R. D. Laing
R. D. Laing
Ronald David Laing, usually cited as R. D. Laing, was a Scottish psychiatrist who wrote extensively on mental illness – in particular, the experience of psychosis. Laing's views on the causes and treatment of serious mental dysfunction, greatly influenced by existential philosophy, ran counter to the psychiatric orthodoxy of the day by taking the expressed feelings of the individual patient or client as valid descriptions of lived experience rather than simply as symptoms of some separate or underlying disorder. Laing was...
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth7 October 1927
suicide wonder psychological
What do you do when you don't know what to do? No wonder there are more suicides among psychiatrists than in any other profession.
mind body mind-body
We live equally out of our bodies and out of our minds.
thinking psychology ifs
If I don't know I don't know, I think I know. If I don't know I know I know, I think I don't know.
spiritual self mad
We are bemused and crazed creatures, strangers to our true selves, to one another, and to the spiritual and material world - mad, even, from an ideal standpoint we can glimpse but not adopt.
men machines body
A man who says that men are machines may be a great scientist. A man who says he is a machine is 'depersonalized' in psychiatric jargon.
believe men sight
In certain cases, a man blind from birth may have an operation performed which gives him his sight. The result: frequently misery, confusion, disorientation. The light that illumines the madman is an unearthly light, but I do not believe it is a projection, an emanation from his mundane ego. He is irradiated by a light that is more than he. It may burn him out.
understanding defining description
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.
One cannot say everything at once.
men experience invisible
I cannot experience your experience. You cannot experience my experience. We are both invisible men.
book white silence
Few books today are forgivable. Black on canvas, silence on the screen, an empty white sheet of paper are perhaps feasible.
beauty lying ifs
Beauty is almost no longer possible if it is not a lie.
ridiculous feels
I'm ridiculous to feel ridiculous when I'm not.
may psychiatrist healer
A mental healer may be a psychiatrist. A psychiatrist may or may not be a mental healer.
spring light flames
The fountain has not played itself out, the Flame still shines, the River still flows, the Spring still bubbles forth, the Light has not faded. But between us and It, there is a veil which is more like fifty feet of solid concrete. Deus absconditus. Or we have absconded.