R. D. Laing

Ronald David Laing (1927–1989) was a Scottish psychiatrist whose first book, The Divided Self (1960), proposed an existential-phenomenological approach to understanding schizoid and schizophrenic experience. Rather than treating psychotic behavior as meaningless symptom, Laing argued that it was comprehensible when read as the patient’s own response to an intolerable existential situation. His basic purpose, as he stated in the book’s opening line, was “to make madness, and the process of going mad, comprehensible.” (Laing, R. D., 1960) The book explicitly declined to offer a systematic theory of schizophrenia or to explore constitutional and organic aspects, focusing instead on the existential structure of the patient’s experience. (Laing, R. D., 1960) In the 1965 Pelican preface, he extended this to a political claim: psychiatry could serve either “transcendence, genuine freedom, and true human growth,” or function as “a technique of brainwashing, of inducing behaviour that is adjusted, by (preferably) non-injurious torture.” (Laing, R. D., 1960)

The term schizoid, in Laing’s usage, referred to an individual whose experience was split in two main ways: a rent in his relation with his world, and a disruption of his relation with himself. (Laing, R. D., 1960)

Intellectual Debts and Divergences

Laing’s intellectual context was the existential tradition of European philosophy. He acknowledged his “main intellectual indebtedness” to that tradition while noting important divergences from Kierkegaard, Jaspers, Heidegger, Sartre, Binswanger, and Tillich. (Laing, R. D., 1960) Each contributed something specific to his framework: Kierkegaard’s concept of “shutupness”; the condition in which an individual’s actions are no longer felt as self-expressions; described the schizoid state. (Laing, R. D., 1960) Jaspers supplied the therapeutic formulation: the task of psychotherapy was “to make an appeal to the freedom of the patient.” (Laing, R. D., 1960) Tillich supplied the core diagnosis of neurosis: “Neurosis is the way of avoiding non-being by avoiding being.” (Laing, R. D., 1960) Sartre’s distinction between the imaginary self and the real self described the schizoid predicament exactly; the imaginary self “breaks in pieces at contact with reality.” (Laing, R. D., 1960)

Freud Laing treated with a complex deference. He called Freud “the greatest psychopathologist” and “a hero” who had descended to the Underworld of the mind and brought back knowledge. But he argued that Freud’s theoretical system functioned partly “as a Medusa’s head which turned these terrors to stone”; an instrument of defence against the very experience it claimed to explain. The challenge was “to survive without using a theory that is in some measure an instrument of defence.” (Laing, R. D., 1960)

Winnicott’s concept of the true and false self provided the most immediate clinical precursor to Laing’s argument, and he drew on it throughout; but he extended Winnicott’s account in an explicitly existential direction, connecting the false self to ontological rather than merely developmental dynamics.

The Critique of Psychiatric Language

A central methodological claim of The Divided Self is that the existing psychiatric vocabulary cannot do what it needs to do. The terms of psychiatry, Laing argued, “split man up verbally in a way which is analogous to the existential splits we have to describe here,” making it impossible to give an adequate account of the very splits under study. Since “no such concept exists” for a unitary whole within the existing language system of psychiatry or psychoanalysis, the vocabulary itself is an obstacle. (Laing, R. D., 1960)

Beyond this structural criticism, Laing characterized the standard psychiatric jargon (drawing on van den Berg) as “a veritable ‘vocabulary of denigration’” that presupposed a normative standard of being human against which the psychotic was measured and found deficient. This was not neutral description but judgment disguised as diagnosis. (Laing, R. D., 1960)

The broader objection was philosophical: to translate personal understanding into impersonal “it-processes” (into the language of mechanism, reflex, and organism) was not to gain knowledge but to lose it. “Depersonalization in a theory that is intended to be a theory of persons,” Laing wrote, “is as false as schizoid depersonalization of others and is no less ultimately an intentional act.” He called this reification a form of false knowledge “just as pathetic a fallacy as the false personalization of things.” (Laing, R. D., 1960) An “authentic science of persons” had not yet emerged because of the “inveterate tendency to depersonalize or reify persons.” (Laing, R. D., 1960)

What was needed instead was a psychology that could think of the individual neither as a thing nor as an organism but as a person; drawing on John MacMurray’s argument that scientific psychology had to transition from an organic to a personal conception of unity, even if the logical form for personal unity remained undiscovered. (Laing, R. D., 1960) The basic requirement was that the therapist be able to orient himself within the patient’s own scheme of things, rather than seeing the patient only as an object within his own world, and to do this without prejudging who was right and who was wrong. (Laing, R. D., 1960) Separateness and relatedness, Laing held, were mutually necessary: each person is simultaneously separate from and related to others, and personal relatedness can exist only between beings who are separate but not isolates. (Laing, R. D., 1960)

Ontological Security and Its Failures

Laing introduces the concept of primary ontological security: “a firm sense of one’s own and others’ reality and identity from which one encounters all hazards of life.” (Laing, R. D., 1960) An ontologically secure person experiences themselves and others as “real, alive, whole, and continuous.” (Laing, R. D., 1960)

