrenic will remain essentially a closed book if one does not understand their existential context. In describing one way of going mad, I shall try to show that there is a comprehensible transition from the sane schizoid way of being-in-the-world to a psychotic way of being-in-the-world. Although retaining the terms schizoid and schizophrenic for the sane and psychotic positions respectively, I shall not, of course, be using these terms in their usual clinical psychiatric frame of reference, but phenomenologically and existentially."
"We live in a moment of history where change is so speeded up that we begin to see the present only when it is already disappearing."
"I cannot experience your experience. You cannot experience my experience. We are both invisible men. All men are invisible to one another. Experience used to be called The Soul. Experience as invisibility of man to man is at the same time more evident than anything. Only experience is evident. Experience is the only evidence. Psychology is the logos of experience. Psychology is the structure of the evidence, and hence psychology is the science of sciences."
"Social phenomenology is the science of my own and of others' experience. It is concerned with the relation between my experience of you and your experience of me. That is, with inter-experience. It is concerned with your behaviour and my behaviour as I experience it, and your and my behaviour as you experience it."
"We are effectively destroying ourselves by violence masquerading as love. I am a specialist, God help me, in events in inner space and time, in experiences called thoughts, images, reveries, dreams, visions, hallucinations, dreams of memories, memories of dreams, memories of visions, dreams of hallucinations, refractions of refractions of refractions of that original Alpha and Omega of experience and reality, that Reality on whose repression, denial, splitting, projection, falsification, and general desecration and profanation our civilisation as much as anything is based."
"It is of fundamental importance not to make the positivist mistake of assuming that because a group’s members are in formation this means that they’re necessarily on course."
"There is no such "condition" as "schizophrenia," but the label is a social fact and the social fact a political event."
"The madness that we encounter in "patients" is a gross travesty, a mockery, a grotesque caricature of what the natural healing of that estranged integration we call sanity might be. True sanity entails in one way or another the dissolution of the normal ego, that false self competently adjusted to our alienated social reality; the emergence of the "inner" archetypal mediators of divine power, and through this death a rebirth, and the eventual re-establishment of a new kind of ego-functioning, the ego now being the servant of the divine, no longer its betrayer."
"The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice. And because we fail to notice there is little we can do to change until we notice how failing to notice shapes our thoughts and deeds."
"Laing was profoundly disenchanted with most analysts' closed-minded and dogmatic world-views, and their derogatory attitude toward psychotics. The Freudians and Kleinians in London, for their part, did not trust Laing because he committed the cardinal sin of taking Jung's notion of metanoia seriously. This was not yet evident in 1960, when he published The Divided Self. But it was vividly apparent in The Politics of Experience, published in 1967."
"Fed up with the limelight, in 1970, Laing left for India and Ceylon, where he studied Buddhist mediation and Shiviite Yoga for 18 months. He returned a changed man. Unlike his former, angrier, radical self, the new R.D. Laing now enjoined a kind of gentle, Buddhist austerity as the best path to liberation, and expressed a great skepticism about the left's agenda and methods. Moreover, he no longer condemned the nuclear family or the use of psychotropic medication as a treatment of last resort, provided these drugs were taken voluntarily, with the patient's informed consent. He remained categorically opposed to electroshock and involuntary psychiatric treatment, and eager to explore alternatives to psychiatry. But he now rejected the "anti-psychiatry" label that others had placed on him, and made several conciliatory gestures toward his estranged psychiatric colleagues."
"Many things have changed since The Politics of Experience created such a sensation. The general public isn't as moved by the plight of these people as they were in Laing's day. And though Laing was far more effective with people like these than the average clinician in a one-on-one setting, he never developed a workable alternative to the conventional mental hospital. In the absence of such an alternative, people in distress are inclined to rely on the devil they know. Besides, really good psychotherapy is time and labor intensive. It requires a substantial emotional investment from the therapist as well as the patient. It is not cheap and not fast, and in the recent climate of fiscal restraint we want a quick fix: something clean and cost-effective, not messy and time consuming."
"Laing argued that labeling the individual often has little to do with accurate assessment of the patient's real problems, and that the remedial interventions mandated by a specific diagnosis often serve complex social functions by equilibrating extant social-systems, i.e. maintaining the status quo. In short, clinicians frequently locate the cause of the disturbance in individuals to divert attention from the processes that actually engendered their disturbed behavior. If they did not, they would often construe the "signs and symptoms" of these diagnostic entities as intelligible responses to what Laing termed "unlivable situations" — ones which the patient can neither understand, nor tolerate, nor change effectively."
"Laing had an aching addiction to fame and celebrity and it unquestionably damaged his reputation. … His need for attention was a lifelong problem and robbed his work of credibility, particularly after he had a serious midlife crisis of creativity and felt he had run out of things to say. He became a tragic figure, his behaviour erratic and self-destructive. There were flashes of the old brilliance, but much of his later output was of questionable value. Frankly, it was dreck."
"Being the son of RD Laing was neither amazing nor enlightening …For most of the time it was a crock of shit."
"The square root of nothing."
"We’ve got too many problems for him. … He can solve everybody else’s, but not ours."
"Ronnie was brilliant, a complete original, but he desperately overdid the drugs and drink. He was one of those drunks whose body would jack it in while his mind kept working. He would be lying on the floor, paralytic but talking nonstop and making perfect sense."