R D Laing
(Grey text not written by me - PC)
A few months ago (shortly before the covid-19 lock-down) while browsing second-hand books in the Oxfam shop, I spotted John Clay’s 1996 biography of R D Laing. Wherever I dipped-in, I found the book gripping... it was 75p and good as new.
Having over many years collected books that look at least half-promising, I’d read parts of several of Laing's most popular works: ie, The Divided Self, Self and Others and especially The Politics of Experience AND The Bird of Paradise. I say ‘especially' because that latter tome contains observations that are perhaps among the most poignant and challenging you're ever likely to contemplate. That is, they question the nature of - the reality behind - human culture as we experience it, understand it and generally accept it... or, as Laing proposes, are conditioned to accept it... frequently to the detriment of our psychological health and much else besides.
The only other times I've seen culture examined to such depth was Paul Bowles' The Sheltering Sky... and maybe Twain's 'The Mysterious Stranger' (see Twain), which parallels Laing's key perceptions. From Clay's biography, I see that Laing was an avid reader in his youth and devoured everything he could from the local library.
Furthermore, what Laing (and Twain) had observed, as in his other books, struck me as manifestly self-evident: eye-opening - and perhaps alarming to some - but undeniably true. Many people, I'm sure, would disagree: that 'reality' should appear that way is not only subjective, but disturbing and dangerously subversive. Yet, from my angle, the self-evidence is entirely objective - essentially scientific: based on clear impartial observation - as I'm sure any anthropologist would confirm. Some people, I well know, cannot 'see' (or even imagine) impartially; their conditioning is total. Hence the controversial reputation Laing’s work has acquired in claiming, for instance, that schizophrenia is the consequence of failing to adapt (or perhaps subconscious refusal to be conditioned). In my view the controversy is inappropriate; with regard to applying what Laing discovered, the 'dispute' serves only to deny many potential benefactors treatment that is at worst innocuous, but always benign.
I’ve yet to understand - now more than half a century after Laing's publications, which are both meticulous and groundbreaking - why they should remain controversial, any more than, say, Freud's or Jung's; or even Maxwell’s or Einstein’s when first revealed or proposed. Here's a paraphrased quote:
“In the late 1960s Laing gained a reputation for his radical objection to conventional psychiatry. His early book, ‘The Divided Self’ and ‘The Politics of Experience’ questioned the right of society to proclaim itself sane and others mad.
Protesting the ‘outrageous violence’ inflicted on patients by drastic therapies like electric shock, he generated controversy with his willingness to try psychedelic drugs, meditation and other unconventional techniques in search of a healing common ground between doctor and patient.”
Regarding "..the right of society to proclaim itself sane and others mad." there's the excerpt in my memoir containing perspectives my experiences exposed, but also this from The Politics of Experience p64:
The majority of my own generation did not or do not regard it as stark raving mad to feel it better to be dead than Red. None of us, I take it, has lost too many hours' sleep over the threat of imminent annihilation of the human race and our own responsibility for this state of affairs.
In the last fifty years, we human beings have slaughtered by our own hands coming on for one hundred million of our species. We all live under constant threat of our total annihilation. We seem to seek death and destruction as much as life and happiness. We are as driven to kill and be killed as we are to let live and live. Only by the most outrageous violation of ourselves have we achieved our capacity to live in relative adjustment to a civilization apparently driven to its own destruction. Perhaps to a limited extent we can undo what has been done to us, and what we have done to ourselves. Perhaps men and women were born to love one another, simply and genuinely, rather than to this travesty that we can call love. If we can stop destroying ourselves we may stop destroying others. We have to begin by admitting and even accepting our violence, rather than blindly destroying ourselves with it, and therewith we have to realize that we are as deeply afraid to live and to love as we are to die.
It's frequently the case that innovative and revolutionary ideas or observations evoke hostility, fear and opposition – particularly from those at the forefront of whatever is under the spotlight who’ll see any new approach as a challenge, at least to their integrity in failing to have spotted the innovative angle first.
Almost always when this happens, an existing hierarchy will feel threatened: their status, ego and even livelihood are in the balance. This means that established set-ups can be very defensive of their practices, even in the light of the most obvious evidence against them.