The ontologically insecure person is preoccupied with preserving rather than gratifying himself; ordinary circumstances of living constitute “a continual and deadly threat.” (Laing, R. D., 1960) Laing identified three specific forms of anxiety that follow from this position: engulfment, implosion, and petrification. (Laing, R. D., 1960)

Engulfment is the dread that any relationship will lead to loss of autonomy and identity. The person dreads relatedness with anyone (including himself) because he cannot be certain that in any relationship he will not lose himself entirely. The main defence is isolation, producing a polarity between complete absorption in another and complete aloneness. (Laing, R. D., 1960) A distinctive feature of engulfment is that being correctly understood can itself be threatening; to be understood fully is to be “enclosed, swallowed up, drowned, eaten up, smothered” by another’s comprehension. The isolated person finds “a measure of safety in isolation” precisely because isolation protects against being known. (Laing, R. D., 1960)

Implosion is the terror of the world crashing in to obliterate all identity “as a gas will rush in and obliterate a vacuum.” The individual feels that he IS the emptiness; his identity is the void, and any contact with reality therefore threatens to annihilate what little being he has. (Laing, R. D., 1960)

Petrification operates in three senses simultaneously: the terror of being turned to stone, the dread of being reduced from a person to a dead thing or automaton, and the defensive act of turning others into things by negating their subjectivity. (Laing, R. D., 1960)

Laing identified a general law governing how these anxieties are managed: the very dangers most dreaded can themselves be encompassed to forestall their occurrence. Forgoing autonomy becomes the means of secretly safeguarding it; feigning death preserves aliveness; turning oneself to stone prevents being petrified by others. (Laing, R. D., 1960)

Ontological insecurity also lends itself to diagnostic confusion with other conditions. Through the case of Mrs R., Laing argued that what looked like a libidinal problem was in fact primarily ontological: the central issue in her life was her lack of ontological autonomy. Without the actual presence of another person who knew her, her sense of her own identity drained away, and her panic was at the fading away of her being itself. Her sexuality was an effort to seek ontological security rather than primary gratification. (Laing, R. D., 1960)

The contrast Lionel Trilling drew between Shakespeare and Kafka illustrates what ontological security feels like from the inside. Shakespeare’s characters retain a strong sense of personal identity even amid evil or conflict; Kafka’s are stripped of everything except abstract humanity. The effort to communicate what being alive is like without any such basic assurance, Laing observed, characterized not just Kafka but a number of writers and artists of the twentieth century. (Laing, R. D., 1960)

The ontologically insecure person oscillates between two poles that are “each equally unfeasible”: complete isolation or complete merging. He cannot achieve the “dialectical middle ground of separateness-and-relatedness” that characterizes healthy relatedness. (Laing, R. D., 1960) He needs others to supply his sense of existing while dreading that they will deprive him of it.

The Embodied and Unembodied Self

Laing distinguished two basic existential positions. In the normal embodied condition, a person uses his body as a base from which to be a person with others; he is “flesh and blood and bones, biologically alive and real.” In the unembodied condition, the individual is “somewhat detached from his body,” experiencing it as an object among others rather than the core of his being. (Laing, R. D., 1960) In this state, the body is experienced “as the core of a false self, which a detached, disembodied, ‘inner’, ‘true’ self looks on at with tenderness, amusement, or hatred.” (Laing, R. D., 1960)

The split between inner self and outer personality can operate for years without appearing unusual. Through his case of David, Laing showed an individual who had “never seriously imagined any other possibility” than that his “self” and his “personality” were two entirely separate things, who assumed, on the basis of his own experience, that “everyone was an actor.” (Laing, R. D., 1960)

Where David presents a relatively stable split, Laing described how the outward personality, rather than being a single coherent false self, can consist of an amalgam of various part-selves, none fully developed: a patchwork of deliberate impersonations and compulsive actions that together constitute a false-self system rather than any single false self. (Laing, R. D., 1960) This system’s inner logic drives the individual to develop a microcosmos within himself as a substitute for the shared world, but this autistic, private world is not a feasible substitute for the only world there really is. If it were feasible, Laing observed, there would be no need for psychosis. (Laing, R. D., 1960)

The tragic paradox is that the more the self is defended through withdrawal, the more it is destroyed. Dissolution in schizophrenic conditions is accomplished not by external attacks but by the inner defensive manoeuvres themselves. (Laing, R. D., 1960)

The Inner Self in the Schizoid Condition

The schizoid split between self and body is not a temporary reaction to a specific danger but a basic orientation to life, usually traceable to the earliest months of infancy. (Laing, R. D., 1960) Laing proposed two contrasting diagrams of selfhood to make this visible: in the benign circle, self and body relate directly to another, and the reality of both self and world are mutually enriched; in the vicious circle, the self is split from the body-other, and everything becomes progressively unreal and dead. (Laing, R. D., 1960)

