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
existence non-existence
Rule A: Don't. Rule A1: Rule A doesn't exist. Rule A2: Do not discuss the existence or non-existence of Rules A, A1 or A2.
book today
Few books today are forgivable.
children giving-up imagination
Children do not give up their innate imagination, curiosity, dreaminess easily. You have to love them to get them to do that.
patient cold schizophrenia
No one has schizophrenia, like having a cold. The patient has not "got" schizophrenia. He is schizophrenic.
hero stones medusa
Freud was a hero. He descended to the Underworld and met there stark terrors. He carried with him his theory as a Medusa's head which turned these terrors to stone.
thinking justice shapes
The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice. And because we fail to notice that we fail to notice, there is little we can do to change until we notice how failing to notice shapes our thoughts and deeds.
men roots body
I, for instance, regard any particular man as finite, as one who has had a beginning and who will have an end. He has been born, and he is going to die. In the meantime, he has a body that roots him to this time and this place.
reality men confusion
Man as seen as an organism or man as seen as a person discloses different aspects of the human reality to the investigator. Both are quite possible methodologically but one must be alert to the possible occasion for confusion. (...) Seen as an organism, man cannot be anything else but a complex of things, of its, and the processes that ultimately comprise an organism are it-processes.
feelings body hopelessness
Being embodied as such is no insurance against feelings of hopelessness or meaningslessness. Beyond his body, he still has to know who he is.
reason obedient
There are good reasons for being obedient, but being unable to be disobedient is not one of the best reasons.
self way behavior
Our behavior is a function of our experience. We act according to the way we see things. If our experience is destroyed, our behavior will be destructive. If our experience is destroyed, we have lost our own selves.
children imbeciles fool
Children are not yet fools, but we shall turn them into imbeciles like ourselves, with high I.Q.'s if possible.
family spiritual baby
Each time a new baby is born there is a possibility of reprieve. Each child is a new being, a potential prophet, a new spiritual prince, a new spark of light precipitated into the outer darkness.
children men normal
Society highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal.