R. D. LAING QUOTES III

Scottish psychiatrist (1927-1989)

No one has schizophrenia, like having a cold. The patient has not "got" schizophrenia. He is schizophrenic.

R. D. LAING

The Divided Self


Freud was a hero. He descended to the "Underworld" and met there stark terrors. He carried with him his theory as a Medusa's head which turned these terrors to stone. We who follow Freud have the benefit of the knowledge he brought back with him and conveyed to us. He survived. We must see of we now can survive without using a theory that is in some measure an instrument of defence.

R. D. LAING

The Divided Self

Tags: Sigmund Freud


Conventions are convenient. It is inconvenient to say people are dead when they are alive, or alive when they have been buried, or that the world is crumbling when it is, as everyone can see, there as usual. If all A that does not fit B is ipso facto disqualified, we have to tailor A to shape and size to avoid serious trouble, and not all are equally gifted in this art.

R. D. LAING

The Politics of Family and Other Essays


Where can you scream? It's a serious question: where can you go in society and scream?

R. D. LAING

attributed, Mad to be Normal: Conversations with R. D. Laing


It is terrifying that having moved up through the irrationality/rationality of sets of sub-systems until we reach the total social context, we there seem to glimpse a total system that appears to be dangerously out of the control of the sub-systems or sub-contexts that comprise it. Here we face a theoretical, logical and practical dilemma. Namely, we seem to arrive at an empirical limit which itself appears to be without obvious intelligibility, and beyond this limiting context we do not know what further context there may be that may help us to set the total social world system in a larger pattern or design in which it finds its rationality. Some people think that it may be possible to do this within a cosmic pattern. On the other hand, more than one person has said--and usually been regarded as mad for having said it--that perhaps God is not dead: perhaps God is Himself mad.

R. D. LAING

"The Obvious", Going Crazy: The Radical Therapy of R.D. Laing and Others

Tags: God


From the moment of birth, when the Stone Age baby confronts the twentieth-century mother, the baby is subjected to these forces of violence, called love, as its mother and father, and their parents and their parents before them, have been. These forces are mainly concerned with destroying most of its potentialities, and on the whole this enterprise is successful.

R. D. LAING

The Politics of Experience

Tags: love


What is to be done? We who are still half alive, living in the often fibrillating heartland of a senescent capitalism -- can we do more than reflect the decay around and within us? Can we do more than sing our sad and bitter songs of disillusion and defeat?

R. D. LAING

introduction, The Politics of Experience

Tags: capitalism


When I go beyond a certain range it's outside of my direct horizon therefore I've got to rely on the writings and personal communications given to me by other people that I know.... I've got to try to piece together some tentative information picture of what the whole thing is like, but I'm aware that it becomes more and more speculative as it becomes more and more second, third, fourth hand. And this applies to absolutely everyone.

R. D. LAING

interview, "Our Present Madness", Unit, no. 11


In the context of our present pervasive madness that we call normality, sanity, freedom, all our frames of reference are ambiguous and equivocal.

R. D. LAING

The Divided Self


Since the self, in maintaining its isolation and detachment does not commit itself to a creative relationship with the other and is preoccupied with the figures of phantasies, thought, memories, etc. (imagos), which cannot be directly observable by or directly expressed to others, anything (in a sense) is possible. Whatever failures or successes come the way of the false-self system, the self is able to remain uncommitted and undefined. In phantasy, the self can be anyone, anywhere, do anything, have everything. It is thus omnipotent and completely free -- but only in phantasy. Once it commits itself to any real project it suffers the agonies of humiliation -- not necessarily for any failure, but simply because it has to subject itself to necessity and contingency. It is omnipotent and free only in phantasy.

R. D. LAING

The Divided Self


In a world full of danger, to be a potentially seeable object is to be constantly exposed to danger. Self-consciousness, then, may be the apprehensive awareness of oneself as potentially exposed to danger by the simple fact of being visible to others. The obvious defence against such a danger is to make oneself invisible in one way or another.

R. D. LAING

The Divided Self

Tags: danger


Experience is mad when it steps beyond the horizons of our common, that is, our communal sense.

R. D. LAING

"Transcendental Experience in Relation to Religion and Psychosis", The Psychedelic Review, 1964


In the society of men the truth resides now less in what things are than in what they are not.

R. D. LAING

introduction, The Politics of Experience


There is a great deal of pain in life and perhaps the only pain that can be avoided is the pain that comes from trying to avoid pain.

R. D. LAING

attributed, The Quotable Quote Book

Tags: pain


Rule A: Don't. Rule A1: Rule A doesn't exist. Rule A2: Do not discuss the existence or non-existence of Rules A, A1 or A2.

R. D. LAING

Knots

Tags: rules


Philosophy does not exist. It is nothing but an hypostatized abstraction.

R. D. LAING

Reason and Violence

Tags: philosophy


The Lotus opens. Movement from earth, through water, from fire to air. Out and in beyond life and death now, beyond inner and outer, sense and non-sense, meaning and futility, male and female, being and non-being, Light and darkness, void and full. Beyond all duality, or non-duality, beyond and beyond. Disincarnation. I breathe again.

R. D. LAING

The Politics of Experience


The madman is ... confused. He muddles ego with self, inner with outer, natural and supernatural. Nevertheless, he often can be to us, even through his profound wretchedness and disintegration, the hierophant of the sacred. An exile from the scene of being as we know it, he is an alien, a stranger, signalling to us from the void in which he is foundering. This void may be peopled by presences that we do not even dream of. They used to be called demons and spirits, that were known and named. He has lost his sense of self, his feelings, his place in the world as we know it. He tells us he is dead. But we are distracted from our cozy security by this mad ghost that haunts us with his visions and voices that seem so senseless and of which we feel impelled to rid him, cleanse him, cure him.

R. D. LAING

"Transcendental Experience in Relation to Religion and Psychosis", The Psychedelic Review, 1964

Tags: madness


Our social realities are so ugly if seen in the light of exiled truth, and beauty is almost no longer possible if it is not a lie.

R. D. LAING

introduction, The Politics of Experience

Tags: beauty


Psychiatry could be, and some psychiatrists are, on the side of transcendence, of genuine freedom, and of true human growth. But psychiatry can so easily be a technique of brainwashing, of inducing behaviour that is adjusted, by (preferably) non-injurious torture. In the best places, where straitjackets are abolished, doors are unlocked, leucotomies largely forgone, these can be replaced by more subtle lobotomies and tranquilizers that place the bars of Bedlam and the locked doors inside the patient. Thus I would wish to emphasize that our "normal" "adjusted" state is too often the abdication of ecstasy, the betrayal of our true potentialities, that many of us are only too successful in acquiring a false self to adapt to false realities.

R. D. LAING

The Divided Self