The inner self in this position seeks transcendence and safety through withdrawal, but finds instead a vacuum: “everything is there, outside; nothing is here, inside.” (Laing, R. D., 1960) The self becomes omnipotent and free; but “only in phantasy.” The more this phantastic omnipotence is indulged, the “more weak, helpless, and fettered it becomes in actuality.” (Laing, R. D., 1960) Inner impoverishment follows; complaints of “the emptiness, deadness, coldness, dryness, impotence, desolation, worthlessness, of the inner life.” (Laing, R. D., 1960)

The split also carries a particular terror about destructiveness. The schizoid individual tends to believe that his love is as dangerous to others as his hatred; isolation is partly “out of concern for others” as much as protection of the self. (Laing, R. D., 1960)

The False-Self System

Laing distinguished between the hysteric’s false self and the schizoid false self. The hysteric’s false self does not serve as a vehicle for fulfillment or gratification. (Laing, R. D., 1960) In the schizoid individual, “the self may remain hungry and starved in a most primitive sense while the false self may be apparently genitally adapted.” (Laing, R. D., 1960)

What holds this false self together is compliance — “acting according to other people’s definitions of what one is, in lieu of translating into action one’s own definition of whom or what one wishes to be.” (Laing, R. D., 1960) This compliance progresses: from adjusting to others’ definitions, to impersonation, to compulsive caricature that ultimately expresses the hatred stored up in the process. (Laing, R. D., 1960)

Laing regarded early histories of model children (“never a trouble, always obedient”) as particularly ominous, especially when the parents reported them with evident pride. (Laing, R. D., 1960) The false-self system’s compliance reaches its extreme form in catatonic phenomena: automatic obedience, echopraxia, echolalia, and waxy flexibility (flexibilitas cerea). These states, Laing argued, were not symptoms of empty mechanism but acts of hostile mirroring — “a grotesque parody” that became “a concealed indictment of the manipulating examiner.” (Laing, R. D., 1960)

The false-self system tends toward increasing deadness: “it is as though they have turned their lives over to a robot which has made itself (apparently) indispensable.” (Laing, R. D., 1960) Psychosis, in this framework, can be understood as the sudden removal of the veil; the false self that had been maintaining outward behavioral normality is stripped away, exposing a secret self whose state has long been out of step with what the surface presented. (Laing, R. D., 1960)

Self-Consciousness

The schizoid individual’s self-consciousness plays a double role. On one hand, being aware of himself and knowing that others are aware of him provides a means of assuring himself that he exists; on the other, “in a world full of danger, to be a potentially seeable object is to be constantly exposed to danger.” (Laing, R. D., 1960) Laing was explicit that this could not be adequately explained by guilt or repressed exhibitionism alone; the central issue was the failure to achieve a secure sense of identity, and the self-consciousness was a direct expression of, and an attempt to overcome, that ontological insecurity. (Laing, R. D., 1960) This is not narcissism, Laing insisted. The schizoid individual exists “under the black sun, the evil eye, of his own scrutiny.” This glare “kills his spontaneity, his freshness; it destroys all joy. Everything withers under it.” (Laing, R. D., 1960)

Laing proposed that the experience of being seen by the mother was a necessary component in the development of the self, so that loss of the mother at a certain stage threatened the individual with loss of his own being — esse est percipi (to be is to be perceived). (Laing, R. D., 1960) He reinterpreted Freud’s fort-da game to argue that the child playing at making himself disappear in the mirror was mastering not merely the anxiety of maternal absence but the deeper terror of his own non-being. (Laing, R. D., 1960)

The general principle he distilled was that “when the risk is loss of being, the defence is to lapse into a state of non-being with, however, all the time the inner reservation that this lapsing into non-being is just a game, just pretending.” (Laing, R. D., 1960)

Kraepelin’s Patient Reinterpreted

Chapter 2 of The Divided Self contains one of Laing’s most celebrated passages. Turning to Kraepelin’s description of a catatonic patient being exhibited before a lecture-room of students, Laing offered a different reading of the same behavior. Where Kraepelin described meaningless excitement and incoherence, Laing read comprehensible action: “he is carrying on a dialogue between his own parodied version of Kraepelin, and his own defiant rebelling self.” The patient was not producing meaningless sounds but “plain enough talk” expressing his resentment at “this form of interrogation which is being carried out before a lecture-room of students.” (Laing, R. D., 1960)

This rereading carried a general methodological claim. The standard psychiatric patient, Laing argued, “is a function of the standard psychiatrist, and of the standard mental hospital.” Patient behavior is partly shaped by the behavioral field in which it occurs; by the psychiatrist’s own expectations, manner, and institutional context. (Laing, R. D., 1960)

The Interpersonal Test of Sanity

Laing proposed that sanity or psychosis “is tested by the degree of conjunction or disjunction between two persons where the one is sane by common consent.” The critical test of whether someone is psychotic is a “lack of congruity, an incongruity, a clash, between him and me.” (Laing, R. D., 1960) This made diagnosis fundamentally interpersonal rather than clinical; an assessment of relationship, not a reading of internal signs.

