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
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.
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?