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
vacuums
No one acts or experiences in a vacuum...
love-is thinking spirituality
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.
children war dirty
Long before a thermonuclear war can come about, we have had to lay waste our own sanity. We begin with the children. It is imperative to catch them in time. Without the most thorough and rapid brainwashing 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.
infancy-is trance hypnotic
We are all in a post-hypnotic trance induced in early infancy.
games play break
They are playing a game. They are playing at not playing a game. If I show them I see they are, I shall break the rules and they will punish me. I must play their game, of not seeing I see the game.
dream memories reality
We are effectively destroying ourselves by violence masquerading as love. I am a specialist, God help me, in events in inner space and time, in experiences called thoughts, images, reveries, dreams, visions, hallucinations, dreams of memories, memories of dreams, memories of visions, dreams of hallucinations, refractions of refractions of refractions of that original Alpha and Omega of experience and reality, that Reality on whose repression, denial, splitting, projection, falsification, and general desecration and profanation our civilisation as much as anything is based.
diversity political labels
There is no such condition as 'schizophrenia,' but the label is a social fact and the social fact a political event.
freedom blow men
The brotherhood of man is evoked by particular men according to their circumstances. But it seldom extends to all men. In the name of our freedom and our brotherhood we are prepared to blow up the other half of mankind and to be blown up in our turn.
understanding despair schizophrenia
Schizophrenia cannot be understood without understanding despair.
fate destiny diversity
Alienation as our present destiny is achieved only by outrageous violence perpetrated by human beings on human beings.
love violence destroying-ourselves
We are effectively destroying ourselves by violence masquerading as love.
views oneness progress
Our time has been distinguished, more than by anything else, by a mastery, a control, of the external world, and by an almost total forgetfulness of the internal world. If one estimates human evolution from the point of view of knowledge of the external world, then we are in many respects progressing. If our estimate is from the point of view of the internal world, and of oneness of internal and external, then the judgment must be very different.
depression denial normal
What we call "normal" is a product of repression, denial, splitting, projection, introjection, and other forms of destructive actions on experience...It is radically estranged from the structure of being ...
spiritual thinking shapes
The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice.