Customer Reviews

Knots

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Knots is one of those books that you not only can but need to read and re-read throughout a lifetime. Laing really points out the ways in which we hinder ourselves, our relationships and our lives through these 'knots.'
For those out there who need a book with examples to see Laing's point more clearly, I would recommend 'Sanity, Madness and the family,' where one can see in concrete terms the things Laing points out "only" abstractlt in Knots.
HOwever, do not get me wrong, Knots is one of the best books ever written

A collection of well-written, and sometimes darkly humorous, dialogs and prose poems about the way people communicate and misunderstand each other. It's derived from Gregory Bateson's "double-bind" theory of how families make their members sick. Bateson promoted this as the cause of schizophrenia. Admirers of Laing should read the biography written by his son Adrian. Strangely enough it was never published in the US. You can get it from the UK Amazon,com site

Famed radical psychologist R.D. Laing's bizarre, one-of-a-kind (or at least first of its kind) book consists of five chapters of increasingly weird 'knots' - internal conversations that develop into obsessive debates. Laing uses his deceptively flat, simple style to brilliantly shed light on the way the mind works, and most of all the way it deals with relationships. It starts out easy enough to follow, but watch out - in the second chapter Laing turns the 'If it is me, it is not mine' knot into a masterpiece of convoluted reasoning, actually numbering each line and turning them into impossibly complex diagrams. Next comes the 'There is something Jack knows that Jill does not, but he does not know he does not know...' knot, which might prompt you to hurl the book at the wall after six pages of interminable mental gymnastics. But once you've made it through that, the rest of the book is a breeze, and the fifth chapter, the most opaque, is even a little disturbing. After you close the book, beware of turning every question that pops into your head into a knot - it starts to get a bit compulsive!

Scottish psychiatrist R. D. Laing was considered a radical for his view that mental illness, or at least some forms of it, arise from twisted logic. People may fall into a deepening spiral of self destructive behavior because they see no alternative to the thought patterns that arise from fundamental choices. The idea that mental illness could sometimes be existential remains anathema to many in the psychiatric profession.

Laing called such self entangeled patterns knots. Unlike his many other books which try to analyze and explain, "Knots" simply presents knots that he observed during his practice in free verse, without analysis or comment. The reader is left to unravel the knots and to draw his own conclusions. Although this is a thin book, it is not an easy read. The knots are complex and frustratingly repetitive.

I first read this book shortly after it was published in 1970 on the recommendation of a psychology professor who perhaps thought that as an English major I'd find the free verse format a better introduction to Laing's ideas. I did. I also found insights about how loving relationships can go horribly bad. These insights did not help me to keep a loving relationship from going horribly bad. My soon to be ex-wife despised logical explanations.

I recently decided to reread Knots because I saw parallels to group self destructive behavior. Why do governments, businesses, etc. when faced with crisis often choose to do things that can only make the crisis worse?

Newspapers are losing both circulation and advertising revenue to electronic media. So they reduce content and raise the price. The US Postal Service is losing business as more people use e-mail and pay their bills on-line. So they raise the price of stamps. We have an economic crisis due to the collapse of a real estate bubble based on fake money. So let's inject hundreds of billions of dollars that we don't actually have to stimulate the economy. More fake money. Radical Islamic terrorists attack us mainly because they fear we want to impose western values. So we invade Iraq and Afghanistan and impose western values. Iran thinks they need to become a nuclear power to keep us from contolling them again. So we invade and occupy two of their bordering countries and establish military bases in every other bordering country.

When I reread "Knots" I found that it did offer some insights by example into how to recognize self destructive patterns of thought and behavior, on both individual and group levels. But there is nothing here to help unravel the knots.

Dr. Laings book, Knots, illustrates in terms we can easily understand the unusual complexities of human relationships, particularly involving loving or not loving. With apparent child-like simplicity Dr. Laing demonstrates for us what is intuitively complex and daunting. He clarifies what for us is emotional and psychological, using the knot as a metaphore for what we want to see about our relationships that is clouded and only vaguely sensed. To clarify is to confirm. To make visible what is troubling is to give the reader respect for their intuition and possibly even a grasp of how to deal with our relations with each otherl. The power of understanding our relating to others is here in a short text from which we can begin to unknot our mental perplexity and achieve for ourselves satisfying or at the very least, understood, relations with those we love.

RD Laing's Knots is a brilliantly written examination of the ways in which our own minds interfere with our personal relationships, bringing life to a standstill of self-hatred inflicted on those around us. Knots is a particularly valid study of the relationships of those closest to us, our families. However, it might just barely be possible that everything in your life is perfect, and that you interact with others in a realm far above that of the average human being, in which case you probably won't like knots, but if you, like many others, struggle with your own feelings of inadequacy and doubt, then you too will find Knots compelling. On a side note, I'm not sure that paying 8 dollars would be advisable. I found it at a used book sale, but if that doesn't work, try a library.

Take a chance and let your mind go to a place where few follow. RD Laing was, in my opinion, a master within his field. Other reviewers summed up what the book is about pretty nicely, so I won't approach the inner workings. Instead, I suggest you take a serious look at the author, this, and his other writings (esp. Politics of Experience).

If you want to really figure out who you are, why you think the way you do, and how we are all perpetually children, then you really should take a look at this book! However, don't expect to understand it all the first time you read it...yes, that means reading it again, and again, and again........in a good way :)

Best Wishes!

Painful because of the subject matter, and painful because of Laing's style or pretension towards one.

If you want to find out about Laing, read his earlier stuff first. This is not Laing at his best, this is the threadbare, ideologially-exhausted Laing. By the point in his life that he wrote this, his time had definitely been.

I like this book. You like this book. I like this book cause you like this book. You like this book cause I like this book cause you like this book.

If you like this book then I like this book. If I like this book then you like this book. If you like this book cause I like this book, Then I must not like this book Cause you like this book.

If you are the cause of my liking this book I must not really like this book. If I am the cause of you likeing this book Then you must not really like this book. If you dont like this book cause I like this book Cause you like this book, Then I must not like the book Cause you dont like this book.

If you dont like this book cause I like this book cause you like this book cause I like this book, Then I dont like this book cause you like this book cause I like this book.

She thinks I bought this book cause she bought this book. He thinks I bought this book cause he bought this book. She thinks I bought this book cause she likes this book cause she bought this book. He thinks I bought this book cause he likes this book cause I like this book. She thinks that he likes this book cause I bought this book. He thinks that she likes this book cause I bought this book. If she thinks that I bought this book cause she likes this book and she bought this book, then I must not have bought it. She must have bought it for me.

(R.D. Laing's poetry inspired by schizophrenic thinking is a masterpiece in its own way. Wonderfully exhibits the way many people think and have internal conversation that is tied up in knots).

One interminable little book Mr. Laing put together. RDL has fabricated a vis-à-vis discourse between Jack and Jill, which develops into a permutation poem akin to the late Brion Gysin. However, readers, be prepared. RDL may seem like a page turner at first glance, but the trick here is to read between the lines ---as always. "Irony" is the word for today, especially after reading Knots.