Politics of Experience [Paperback]

R.D. Laing (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 039471475X | ISBN-13: 978-0394714752 | Publication Date: August 12, 1983

Laing attacks accepted assumptions about the nature of "normality" with a challenging view of the mental sickness built into our society.

Editorial Reviews

From the Inside Flap

Laing attacks accepted assumptions about the nature of "normality" with a challenging view of the mental sickness built into our society.

Product Details

• Paperback: 192 pages
• Publisher: Pantheon (August 12, 1983)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 039471475X
• ISBN-13: 978-0394714752
• Product Dimensions: 4.1 x 0.5 x 7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #109,024 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

36 of 36 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Profound Insights, March 14, 2003

By 

William Starr Moake (Honolulu, Hawaii) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Politics of Experience (Paperback)

This is the most profound book I ever read. Laing defines mental illness as an ontological crisis with the potential to be a spiritual breakthrough. He decries psychiatry for perversely thwarting this potential with various forms of torture (incarceration, drugs, electroshock, etc.) As to normality, Laing argues it is the product of a pathological "us and them" mentality underlying personal identity and group dynamics.
To be well-adjusted to our modern dysfunctional society is not healthy for the individual or society. Who is more dangerous? Laing asks: the psychotic who mistakenly believes he carries a hydrogen bomb in his stomach or the perfectly adjusted B-52 bomber pilot who will drop very real hydrogen bombs when ordered to do so?
The chapter titled "The Bird of Paradise" is hypnotically poignant in exploring the inner world of thoughts and emotions. Laing was much more than a scientist. He was a visionary who shed light on the dark role of pscyhiatrists as voodoo-like priests and purveyors of social engineering.

47 of 50 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Necessary analysis of our culture, May 6, 2000

By 

Derrick Jensen (Crescent City, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Politics of Experience (Paperback)

This is one of the best books I have ever read, and has influenced my thought more than almost any other. He lays bare the presumptions that are guiding our culture to destroy the planet, with beautiful writing that is clear when it needs to be and obscure when that best serves. A truly remarkable book. My own perception of the ending was different than one other reviewer who thought it was the weakest point of the book: for me it was the strongest. I read it lying on the grass in the middle of a public park so crowded people were stepping over the top of me, yet I was so moved I could not stop crying. Amazing book.

28 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars precious, October 22, 2002

By 

Makula Aulanchis "wirnggit" (Jerez de la Frontera, Spain) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Politics of Experience (Paperback)

This is an important book in which Laing pioneers a new view of "madness" and "insanity". According to L., a sensitive person, pushed by an unhealthy environment, escapes into another reality so as not to deal with the disconnectedness and horror of the consensual reality. As a consequence, he/she is promptly classified as being "mad" by the orthodox psychiatry and its practitioners, ever so scared of losing the monopoly on sanity. During reading of the book, I sometimes had to ask myself who was really mad: the cold, anal and unfeeling parents or their sensitive schizophrenic son, whose ramblings when decoded make much more sense to me than their parents' eerie "normality". Another question that kept cropping up was whether our shrinks, "regular people" who are usually themselves disconnected from their emotional and spiritual foundations, are the right people to guide the sick into other realities and back again? Laing makes a good case that methods used for training and practicing of psychiatry need serious re-evaluation. This is as true now as it was in the 60-ies.

Many ancient cultures value and even encourage temporary forays into "insanity" when the initiate goes to ask the gods about the meaning of life. We have lost these initiation experiences and when they occur spontaneously in the most sensitive members of our society, as they are wont to, the psychiatrists classify these people as insane, drug them heavily and, if they encounter resistance to their authority, lock them up. The loss, sadly, is all ours. As Laing says: "our sanity is not *true* sanity. their madness is not *true* madness. ...The madness that we encounter in "patients" is a gross travesty, a mockery, a grotesque caricature of what the natural healing of that estranged integration we call sanity might be. True sanity entails... dissolution of the normal ego, that false self competently adjusted to our alienated social reality ".

Our culture is a secular one in which the mystery of death and rebirth has been lost. We therefore lost the ability to help people who have stumbled into the ever-shifting universe of ego dissolution. Even worse, our psychiatry is designed to further push them into helplesness and fragmentation of the self. What should be a joyous experience, a journey into the divine, becomes a journey into hell, a true loss of the soul. Laing, in this precious book, eloquently uncovers the heartless and soulless machine that has been entrusted with this process - and that has failed, millions upon millions of times, to bring light into the darkness.