starrwriter
11-17-2005, 05:28 PM
R. D. Laing (1927-1989) was a Scottish psychiatrist who wrote books of social criticism and existential philosophy in addition to leading an influential movement against his own profession. Late in his life he explored esoteric Buddhist teachings in Asia.
Laing's two best books were "The Divided Self" (1960) and "The Politics of Experience" (1967). The second book catapulted Laing into fame as a revolutionary thinker, especially the long chapter titled "The Bird of Paradise" in which he described the effects of his using LSD to understand psychotics by joining them in their inner world.
Laing made extensive use of Gregory Bateson's concept of the "double bind" to explain the cause of schizophrenia. This refers to a paralyzing social situation where an individual is condemned if he takes a particular action and equally condemned if he doesn't do it.
Laing argued that no individual goes insane in a vacuum. It always happens within a social context, most often the family. He claimed that families sometimes function like gangster organizations, using emotional extortion, threats of violence and actual violence to keep members in line. The nervous breakdown of one member is, therefore, a symptom of unhealthy family ties, which Laing called violence masquerading as love. He extrapolated these lessons about family life to the larger social context to demonstrate how modern society was dysfunctional at its core.
Laing concluded that traditional psychiatry was ineffective and involved inhumane treatment of the mentally ill. He thought psychosis contained the potential for a spiritual rebirth that was thwarted by psychiatric methods.
Some quotes from Laing:
The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one's mind, is the condition of the normal man. 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 [first half of the 20th century].
Long before a thermonuclear war can come about, we have had to lay waste to our own sanity. We begin with the children. It is imperative to catch them in time. Without the most thorough and rapid brain-washing, 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.
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.
We are not able even to think adequately about the behaviour that is at the annihilating edge. But what we think is less than what we know: what we know is less than what we love: what we love is so much less than what there is. And to that precise extent we are so much less than what we are.
Laing's two best books were "The Divided Self" (1960) and "The Politics of Experience" (1967). The second book catapulted Laing into fame as a revolutionary thinker, especially the long chapter titled "The Bird of Paradise" in which he described the effects of his using LSD to understand psychotics by joining them in their inner world.
Laing made extensive use of Gregory Bateson's concept of the "double bind" to explain the cause of schizophrenia. This refers to a paralyzing social situation where an individual is condemned if he takes a particular action and equally condemned if he doesn't do it.
Laing argued that no individual goes insane in a vacuum. It always happens within a social context, most often the family. He claimed that families sometimes function like gangster organizations, using emotional extortion, threats of violence and actual violence to keep members in line. The nervous breakdown of one member is, therefore, a symptom of unhealthy family ties, which Laing called violence masquerading as love. He extrapolated these lessons about family life to the larger social context to demonstrate how modern society was dysfunctional at its core.
Laing concluded that traditional psychiatry was ineffective and involved inhumane treatment of the mentally ill. He thought psychosis contained the potential for a spiritual rebirth that was thwarted by psychiatric methods.
Some quotes from Laing:
The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one's mind, is the condition of the normal man. 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 [first half of the 20th century].
Long before a thermonuclear war can come about, we have had to lay waste to our own sanity. We begin with the children. It is imperative to catch them in time. Without the most thorough and rapid brain-washing, 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.
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.
We are not able even to think adequately about the behaviour that is at the annihilating edge. But what we think is less than what we know: what we know is less than what we love: what we love is so much less than what there is. And to that precise extent we are so much less than what we are.