As with other 'scientists' (whose work can be proved by independently repeating an experiment or by rigorous mathematics), Laing's approach was also shown to work - yet there was a difference: As he explains in The Divided Self: unlike a normal clinician who examines a patient as a biological machine and focuses on the broken leg or whatever, the psychiatrist needs to treat the patient as a human being, not a machine.
In a revised Preface to The Divided Self Laing declares that he should have said less in the book about Them (the patient) and more about Us (the psychiatrist). That is, he is critical of how the profession fails to recognise the significance of the nature of the relationship between psychiatrist and patient and above all of the way the patient is 'treated' - ie, see this 2-minute youtube.
It was precisely the 'respect', the 'courtesy', the way you 'treat' the patient, as he describes in the youtube, that formed the foundation of Laing's breakthrough. Often, such patients, with the development of characteristicly quirky behaviours, would have likely experienced very little courtesy from anyone, still less from someone with Laing's skills: prepared to spend hours just 'being' with the patient, totally there, in silence or - as appropriate - to really listen... without distraction, without judgement, criticism, or dishing-out 'wise' advice, etc., etc. (Perhaps Laing was as surprised as anyone that this worked, or worked as well as it did... though I doubt it, because to some of us it looks pretty obvious.)
But crucially, it was this kind of early experience that led Laing to challenge the traditional prevailing view that the psychiatrist should regard the patient in the same existential and phenomenological way as a clinician.
Here’s a link to an 8-min youtube describing one experiment that demonstrates the success of Laing’s approach, but which ultimately fails - NOT because of Laing’s method of allowing his patients to recover from their trauma naturally, but because once cured they are plunged straight back into the precise circumstances that were the source of, or was exacerbating, their original trauma. ie, a dysfunctional family: youtube
And here's a couple of responses from that youtube:
Revolutionary psychiatrist RD Laing demonstrates how normal family interactions are selfish and malevolent agendas masquerading as kindness and love, and how such atmospheres produces so called mental illnesses and neuroses. I find it highly distressing that mental health professionals today are unaware of RD Laing and his work.
Yes, I remember it well. One of the best and most informative documentaries ever produced. Always worth a second, third fourth (and so on) watch. This should be compulsory viewing in any educational setting, including religious instruction, natural philosophy and the arts. I have over four decades in developmental, educational and now existential psychology in which Laing's work sits perfectly well. His like are far too rare in the history of academia...
There are several more youtubes and other records about or by Laing, for instance:
On Life and Laing: with Bob Foss youtube
R.D.Laing's Glasgow (1978) Internet archive
'Interview' with son Adrian BBC Radio-4
R D Laing - Part 1. The essence: youtube
.....and Part 2 (< 8 mins): youtube
Did you used to be RD Laing youtube
To recognise truth, or conform youtube
(Demonstation 1985 youtube)
and
Fear of no common interests youtube
ie, from that last video:
"If I could turn you, if I could drive you out of your wretched mind, if I can tell you I would let you know."
"These words were written by Dr R D Laing, one of the foremost psychiatrists of our time. Born in Glasgow Scotland in 1927 Laing was drawn at an early age to the misery and suffering he saw around him. Until his death in 1989, he devoted his life to the study of the human condition, redefining our concepts of madness, offering revolutionary humanistic solutions to the problems of mental illness. For Laing modern society imposes prison walls of conformity on the individual, inhibiting potential and devastating the personality. So called Madness may be the result of a person's inability to suppress his normal instincts to conform to an abnormal Society. In exploring what drives people to madness Laing was a master at portraying the incompatible contradictions that can enmesh people in a web of lies and confusions; for him the key to understanding was always personal experience."
Another (monochrome) video shows Laing reading/contemplating these lines by Auden:
If I Could Tell You
Time will say nothing but I told you so
Time only knows the price we have to pay;
If I could tell you I would let you know.
etc.