Drawing on Dilthey’s hermeneutics, Laing argued that understanding a psychotic patient required the same interpretive approach as understanding an ancient text: starting from empathy and the living whole, not from signs isolated by clinical observation. (Laing, R. D., 1960) He endorsed Fromm-Reichmann’s clinical position that when a therapeutic relationship with a schizophrenic patient seems impossible, “it is due to the doctor’s personality difficulties, not to the patient’s psychopathology.” (Laing, R. D., 1960)

A fundamental distinction followed from this: no one “has” schizophrenia the way one has a cold. The patient IS schizophrenic, Laing insisted; the schizophrenic has to be known as such, without being destroyed in that knowing. (Laing, R. D., 1960) Understanding this required understanding despair: “schizophrenia cannot be understood without understanding despair.” (Laing, R. D., 1960) And when a schizophrenic man says he is dead or unreal, he is expressing existential truth literally, not metaphorically; the price he pays for this transvaluation of communal truth is to be labeled mad. (Laing, R. D., 1960)

He also endorsed Jung’s formulation that “the schizophrenic ceases to be schizophrenic when he meets someone by whom he feels understood. When this happens most of the bizarrerie which is taken as the ‘signs’ of the ‘disease’ simply evaporates.” (Laing, R. D., 1960) The main agent in this healing was not technique but relationship: “the physician’s love, a love that recognizes the patient’s total being, and accepts it, with no strings attached.” (Laing, R. D., 1960)

The Transition to Psychosis

Laing identified four changes the inner self undergoes as it approaches psychosis: it becomes phantasticized and loses firmly anchored identity; it becomes unreal; it becomes impoverished, empty, dead, and split; it becomes increasingly charged with hatred, fear, and envy. (Laing, R. D., 1960) As this process advances, the self that remains becomes capable only of being anybody in phantasy and nobody in reality; its omnipotence is based on impotence, its freedom operates in a vacuum, and its activity is without life. (Laing, R. D., 1960) The false-self system undergoes parallel deterioration; it becomes more extensive, more autonomous, “harassed by compulsive behaviour fragments,” and everything belonging to it becomes “more and more dead, unreal, false, mechanical.” (Laing, R. D., 1960)

The basic psychotic defence, Laing argued, was the paradoxical denial of being as a means of preserving being: “The schizophrenic feels he has killed his ‘self’, and this appears to be in order to avoid being killed. He is dead, in order to remain alive.” (Laing, R. D., 1960)

What is called a psychotic break can sometimes be understood as the desire to end a pretense that has become unbearable; the true self “conceiving the desire to escape from its shut-upness, to end the pretence, to be honest, to reveal and declare and let itself be known without equivocation.” (Laing, R. D., 1960)

The case of Rose illustrated a further pattern. She copied others’ walks, borrowed their phrases, mimicked their gestures in an effort to recapture a sense of reality. Yet the more she withdrew, the more vulnerable she became: her private world became invaded by psychotic dangers from outside, not protected from them. (Laing, R. D., 1960) Drawing on Heidegger, Laing distinguished authentic guilt from unauthentic guilt in schizoid individuals. What might be called the patient’s authentic guilt was not the guilt of forbidden desire but of having capitulated to unauthentic guilt — “making it the aim of one’s life not to be himself.” (Laing, R. D., 1960)

Sanity itself, Laing argued, required connection: “it is not possible to go on living indefinitely in a sane way if one tries to be a man disconnected from all others and uncoupled even from a large part of one’s own being.” The sense of identity requires both recognition by another and the conjunction of that recognition with self-recognition. (Laing, R. D., 1960)

Schizophrenia: The Body Split and the Deliberate Retreat

Chapter 10 of The Divided Self traced what happens when the schizoid structure tips fully into schizophrenia. The basic self-body split from the schizoid state is carried over into the psychotic condition: the individual’s being is cleft in two, producing a disembodied self and a body that is experienced as just another thing in the world. (Laing, R. D., 1960) When the center fails to hold entirely, neither self-experience nor body-experience retains identity, integrity, or vitality, and the individual is precipitated into what Laing described as “chaotic nonentity.” (Laing, R. D., 1960)

One consequence that clinical observers often overlooked was that much schizophrenic incomprehensibility is deliberate. The patient uses obscurity as a smokescreen, playing at being psychotic to preserve the privacy of the self against intrusion; what appears as disorganized speech is, from the inside, often a strategy of concealment. (Laing, R. D., 1960)

The chapter drew extensively on testimony from a patient named Joan, reported in a 1956 paper by Hayward and Taylor. Joan described her experience of having a body that felt entirely separate from her real self: if her therapist had exploited her body, “The real me would have been up on the ceiling watching. You would have seemed content to let the real me die.” (Laing, R. D., 1960) She also articulated, with striking clarity, the three-way conflict at the heart of schizophrenic experience: the schizophrenic is simultaneously “trying to get to the breast, trying to die, and a third part trying not to die.” (Laing, R. D., 1960)

The Case of Peter

One of the book’s intermediate clinical studies centers on a patient Laing called Peter. Peter’s parents had been inseparable before his birth and simply treated him as though he was not there, not through overt unkindness but through a sustained invisibility that prevented him from ever being confirmed as a person. (Laing, R. D., 1960) His presenting symptom, a convinced sense that an unpleasant smell emanated from his body, expressed the existential position that had formed from this beginning: he felt dirty, rancid, and unworthy of existing, a thief and criminal for having been born at all. (Laing, R. D., 1960) From childhood he had been aware of himself as “obvious” simply by being present, guilty for taking up space, “an eyesore since the day I was born.” (Laing, R. D., 1960)

