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
our-society lost ritual
In our society many of the old rituals have lost much of their power. New ones have not arisen.
pain bipolar trying
There is a great deal of pain in life and perhaps the only pain that can be avoided is the pain that comes from trying to avoid pain.
philosophy doe abstraction
Philosophy does not exist. It is nothing but an hypostatized abstraction.
serious scream
Where can you scream? It's a serious question: where can you go in society and scream?
life success sexually-transmitted-diseases
Life is a sexually transmitted disease and the mortality rate is one hundred percent.
thinking self long
Before one goes through the gate one may not be aware there is a gate One may think there is a gate to go through and look a long time for it without finding it One may find it and it may not open If it opens one may be through it As one goes through it one sees that the gate one went through was the self that went through it no one went through a gate there was no gate to go through no one ever found a gate no one ever realized there was never a gate
civilization driven destruction
We all live under the constant threat of our own annihilation. Only by the most outrageous violation of ourselves have we achieved our capacity to live in relative adjustment to a civilization apparently driven to its own destruction.
pain life-is this-life
Pain in this life is not avoidable, but the pain we create avoiding pain is avoidable.
children taken mad
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.
insane-world break-through insanity
Madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be break-through.
reality self ego
True sanity entails in one way or another the dissolution of the normal ego, that false self competently adjusted to our alienated social reality... and through this death a rebirth and the eventual re-establishment of a new kind of ego-functioning, the ego now being the servant of the divine, no longer its betrayer.
reality mind faults
Do not adjust your mind, the fault is in reality.
spring passion company-you-keep
If you have passion for what you do, the company you keep, the life you live, it will be reflected in whatever you create. Passion is like that; it springs out, jumps, unpredictable and unplanned, into everything we touch. If it doesn't, others know. Passion can't be faked and it can't be manufactured. Which is why it is so priceless.
betrayal abdication normal
Our 'normal' 'adjusted' state is too often the abdication of ecstasy, the betrayal of our true potentialities.