Scottish psychiatrist (1927-1989)
Our civilization represses not only "the instincts", not only sexuality, but any form of transcendence. Among one-dimensional men, it is not surprising that someone with an insistent experience of other dimensions, that he cannot entirely deny or forget, will run the risk either of being destroyed by the others, or of betraying what he knows.
R. D. LAING
The Divided Self
We are all murderers and prostitutes -- no matter to what culture, society, class, nation, we belong, no matter how normal, moral, or mature we take ourselves to be. Humanity is estranged from its authentic possibilities.
R. D. LAING
introduction, The Politics of Experience
Attempts to wake before our time are often punished, especially by those who love us most. Because they, bless them, are asleep. They think anyone who wakes up, or who, still asleep, realizes that what is taken to be real is a "dream" is going crazy.
R. D. LAING
The Politics of Family and Other Essays
If I don't know I don't know
I think I know
If I don't know I know
I think I don't know
R. D. LAING
Knots
We must remember that we are living in an age in which the ground is shifting and the foundations are shaking. I cannot answer for other times and places. Perhaps it has always been so. We know it is true today.
R. D. LAING
"Transcendental Experience in Relation to Religion and Psychosis", The Psychedelic Review, 1964
Long before a thermonuclear war can come about, we have had to lay waste our own sanity. We begin with the children. It is imperative to catch them in time. Without the most thorough and rapid brainwashing their dirty minds would see through our dirty tricks. Children are not yet fools, but we shall turn them into imbeciles like ourselves, with high I.Q.s if possible.
R. D. LAING
The Politics of Experience
Madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be break-through. It is potential liberation and renewal as well as enslavement and existential death.
R. D. LAING
"Transcendental Experience in Relation to Religion and Psychosis", The Psychedelic Review, 1964
True guilt is guilt at the obligation one owes to oneself to be oneself. False guild is guilt felt at not being what other people feel one ought to be or assume that one is.
R. D. LAING
Self and Others
I started to try to see through the dense opacity of social events from the study of certain people who were labelled psychotic or neurotic, as seen in mental hospitals, psychiatric units and out-patient clinics. I began to see that I was involved in the study of situations and not simply of individuals. It seemed (and this still seems to be the case) that the study of such situations was arrested in three principal ways. In the first place the behaviour of such people was regarded as signs of a pathological process that was going on in them, and only secondarily of anything else. The whole subject was enclosed in a medical metaphor. In the second place this medical metaphor conditioned the conduct of all those who were enclosed by it, doctors and patients. Thirdly, through this metaphor the person who was the patient in the system, being isolated from the system, could no longer be seen as a person: as a corollary, it was also difficult for the doctor to behave as a person. A person does not exist without a social context. You cannot take a person out of his social context and still see him as a person, or act towards him as a person. If one does not act towards the other as a person, one depersonalizes oneself.
R. D. LAING
"The Obvious", Going Crazy: The Radical Therapy of R.D. Laing and Others
I cannot experience your experience. You cannot experience my experience. We are both invisible men.
R. D. LAING
The Politics of Experience
They are playing a game. They are playing at not playing a game. If I show them I see they are, I shall break the rules and they will punish me. I must play their game, of not seeing I see the game.
R. D. LAING
Knots
Children do not give up their innate imagination, curiosity, dreaminess easily. You have to love them to get them to do that. Love is the path through permissiveness to discipline: and through discipline, only too often, to betrayal of self.
R. D. LAING
The Politics of Experience/The Bird of Paradise
The range of what we think and do
is limited by what we fail to notice.
And because we fail to notice
that we fail to notice
there is little we can do
to change
until we notice
how failing to notice
shapes our thoughts and deeds.
R. D. LAING
attributed, Vital Lies, Simple Truths: The Psychology of Self Deception
Society highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal. Normal men have killed perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years.
R. D. LAING
The Politics of Experience
Schizophrenic behaviour is a special strategy that a person invents in order to live in an unlivable situation.
R. D. LAING
The Politics of Experience
A child born today in the United Kingdom stands a ten times greater chance of being admitted to a mental hospital than to a university.... This can be taken as an indication that we are driving our children mad more effectively than we are genuinely educating them. Perhaps it is our way of educating them that is driving them mad.
R. D. LAING
The Politics of Experience
Schizophrenia is the name for a condition that most psychiatrists ascribe to patients they call schizophrenic.
R. D. LAING
attributed, The Concise Columbia Dictionary of Quotations
The dynamics and structures found in those groups called families in our society may not be evident in those groups called families in other places and times.
R. D. LAING
The Politics of the Family and Other Essays
What we take anything to be profoundly affects how we go about describing it, and how we describe something profoundly affects how we go about explaining, accounting for, or understanding what is what we are, in a sense, defining, by our description.
R. D. LAING
"The Use of Existential Phenomenology in Psychotherapy", The Evolution of Psychotherapy
A psychiatrist who professes to be a healer of souls, but who keeps people asleep, treats them for waking up, and drugs them asleep again (increasingly effectively as this field of technology sharpens its weapons), helps to drive them crazy.
R. D. LAING
The Politics of Family and Other Essays