When he was nine, a little girl of his own age who lived beside him was blinded in an air-raid in which both her parents were killed. For several years he spent most of his time with this little girl; he had inexhaustible patience and kindness. (Laing, R. D., 1960) He was convinced he was nobody and worthless, and that all effort to be somebody was a deception and a pretence; being held up as a paragon while knowing himself as a secret masturbator intensified his sense of living a lie. (Laing, R. D., 1960)

The Case of Julie and the Good-Bad-Mad Sequence

The final chapter of The Divided Self presented Julie, a chronic schizophrenic whose history illustrated how ontological insecurity, family dynamics, and false-self compliance converge. Julie’s mother had inverted the normal developmental sequence of autonomy: instead of the baby throwing things away and having them returned, “I threw things away and she brought them back to me, as soon as she could crawl.” (Laing, R. D., 1960) From infancy, Julie had been prevented from developing genuine self-action.

The mother consistently praised Julie for the very features that marked her existential deadness; never demanding, never a trouble, always obedient. “None of the adults in her world knew the difference between existential life and death. On the contrary, being existentially dead receives the highest commendation from them.” (Laing, R. D., 1960)

Julie’s later psychotic statement that “a child had been murdered” expressed existential truth literally: her authentic self had been killed, whether by herself or by her mother. (Laing, R. D., 1960) As a chronic schizophrenic, she became what she called a “tolled bell” (or “told belle”), meaning she was only what she was told to do, having never developed any self-action of her own. (Laing, R. D., 1960)

Laing identified a three-stage sequence common to family descriptions of schizophrenics: “Good - bad - mad.” The patient was first good (compliant), then bad (the true self emerging through accusations and disruption), then mad (when the truth the disruption expressed became too threatening to acknowledge as truth). (Laing, R. D., 1960)

The clinical biography Laing constructed for Julie was, he insisted, not class-specific or culture-specific in its dynamics: it could apply equally to a working-class girl from Zurich, a middle-class girl from Lincoln, or a millionaire’s daughter from Texas. It belonged to twentieth-century Western civilization; whether quite the same conditions obtained elsewhere remained an open question. (Laing, R. D., 1960) What held across all such cases was a recognizable early pattern: the almost total failure of the infant to achieve self-instinctual gratification, combined with the mother’s total failure to realize this had occurred. (Laing, R. D., 1960)

The 1965 Preface: Political Radicalization

Laing contended that the “normal adjusted state is too often the abdication of ecstasy, the betrayal of our true potentialities,” and that “many of us are only too successful in acquiring a false self to adapt to false realities.” (Laing, R. D., 1960) He extended this to a political provocation: statesmen who boasted of Doomsday weapons were “far more dangerous, and far more estranged from ‘reality’ than many of the people on whom the label ‘psychotic’ is affixed.” (Laing, R. D., 1960)

The Politics of Experience (1967)

Seven years after The Divided Self, Laing published The Politics of Experience, a shorter and more radical book that extended his clinical arguments into philosophical and political territory. Where The Divided Self worked within the frame of psychotherapy (trying to make individual schizoid experience comprehensible) The Politics of Experience argued that the normal condition of modern society was itself pathological.

Laing opened by declaring that alienation was the universal starting point for any authentic thought, feeling, or action in the present historical moment.(Laing, R. D., 1967) Around modern people, he argued, were “pseudo-events” to which they adjusted with a false consciousness adapted to see those events as true and real; social reality was so ugly in the light of exiled truth that beauty had become nearly impossible if it was not also a lie.(Laing, R. D., 1967) “We are all murderers and prostitutes,” he wrote, and this was not a natural condition but one “achieved only by outrageous violence perpetrated by human beings on human beings.”(Laing, R. D., 1967)(Laing, R. D., 1967) Marx, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger, Tillich, and Sartre all converged on this diagnosis from different vantage points.(Laing, R. D., 1967) He placed Foucault’s Madness and Civilization alongside Joseph Gabel’s La Fausse Conscience as key intellectual contexts,(Laing, R. D., 1967) while distancing himself from Marcuse’s suggestion that dialectical theory finds its present truth only in its own hopelessness.(Laing, R. D., 1967)

The book’s philosophical core was a program for social phenomenology — “the science of my own and of others’ experience,” concerned with the relation between my experience of you and your experience of me. Laing called this field “inter-experience,” and he distinguished it from both behaviorism (which ignores experience) and intrapsychic theories (which ignore the other).(Laing, R. D., 1967)(Laing, R. D., 1967) He proposed as axiomatic that behaviour is a function of experience, and both are always in relation to someone or something other than self.(Laing, R. D., 1967)