Amazon has some insightful reviews of the books too. For instance on The Politics of Experience:
2017:
I read this book 40 years ago. I have read it again now, realizing how much of my own thinking all through my life has been affected and influenced by this book. My politics, my morality, my understanding of social realities, in fact, of the structure of reality itself, keeps the mark of these extraordinarily radical and intelligent pages. read it.
2016
I have bought this book three times now, it is a seminal works and ought to be made compulsory reading. R D Laing was a phenomenal mind; to the extent, that his works, are not, perhaps, for those who are looking for 'light-reading'. Requires an intelligent mind and a critical one at that. R D Laing deserves a place in history next to Nietzsche, Sartre, Plato.
And from the official website: https://www.rdlaingofficial.com/
To this day the life and works of R. D. Laing influence writers, poets, musicians, philosophers, psychologists, therapists, film makers and those involved with the day-to-day challenges of coping and dealing with mental distress.
R.D. Laing was a controversial figure to the Establishment and a hero to the counter-culture movement of the 1960s which viewed R. D. Laing as a pioneering humanitarian whose works displayed an authentic existential understanding of psychosis.
Scottish existential psychiatrist who argued that insanity could be a creative and adaptive response to the world
[and] developed the theory that mental illness was an escape mechanism that allowed individuals to free themselves from intolerable circumstances.
There's no doubt Laing was a remarkable intellect, perhaps a genius; but either way his ideas and perceptions - esp as set-out in Politics of Experience - reveal aspects of our lives, as I say, that very few people seem to accept, less still are aware of... such is the extent, the depth, the thoroughness of our conditioning. Regarding this, by certain fluke experiences (described in my Memoir), I became aware as a teenager of what Laing describes - among other things. Maybe Laing's early experiences contained similar threads, and with his sharp mind triggered a recognition of the significance of this and other observations he describes? No doubt reading Freud (who I'd scarcely heard of before I was ~30) and others would have honed such observations. A quote from Darwin:
"It is worthy of remark that a belief constantly inculcated during the early years of life, whilst the brain is impressible, appears to acquire almost the nature of an instinct; and the very essence of an instinct is that it is followed independently of reason." - Charles Darwin
Despite my own unwitting recognition of these angles on the human 'predicament', Laing's books have formed quite an eye-opener - if only in the systematic analysis and articulation of key phenomena, especially as clarified, for instance, in the below excerpts. (These issues must form a central theme in any study of anthropology, and maybe the history of economics too... ie, see also my article quoting Fromm)
I'm reminded how in 1984 experimenting with an early computer (BBC model 'B') I stumbled on 'windows' (described here). Since my interests were elsewhere (idling?) - and my IQ is quite a bit less than that of Bill Gates - I failed to twig the potential of what I'd seen. I'm reminded too of how, twenty years earlier as a 14 year-old, I gained an intimate understanding of existentialism more than a decade before first hearing the word and being amazed and delighted at finding it to be a popular and major philosophy that I could study. I'd assumed my perception to be unique to me - or a view of existence that was taboo (since the prevailing mind-set seemed quite the opposite). So once again, I'd failed to look further than my nose.
There's also the time that I imagine many people experienced: when they 'invented' the internet... for me this is described here (and here).
Likewise - above all - witnessing conditions and actions authorities and associated adults created or participated in that to me were not only inexplicable but counterproductive, even hostile.... in other words: my recognition that nearly every aspect of the society I lived in was twisted, apparently irrational and geared to serve some 'mysterious' hierarchical status-quo.... either that or most people were just mad... an observation that Laing must have interpreted as I did, but saw was something to pursue and investigate for its psychological and cultural (more than political) significance.
I say 'mysterious' because I merely accepted it - grudgingly, true, but I made no attempt to understand its source, its purpose, its cause; although the phenomenon was clear enough, it was many years before I bothered to examine what was behind it: as with 'windows', existentialism and doubtless many other observations, I failed to follow this 'political' aberration to its logical conclusion.
Which leaves me astonished now to think I was almost 30 before I peered beyond my own comfortable techno-bubble to recognise how corrupt cultures were anywhere in the world and how decrepit western society in particular was for the majority of 'enslaved' people as in the following excerpts from Laing's Politics of Experience. See also: here... I could add links to many more examples.
