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
R. D. Laing quotes about
enlightenment psychological breakthrough
Psychological breakdowns are actually breakthroughs to enlightenment.
philosophy doe abstraction
Philosophy does not exist. It is nothing but an hypostatized abstraction.
pain life-is this-life
Pain in this life is not avoidable, but the pain we create avoiding pain is avoidable.
madness sanity ambiguous
In the context of our present pervasive madness that we call normality, sanity, freedom, all our frames of reference are ambiguous and equivocal.
love realizing dies
We have to realize that we are as deeply afraid to live and to love as we are to die.
names patient schizophrenia
Schizophrenia is the name for a condition that most psychiatrists ascribe to patients they call schizophrenic.
honesty brutal-honesty absolution
The truth brings with it a great measure of absolution, always.
break-through diversity needs
Madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be break-through. It is potential liberation and renewal as well as enslavement and existential death.
simple self world
In a world full of danger, to be a potentially seeable object is to be constantly exposed to danger. Self-consciousness, then, may be the apprehensive awareness of oneself as potentially exposed to danger by the simple fact of being visible to others. The obvious defence against such a danger is to make oneself invisible in one way or another.
age answers today
We must remember that 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.
spiritual loneliness anxiety
If I hazard a guess as to the most endemic, prevalent anxiety among human beings-including fear of death, abandonment, loneliness-nothing is more prevalent than the fear of one another.
successful reality pseudo
Schizophrenia is a successful attempt not to adapt to pseudo- social realities.
beauty lying reality
In the society of men the truth resides now less in what things are than in what they are not. Our social realities are so ugly if seen in the light of exiled truth, and beauty is no longer possible if it is not a lie.
communication writing hands
When I go beyond a certain range it's outside of my direct horizon therefore I've got to rely on the writings and personal communications given to me by other people that I know.... I've got to try to piece together some tentative information picture of what the whole thing is like, but I'm aware that it becomes more and more speculative as it becomes more and more second, third, fourth hand. And this applies to absolutely everyone.