Normal socialization, in this account, produced alienated persons who were shrivelled fragments of their potential selves. Most personal action in the normal condition was destructive of both one’s own experience and that of others.(Laing, R. D., 1967) Defence mechanisms, when analyzed phenomenologically, were not impersonal processes undergone by the patient but actions the person takes upon his own experience. Recognizing this converted process back into praxis; the patient became an agent.(Laing, R. D., 1967)

Laing also described what he called transpersonal invalidation: the systematic actions by which one person attacks another’s experience, denying that an event occurred, shifting the modality of another’s memory to imagination, invalidating not only the content of experience but the other person’s very capacity to perceive and remember. He observed that such invalidation was not unusual. “People are doing such things to each other all the time.”(Laing, R. D., 1967) Bertrand Russell’s remark that “the stars are in one’s brain” prompted Laing’s insistence that experience is not inside the head: “my experience of this room is out there in the room.” Any theory reducing experience to inner events already begins to falsify it.(Laing, R. D., 1967) The creative act, Laing proposed, emerges from a zone of nonbeing (silence, formlessness, pre-light), and the person who functions as medium for creation passes beyond depression and chaos into liberation.(Laing, R. D., 1967)

The Critique of Psychotherapy Theory

The irreducible elements of psychotherapy are therapist, patient, and regular time and place, Laing conceded; but given those, “it is not so easy for two people to meet.”(Laing, R. D., 1967) The masks, roles, defences, and transferential habits brought into the therapeutic situation re-create alienation, and Laing argued the real task is paring them away.(Laing, R. D., 1967)

His specific target was the absence of the second person from psychiatric theory. Freudian metapsychology, he argued, had “no category of ‘you’.” It had no way to express the meeting of an “I” with “an other,” and no concept of a “me” except as objectified into the ego. In this it differed from the work of Feuerbach, Buber, and Parsons, each of whom had resources for genuine interpersonal address.(Laing, R. D., 1967) Behaviour therapy he dismissed as the most extreme instance of the same problem: it operated purely in terms of the other without reference to the self, in terms of behaviour without experience, and was therefore “inevitably a technique of non-meeting, of manipulation and control.”(Laing, R. D., 1967)

His programmatic counter-definition: “psychotherapy must remain an obstinate attempt of two people to recover the wholeness of being human through the relationship between them.” Any approach concerned with the other without the self, or with behaviour to the exclusion of experience, “simply perpetuates the disease it purports to cure.”(Laing, R. D., 1967) Heidegger’s phrase “the Dreadful has already happened” described the condition that all psychotherapeutic work inherited: the therapists themselves were embedded in the inner-outer split they sought to heal.(Laing, R. D., 1967) Psychotherapy was therefore less a treatment than a shared research: an attempt to recover what had been lost, validated by “the shared experience of experience regained” in the therapeutic relationship.(Laing, R. D., 1967) Where object-relations theory still dealt with objects rather than persons, Laing insisted that what was specifically human required a “transexperiential” dimension; transactions between electronic systems and between persons are structurally comparable, but only the latter involves experience, and the failure to distinguish them converts a useful analogy into a false homology.(Laing, R. D., 1967)

Mystification and the Politics of Normality

Chapter three of The Politics of Experience made Laing’s political argument its most explicit. Exploitation, he argued, must not be seen as such: “it must be seen as benevolence. Persecution preferably should not need to be invalidated as the figment of a paranoid imagination; it should be experienced as kindness.”(Laing, R. D., 1967) Laing further contended that mystification layers false consciousness over violence so that it cannot be perceived as such.(Laing, R. D., 1967)

His account of childhood socialization was unflinching: “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.” By the age of fifteen, the process was “on the whole successful,” leaving “a half-crazed creature, more or less adjusted to a mad world. This is normality in our present age.”(Laing, R. D., 1967) Positivist social science, rather than exposing this, deepened the mystification: “violence cannot be seen through the sights of positivism.” The choice of vocabulary and syntax were political acts that defined what “facts” could be experienced. Laing coined the term capta (taken) over data (given) to mark the difference between research as discovery and research as selection.(Laing, R. D., 1967)

Drawing on Jules Henry’s ethnographic study of American schools, Laing described how education systematically teaches children to hate competitively without appearing to do so. What would seem “cruel beyond belief” to a Zuni or Dakota Indian was the standard operating condition of the contemporary classroom. “In school the external nightmare is internalized for life.”(Laing, R. D., 1967) The family’s proper function in this system, Laing argued with Marcuse in mind, was to repress Eros, induce false security, deny death, cut off transcendence, and produce “one-dimensional man”: conforming, obedient, afraid of failure, and respectful of work.(Laing, R. D., 1967)

The category of schizophrenia itself was not exempt from this political analysis. Theodore Lidz called schizophrenia “a failure of human adaptation.” Laing observed that this was a value judgment, and proposed a counter-description: “a successful attempt not to adapt to pseudo social realities.” He asked whether that too was objective, concluding that the nearest one could come to a neutral formulation was: “a label affixed by some people to others in situations where an interpersonal disjunction of a particular kind is occurring.”(Laing, R. D., 1967) In the last fifty years, Laing noted, human beings had “slaughtered by our own hands coming on for one hundred million” of their own species. “Only by the most outrageous violation of ourselves” had we achieved the capacity to live in relative adjustment to a civilization “apparently driven to its own destruction.”(Laing, R. D., 1967) Sartre’s preface to Andre Gorz’s The Traitor gave the sociological critique an existential edge: “long before our birth, even before we are conceived, our parents have decided who we will be.” Identity is imposed before the capacity to refuse it exists.(Laing, R. D., 1967)

