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Selected Works of R.D. Laing: Sel Wks Rd Laing:Divid Self V1 (Selected Works of R.D. Laing, 1)

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This book is a very clear and engaging introduction to the existential conception of the person. It uses the insights of Sartre, Heidegger and Hegel to reconsider those people generally called crazy, and shows that what is often called madness is better understood as meaningful gestures of communication from people who have been wrongly ignored. It is a great introduction to existentialism, it will help you understand yourself, it is a deep critique of the mental health profession, and it is a real pleasure to read. I often use it in courses in existentialism or intro to philosophy because of its clarity and because it shows the deep relevance of philosophy in general and existentialism in particular to everyday human life. This should be essential reading for everyone!

In this valuable study, Dr Laing proposes to examine the way some individuals are very proficient in acquiring a false self in order to adapt to false realities and to give an account of specifically personal forms of depersonalisation and disintegration. It is no small task for the therapist to articulate what the patient's "world" is and his way of being in it in order to outline his psychopathology. The author states that if we look at his actions as signs of a disease, we impose categories of thoughts on the patient in our effort to try to explain his mental state and it isn't easy for the therapist to transpose himself into the patient's strange and alien view of world in order to understand his existential position.
Dr Laing states that many patients suffer from "ontological insecurity" because they feel insubstantial, the ordinary circumstances of life constituting a continual threat to their own existence. He mentions personalities like Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett and Francis Bacon. Then Dr Laing proceeds by giving the account of three forms of anxiety encountered by the ontologically insecure subject: engulfment, implosion and petrification. To illustrate these three forms, the author describes the case of Mrs R. who suffered from agoraphobia and schizohphrenic withdrawal.
Interestingly enough, the schizoid individual constantly feels vulnerable as he is exposed by the look of another person and that is why he fears live dialectical relationships with live people and prefers to relate himself to depersonalised persons or to phantoms of his own fantasies, thus the distinction between the "embodied" and "unembodied" self. Such an individual is afraid of the world, frightened that any impingement will be total and engulfing. He is afraid of letting himself "go", of coming out of himself or of losing himself because he feels that he will be depleted, exhausted, emptied, robbed or sucked dry. So for the schizoid individual, direct participation in life is felt as being at a risk of being destroyed by life. One aspect of this individual's ontological insecurity is the precariousness of his subjective sense of his own aliveness and the sense that others threaten this tentative feeling. The schizoid individual strongly believes in his own destructiveness by others. This view is in accord to the existentialist's philosophy represented by Jean-Paul Sartre who stated in his famous theatre play "Huis Clos" that "L'enfer, c'est les autres."
Thus a false self can arise in the individual which is in compliance with the intentions and expectations of the other or with what are imagined to be the other's intentions or expectations. Indeed, the self-conscious person feels he is more the object of other people's interest than in fact he is. And so the schizoid individual carries out defences like being like everyone else, being someone other than oneself, playing a part, being nobody or being incognito and anonymous. So if the gaze of others is experienced as a threat, there is a constant dread and resentment at being turned into someone else's thing (what Sartre called "l'ętre-pour-autrui"), of being penetrated by him, and a sense of being in someone else's power and control. Freedom then consists in being inaccessible. Love too for schizoid individuals is viewed as disguised persecution since it aims to turn him into an object of the other.
This type of individual can be himself in safety only in isolation. With others he plays an elaborate game of pretence and his social life is felt to be false and futile. But the more he keeps his "true self" concealed and unseen, the more he presents to others a false front and the more compulsive this fake presentation of himself becomes. This can lead to a complete disintegration of the personality.

This is Ronald Laing's brilliant first work, written by the eminent psychiatrist at the tender young age of 28. I must say that it contains one of the most eloquent and compassionate descriptions of the process by which an individual retreats from the world of consensual experience and enters the fantastic world of psychosis. Laing provides a detailed theory of this process in his dichotomy between the "false" and "real" selves (based on the existentialist notions of inauthentic and authentic existence, respectively). (Laing explains that the "false self" is best thought of as a "system of false selves".) Beginning with the eccentric neurotic and "schizoid" individuals, Laing explains how these individuals, from a sense of ontological insecurity, progress into the schizophrenic stage of acute psychosis. He harvests the profound insights of existential philosophers (Heidegger, Kierkegaard, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, et al) and applies them to his psychoanalysis.

While I find his explanations of the schizoid individual pretty compelling, they become more and more difficult to follow as he approaches the schizophrenic stage. (In fact, the last case presented in his book of chronic schizophrenia, "The Ghost of the Weed Garden", is downright depressing, and his idea of the schizophrenogenic family (as opposed to schizophrenogenic mother) of this girl seems somewhat unfair to the family members of this chronically psychotic individual.) Most people today would agree that schizophrenia (or "the schizophrenias", whatever the disease/s is/are) is best explained in terms of physiology; however, Laing offers an excellent existential analysis of the "illness" and provides insight into the unique perspectives of the borderline psychotic and psychotic individuals.

All in all, this is a beautiful exposition of the schizoid/schizophrenic mode of being-in-the-world.

This book felt to me strangely intimate, and understanding when I first read it. Laing, who was a clinical psychiatrist, presents case studies of people who feel overly self-conscious and self-critical, fearful to be on the street alone, hiding from social contact -- common enough feelings which he treats with supreme empathy, not judgement or haste to reform. He explains in the preface his analysis is based on existenstial thought, yet, he avoids the amoralistic tendencies of this genre of philosophy. His emphasis is more on the process of alienation of self from self, and inner self from outer self, into a "split." He gives analysis of the so-described schizoid and schizophrenic personality, attempts to analyze why a person slips into so-called "psychosis" -- in his analysis a schizophrenic person is forming a logical reaction to an untenable situation. Here he leans on other writers, such as Gregory Bateson's double-bind theory.

