Customer Reviews

Politics of Experience

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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.

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.

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.

The Politics of Experience was introduced to me by Derrick Jensen. I can't thank him enough for exposing me to this extremely important book. R.D. Laing questions the sanity of the human race by writing, "The Germans reared children to regard it as their duty to exterminate the Jews, adore their leader, kill and die for the Fatherland. 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 of this state of affairs."
He goes on the say that in the last 50 years (this was written in the 60's) humans have slaughtered by our own hands one hundred million of our species. Laing argues that the human race is out of touch with the "inner". He writes, "As adults, we have forgotten most of our childhood, not only its contents but its flavor; as men of the world, we hardly know of the existence of the inner world: we barely remember our dreams, and make little sense of them when we do; as for our bodies, we retain just sufficient proprioceptive sensations to coordinate our movements and to ensure the minimal requirements for biosocial survival-to register fatigue, signals for food, sex, defecation, sleep; beyond that, little or nothing." We, as parents, go on to effectively destroy our children using violence disguised as love. "Children are not yet fools, but we shall turn them into imbeciles like ourselves, with high I.Q.'s if possible. From the moment of birth, when the Stone Age baby confronts the twentieth-century mother, the baby is subjected to these forces of violence, called love, as its mother and father, and their parents and their parents before them, have been. These forces are mainly concerned with destroying most of its potentialities, and on the whole this enterprise is successful. By the time the new human being is fifteen or so, we are left with a being like ourselves, a half-crazed creature more or less adjusted to a mad world. This is normality in our present age."
I recommend this book to anyone who is troubled by the path our species has chosen to take.

Schizophrenics often--not always--have a sensitivity for the Unconscious and what might be going on the mind of the other as well as themselves,but few of us ever get to "hear" it. In the very first three pages Laing gets into the mind and mind- reading of interpersonal relations of the schizophrenic ;eg" you can only experience the fact that I am experiencing your experience..."
this goes on page after page, also in Knots (another book by him). NEVER have I been so engulfed by the thought process; one knows, as he reads these lines, that "he is there" (with the schizophrenic) and knows it unforgettably. Harry Stack Sullivan also struggled with capturing that inner world, which he often shared, of the schizophrenic. Read this book and be introduced poetically into another reality.
Martin J.Kaplan, Ph.D. Clinical Psychologist

This was the book that pushed Lang into popular consciousness in the late 1960s when it was released. In it, he makes a distinction between people as sources of action and people as the seat of experience. His critique of society and the psychiatric institutions is based on the idea that at least some mental illness is actually a curative journey working to heal the sickness of the society around it. Point being that people should be treated as people, and not as things committing actions. The book is weakened by "Bird of Paradise" a fictional (?) chapter trying to express the thoughts of the schitzophrenic from the inside.

Laing emphasizes the relationships between persons and how our experience of another and another's experience of us are a culmination of our respective experiences. The book lays the foundation for his theory that our experience of the schizophrenic is a culmination of what we anticipate that experience to be and what the schizophrenic's experience of us will be. Chapter 6, titled "Us and Them" (this is also the title of a tune on Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon) is a more colloquial explanation of Sartre's 1960 opus, Critique of Dialectical Reason, and how elements from that can be used to aid our relationship with the so-called mentally ill. (Laing had earlier written about Sartre's Critique in the collaboration with David Cooper, Reason and Violence.) Politics of Experience also includes two addenda: The Bird of Paradise, about how Laing views himself as an "expert in human relations," and A Ten-Day Voyage, an account of a aging man's breakdown and recovery, ostensibly an example of David Cooper's axiom that the mental breakdown or psychotic episode, left untreated (except for simple human compassion) and unmedicated, lasts about 10 days. Surprisingly, the attending physician to this episode is not Laing but a former British Royal Navy psychiatrist. Politics of Experience is an excellent introduction to Laing and probably the most accessible of all his books. It is also the book that made him a counterculture media darling (profiled in People magazine!!) in the late 60s and early 70s).

I worked as a physical therapy aide in a mental hospital during college. I read this work during that time, and am still stunned by the lucid prose and astonishingly gutty attack Laing leveled against both the psychiatric community and society at the time.

Laing left no stones unturned in both his career and his life, and although there are cracks and lacunas in his thought, he occupies a special place in psychiatric history. He is one of the most original and idiosyncratic thinkers and characters in the 20th century, and I am still surprised that many seem to minimize the importance of his contribution instead recognizing his substantive worth.

I rank this work third behind the classic and seminal The Divided Self, and Self and Others, in Laingian literature. I have ranked The Politics of Experience with 4 stars instead of 5 because of The Bird of Paradise. Although the Bird of Paradise is certainly original and thought provoking, I believe it detracted from the totality of the work, and was most likely written under the influence of a popular substance during the 1960s. Otherwise, The Politics of Experience is a great, great work.

First published to great controversy & acclaim some 40 years ago, R.R. Laing's ferocious, heartfelt cri de coeur is even more relevant today. Technically it's psychology -- but in truth, it's a poetic, prophetic work in the tradition of William Blake. Laing's horror & outrage at the needless suffering inflicted on humanity by The Normal Man blazes from every page, and he demands that we face our own inner darkness rather than gloss over it.

Many will disagree with his assessment of schizophrenia ... and they may well be right in a literal sense. We've certainly learned that it has major biological origins. Yet in the modern zeal to medicate rather than analyze, to smooth over wounds rather than delve into their roots, we do ourselves a grave disservice by ignoring its psychological & social components. It's a symptom & reflection of the times, I suppose -- the 1960s emphasized community & social responsibility, as well as the importance of the individual; the contemporary attitude is all too often one of fitting in & getting with the program. If time & science call into question Laing's medical diagnosis of schizophrenia, his philosophical & moral diagnosis remains terribly potent.

How much have we really advanced since the book's publication? We see the same Normal Man calmly talking of pre-emptive wars, of acceptable civilian causalities, of torture as rational policy ... and it's Laing's anguish & compassion that are called crazy. If he were alive today, he'd undoubtedly be even more appalled by what passes for civilization. The dumbing down of the past decades, the push for blind, unthinking obedience, the Pavlovian appeal to patriotic buzzwords -- all this would sicken him. As it should sicken us. What to do in the face of such despair?

Laing reminds us:

"Yet if nothing else, each time a new baby is born there is a possibility of reprieve. Each child is a new being, a potential prophet, a new spiritual prince, a new spark of light, precipitated into the outer darkness. Who are we to decide that it is hopeless?"

The Bird of Paradise is there, hovering in the darkness, waiting for us to join it & soar into the heavens ... if we can only break free of the chains of normality. Most highly recommended!

No book on first reading has ever hit me with the force of this one.

Some of the content I don't buy: the focus on madness as a positive journey and the de-emphasis on inborn factors that may lead to "schizophrenia".

But as an example of compelling writing, of a writer putting his heart into his work, I don't know of any rival to this book.

But there's a lot more than writing style here. This is one of the strongest challenges to us "normal" folk about the potential we may have tossed away in exchange for a fit in our troubled society.

This isn't a book that tells us what to do or that sells some old tradition. This is a book that tells us how it seems ... to someone uniquely qualified and extraordinarily concerned about our well-being.

Laing was a great gift to the world and this is his greatest book.