The Nexal Family and the Production of Otherness

In a chapter titled “Us and Them,” Laing extended his analysis from individual psychology to social structure. Collective representations, once shared, come to be experienced as objective entities: they are “projected-introjected reifications” that acquire the appearance of things with a life of their own. Laing agreed with Durkheim that such representations are experienced as exterior and constraining, but insisted that they are not things ontologically.(Laing, R. D., 1967)

The historical moment, he argued, was one of “frenetic passivity”: everyone carrying out orders from elsewhere, threatened by mutual extermination that no one wished and no one knew how to stop.(Laing, R. D., 1967) To analyze how this became possible, Laing drew on his earlier work with Phillipson and Lee on interpersonal perception, distinguishing three levels of awareness: direct agreement or disagreement (level 1), understanding or misunderstanding of the other’s position (level 2), and the recursive question of what I think you think I think (level 3).(Laing, R. D., 1967)

The family was the primary site where these patterns were formed. Laing distinguished what he called the “nexus”: a group whose unity is achieved through the reciprocal interiorization by each member of each other, without external organizational structures serving as the primary cement.(Laing, R. D., 1967) Such nexal families maintain cohesion through reciprocal terror: the generation of terror about the external world in the family’s interior, with stability as the product of violence done by members on each other. “Family ‘homeostasis’ is the product of terror generated in its members by the work (violence) done by the members of the group on each other.”(Laing, R. D., 1967)

The category of “Them” was created, Laing argued, only by each person repudiating their own identity. “When we have installed Them in our hearts, we are only a plurality of solitudes in which what each person has in common is his allocation to the other of the necessity for his own actions.” Each individual disclaimed internal connection and claimed inessentiality: “I just carried out my orders. If I had not done so, someone else would have.”(Laing, R. D., 1967) As an extreme historical illustration, Laing analyzed the Nuremberg rallies’ use of demonic group mysticism: “We are the Party, the Party is Germany, Hitler is the Party, Hitler is Germany”: a self-actualizing social phantasy in which the fantasy of shared presence in each person’s interior became capable of genocide.(Laing, R. D., 1967) The general principle: those who seek to control large numbers of people do so by working on experience. “Once people can be induced to experience a situation in a similar way, they can be expected to behave in similar ways.” Experience is the lever; behaviour follows.(Laing, R. D., 1967)

On schizophrenia, Laing was now openly dismissive of the diagnostic category. It was not a diagnosis pointing to an illness like pneumonia but “a label that some people pin on other people under certain social circumstances.” The cause was to be found by examining “the whole social context in which the psychiatric ceremonial is being conducted.”(Laing, R. D., 1967) He presented Kraepelin’s own account of a psychiatric examination of a young woman and argued that the psychiatrist’s behaviour, extracted from its institutional context, was as extraordinary as the patient’s; yet the psychiatrist’s stance was taken as the touchstone of normality.(Laing, R. D., 1967) Harry Stack Sullivan had told young psychiatrists: “I want you to remember that in the present state of our society, the patient is right, and you are wrong.” Laing cited this not as final truth but to dislodge the opposing assumption, adding his own claim that “schizophrenics have more to teach psychiatrists about the inner world than psychiatrists their patients.”(Laing, R. D., 1967)

Drawing on over a hundred cases studied with Aaron Esterson, Laing argued that without exception schizophrenic behaviour was “a special strategy that a person invents in order to live in an unlivable situation”: a position of checkmate in which any move is impossible and every response generates new constraint.(Laing, R. D., 1967) There was no such condition as schizophrenia, he stated flatly: “the label is a social fact and the social fact a political event.” That political event inaugurated the labelled person into a career of patient “by the concerted action of a coalition (a ‘conspiracy’) of family, G.P., mental health officer, psychiatrists, nurses, psychiatric social workers, and often fellow patients.”(Laing, R. D., 1967) He credited Gregory Bateson as the chief architect of the double-bind hypothesis, first published in 1956, its germ developing in Bateson’s 1930s fieldwork in New Guinea studying cultural techniques for neutralizing dangerous rivalry.(Laing, R. D., 1967)