Laing's writing is poetic in some places, and is literate in a way psychology books seldom are. i recommend this book highly to anyone who wants to know more about their own behavior, and others'.

The Divided Self put R.D. Laing on the map as one of the most brilliant and controversial figures in psychiatry. Written around his 30th birthday in an age of post-Hiroshima and WWII angst, Laing's brilliance rings true as he crafted one of the greatest works in psychiatry and western philosophical thought.

Laing's pursuit in understanding mental illness as an existential and ontological problem was a antithesis and departure from conventional psychiatric thought at the time, and should've been awarded paradigm shifting status by serious thinkers on the subject of mental illness. Although The Divided Self is respected, it isn't respected enough. I strongly believe his challenge was so devastating, that many in the psychiatric community wanted to keep him on the sidelines for fear their own life's work would be turned upside down.

Laing possessed an uncanny and perhaps eery understanding of the world of schizophrenia, and his level of compassion and intellectual commitment and honesty is nearly unmatched. He is definitely one of the elite, and reading his works instead of reading about his works is a mind blowing education into the breadth and depth of an extraordinary and agile mind.

Foucault wrote in madness and civilization: "The constitution of madness as a mental illness, at the end of the eighteenth century, affords the evidence of a broken dialogue.... In the serene world of mental illness, modern man no longer communicates with the madman."

Psychiatric dogma says that Schizophrenics are incapable of human relationships; that it is impossible to meaningfully dialogue with schizophrenics. Laing in this work develops an existential account of madness, which is in direct opposition to the modern dogma of psychiatry. He shows, with the aid of case studies, that madness should be viewed from the 'inside'; that is, people diagnosed as psychotic should be understood; a conversation/relationship should and can be developed. This is the very thing to be avoided according to the modern idea that the mentally ill are merely objects of 'scientific ' enquiry; patients to be diagnosed and treated.

Also developed in the book is the idea that public sanity is not identical with wisdom or truth. As Laing says early in the book " ... The cracked mind of the schizophrenic may let in light which does not enter the intact minds of many sane people whose minds are closed". This is not altogether new, Socrates saw "the superiority of heaven-sent madness over man-made sanity". The idea seems to have been lost in our current culture where the standards of sanity and reason are in large part intellectual constructions; formed by supposed 'experts' of the human condition or by the sloganistic and emotive words of public opinion devoid of all fixed meaning.

The book is informative and just great reading.

Laing's ability to listen and understand is legendary. I learned a great deal about how to "be" with others from reading this and other of Laing's books. It's too bad psychology/psychiatry has gone the route of total reliance on medication--what pill do you have for me to relieve me of despair--my own existential condition?

R. D. Lang starts out this intriguing book with an introduction where he gives the following statement: "a little girl of seventeen in a mental hospital told me she was terrified because the Atom Bomb was inside of her. That is a dellusion. The statesmen of the world who boast and threaten that they have Doomsday weapons are far more dangerous, and far more estranged from 'reality' than mean of the people whom the label 'phychotic' is affixed." Throughout the rest of the book Laing never stops taking into consideration not only the 'signs' of mental illness, but also what the mentally ill and feeling, thinking, and trying to say. Instead of making the mentally ill into a sub-human species, Laing, allows them to be fully human and in doing so revels more about mental illness than if he had stuck to ridged definitions and destinctions. Not only does he succeed in spreading light onto the many parts of their personalties, fears, and contingencies, but he also illuminates what it is to be a 'mentally sound' person in an unhealthy world.

More than being a book of psychology, THE DIVIDED SELF, is a book of philosophy; Laing often uses examples from the works of Sartre as well as other existential philosophers (Heidegger and Husserl) along with an unusual mix of literary influence from Kafka to Shakespear.

Although the book fails exactly where most people will exspect it to be strongest -- a clinical account of mental illness -- it makes up for its lack of medical facts and outdated information (it was orginally published in 1960) with its many wonderful insights. Laing is as much a psychologist as Frued -- however both of them do better outside of the technical arena, where, oddly enough, both of them try to hide their best philosphical insights behind technical jargon.

I applaud Laing for taking troubled people seriously. How many troubled people have felt that no one cared enough to try to understand them? How many troubled people have suffered emotional hell in their lives, which would have driven anyone crazy? And then been stabbed in the back by the more fortunate, who dismiss their distress as mental weakness?

Laing, a psychiatrist from Scotland, wrote Divided Self when he was 27, in the late 'fifties. It is imbued with the thinking of the existentialists so popular then. He also updated it in 1964. Laing himself is regarded as an "anti-psychiatrist" or, for some, an "existential psychiatrist." One of the most interesting chapters discusses "ontological security", a sense of insubstantiality in the world. That concept fits well with the existentialism at the time, but also seems, in retrospect to also describe some of the detachment, dissociation, numbing, and schizoid detachment so commonly seen and described today. He also discusses the concepts of "engulfment" and "objectification", wherein someone's subjectivity is denied or ignored and they are made into objects. R.D. (Ronald David) Laing had a good mind, a nice literary touch, a great rapport with clients apparently, and a sense of iconoclasm, along with his associates at the famed Tavistock clinic. He may be most recollected as railing against the purely medical model, and the humanization of the therapy process. A unique man, a unique doctor and writer, from a unique time in the development of modern psychology and psychiatry, the book is worth a read. Readers should not balk from the occasional difficulty of the prose. It may interest therapists, historians of psychology, as well for those with interest in dissociative states, schizoid phenomenon, and even such au courant diagnoses as Asperger's. For other interesting reading, Susan Laing, his daughter, published a fairly critical article on Laing--brilliant but not apparently the best family man. Damon LaBarbera, PhD.,Panama City