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
funny life sexually-transmitted-diseases
Life is a sexually transmitted disease.
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.
serious scream
Where can you scream? It's a serious question: where can you go in society and scream?
insane-world break-through insanity
Madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be break-through.
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.
our-society lost ritual
In our society many of the old rituals have lost much of their power. New ones have not arisen.
children parent relation
When family relations are no longer harmonious, we have filial children and devoted parents.
insanity independence perfectly-natural
Insanity is a perfectly natural adjustment to a totally unnatural and negative environment.
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.
names patient schizophrenia
Schizophrenia is the name for a condition that most psychiatrists ascribe to patients they call schizophrenic.
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.