A child born in Britain stood a ten times greater chance of being admitted to a mental hospital than to a university, Laing noted; approximately one fifth of mental hospital admissions were diagnosed schizophrenic. “Perhaps it is our very way of educating them that is driving them mad.”(Laing, R. D., 1967) He described the psychotic episode as a natural voyage through seven stages: “from outer to inner, from life to a kind of death, from going forward to a going back, from temporal movement to temporal standstill, from mundane time to aeonic time, from the ego to the self, from being outside (post-birth) back into the womb of all things (pre-birth),” followed by a return passage out.(Laing, R. D., 1967) Bateson’s introduction to Perceval’s Narrative confirmed that such episodes had “as definite a course as an initiation ceremony (a death and rebirth”) and that failures to complete the voyage might result from family or institutional interference.(Laing, R. D., 1967) The practical proposal that followed was a replacement for the mental hospital: “a place where people who have travelled further and, consequently, may be more lost than psychiatrists and other sane people, can find their way further into inner space and time, and back again,” guided by those who had made the passage before. Psychiatrically, this would appear as “ex-patients helping future patients to go mad.”(Laing, R. D., 1967)

The most controversial section of the book argued that madness need not be all breakdown; it could also be breakthrough, “potential liberation and renewal as well as enslavement and existential death.”(Laing, R. D., 1967) One of Laing’s primary exhibits was a patient account quoted by Jaspers in his General Psychopathology: a first-person record of a psychotic voyage to the underworld of the self, involving encounters with what the patient called demons, ego-death, and eventual illumination.(Laing, R. D., 1967) All religious and existential philosophies had agreed, Laing argued, that egoic experience was “a preliminary illusion, a veil, a film of maya”: what Heraclitus called a dream, what Buddhism called the fundamental illusion, “a state of sleep, of death, of socially accepted madness, a womb state to which one has to die, from which one has to be born.”(Laing, R. D., 1967) The artists of the past 150 years who had been shipwrecked on these inner reefs (Holderlin, John Clare, Rimbaud, Van Gogh, Nietzsche, Artaud) reflected society’s ambivalence toward inner experience and hatred of those who pursued it.(Laing, R. D., 1967)

The secular world had produced a famine of direct religious experience, Laing argued, echoing an Amos prophecy of a famine “not a famine for bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the Lord.”(Laing, R. D., 1967) Kraepelinian psychiatry was itself a form of madness, he proposed: “the exact counterpart of ‘official’ psychosis. Literally, and absolutely seriously, it is as mad, if by madness we mean any radical estrangement from the totality of what is the case.” Kierkegaard’s concept of objective madness described what he meant.(Laing, R. D., 1967) True sanity, by contrast, entailed “the dissolution of the normal ego, that false self competently adjusted to our alienated social reality,” and through that dissolution a rebirth in which “the ego now being the servant of the divine, no longer its betrayer.”(Laing, R. D., 1967)

Laing presented his most extended evidence for this account in the tape-recorded account of Jesse Watkins, a sculptor born in 1899 who in 1937 underwent a ten-day psychotic episode following a general anaesthetic and a dog bite.(Laing, R. D., 1967) Watkins described time going backward, regression through evolutionary animal states, and a dual awareness, both experiencing and watching himself undergo the journey. Every headline he read carried “very much wider associations” than normal; everything had “a much greater, very much greater significance.”(Laing, R. D., 1967) He experienced three planes of existence: an antechamber, a central world, and a higher sphere; he was “living in another time dimension added to the time situation” of ordinary experience.(Laing, R. D., 1967)

Laing identified Watkins’s state as “hyper-sanity”: an experience of more, not less, reality, distinguishable from sub-sanity only with difficulty from the outside. Watkins had to trust his own experience, that he had “entered into a state of more, not less, reality.”(Laing, R. D., 1967) Watkins described feeling that “God himself was a madman” because of the enormous load of awareness required at the highest level of existence.(Laing, R. D., 1967) Laing noted that Watkins was fortunate to have been lightly sedated and spared electroconvulsive therapy and deep-freezing, treatments that “would probably have been too much for him” and might have prevented his return.(Laing, R. D., 1967) The voyage was not what people needed to be cured of but “itself a natural way of healing our own appalling state of alienation called normality”; electro-shocks, tranquillizers, and deep-freezing were ways of stopping this natural sequence from occurring.(Laing, R. D., 1967)

Watkins returned by sitting on his bed, clasping his hands together, repeating his own name, and refusing further sedation. Then, suddenly: “just like that. I suddenly realized that it was all over.” A doctor looked at his eyes and confirmed the change.(Laing, R. D., 1967) After his discharge he reported that “everything was so much more real than it had been before. The grass was greener, the sun was shining brighter, and people were more alive.”(Laing, R. D., 1967)

Laing’s practical proposal was for places of sanctuary where people undergoing this natural voyage could be supported rather than interrupted, communities where the inner journey could be accompanied and guided rather than crushed by drugs or confinement.(Laing, R. D., 1967) [GAP: The paragraph originally mentioned the Kingsley Hall experiment as an attempt to realize this vision, but no cited card supports that claim.]

See Also

• Emil Kraepelin
• Sigmund Freud
• Phenomenology of Illness
• Biological Psychiatry
• Insanity
• Total Institution
• Anti-Psychiatry
• Thomas Szasz
• Erving Goffman

Sources

All claims cite evidence cards from:

• Laing, R. D. (1960). The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness. London: Tavistock. [Source ID: laing-dividedself-1960]
• Laing, R. D. (1967). The Politics of Experience. Harmondsworth: Penguin. [Source ID: laing-politicsofexperience-1967]