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
mad steps horizon
Experience is mad when it steps beyond the horizons of our common, that is, our communal sense.
lying suffering deals
If we can revert to the truth, then a great deal of one's suffering can be erased, because a great deal of one's suffering is based on sheer lies.
running men civilization
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.
reality people labels
The statesmen of the world who boast and threaten that they have Doomsday weapons are far more dangerous, and far more estranged from 'reality',than many of the people on whom the label 'psychotic' is affixed
insanity independence perfectly-natural
Insanity is a perfectly natural adjustment to a totally unnatural and negative environment.
book race perfect-one
Perfection is something we should all strive for. It's a duty and a joy to perfect one's nature... The most difficult thing is love. A loveless, driving person that just competes in the rat race is far from perfection in my book.
infancy-is trance hypnotic
We are all in a post-hypnotic trance induced in early infancy.
enlightenment psychological breakthrough
Psychological breakdowns are actually breakthroughs to enlightenment.
men years fifty
Normal men have killed perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years.
pseudo patient madness
From the alienated starting point of our pseudo-sanity, everything is equivocal. Our sanity is not "true" sanity. Their madness is not "true" madness. The madness of our patients is an artifact of the destruction wreaked on them by us, and by them on themselves.
change historical aging
We live in a moment of history where change is so speeded up that we begin to see the present only when it is already disappearing.
children parent relation
When family relations are no longer harmonious, we have filial children and devoted parents.
yesterday intellectual today
The universe was a vast machine yesterday, it is a hologram today. Who knows what intellectual rattle we'll be shaking tomorrow.
dream real crazy
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.