- Mass Market Paperback: 192 pages
- Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd; 2nd Revised edition edition (30 Sep 1971)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0140213767
- ISBN-13: 978-0140213768
- Product Dimensions: 17.5 x 10.9 x 1.5 cm
- Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 134,829 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
Self and Others (Selected Works of R.D. Laing, 2)
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Product Description
To withstand the pressures of conformity we must understand how insidiously they work.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Mass Market Paperback
R D Laing innovator pioneer and provides a long thread of self realisation and the eventual self liberation. This is one torchlight experience on the parade to human freedom. It is a small deceptive book, penetrating hard. Unconscious experience; How can you have an experience you are unaware of? Laing posits an existential point that tips up therapy.
He then makes the case for understanding emotional connection through dialogue with a patient/client/person. Finding out their internal meaning rather than casting a diagnostic framework is key to a will to health. The opposite is the pre-determined doctor diagnosis, good if you have a specific physical condition but not in explaining how it has accrued. Eschewing the unconscious experience which only the therapist can unravel he brings out the real narrative.
Elusion; the process of imagining oneself away, only to wish oneself back again, but this time, as a grafted-on experience rather than a beam from the inner core. Another nod to the Marxist conception of alienation. The false self identity masters experience and then subdues it rather than imbibing and then radiating the moment within a dialectical expression of joy/sadness. The result is the present pre-occupation of living within in a promised future or a schmaltz ridden past. The present is pure disillusionment.
Phantasies are conjured and maintained, with particular emphasis on issues relating to St. Onan.
Working therapeutically with people diagnosed as schizophrenics this book has assisted, not in a Haynes manual dissassembling a motorbike sort of way, but to work with them to ensure grounding is undertaken to unravel their life stories. Too often dismissed as "mad" the place where I now work has begun to change their milieu to meet the needs of the people inhabiting the structure rather than vice versa.
Guess what? It produces more life affirming change, with the most "stuck" accessing further intense psycholgical treatment and support. Obviously not just relied on Laing but he is a catalyst to energise rather than sit back and quote the DSM Manual categorise and drift into a fugue of categorisation and pharmocopia.
Laing had prescience and vision to think far ahead. This book provides the master keys to escape the self imposed prison.
He then makes the case for understanding emotional connection through dialogue with a patient/client/person. Finding out their internal meaning rather than casting a diagnostic framework is key to a will to health. The opposite is the pre-determined doctor diagnosis, good if you have a specific physical condition but not in explaining how it has accrued. Eschewing the unconscious experience which only the therapist can unravel he brings out the real narrative.
Elusion; the process of imagining oneself away, only to wish oneself back again, but this time, as a grafted-on experience rather than a beam from the inner core. Another nod to the Marxist conception of alienation. The false self identity masters experience and then subdues it rather than imbibing and then radiating the moment within a dialectical expression of joy/sadness. The result is the present pre-occupation of living within in a promised future or a schmaltz ridden past. The present is pure disillusionment.
Phantasies are conjured and maintained, with particular emphasis on issues relating to St. Onan.
Working therapeutically with people diagnosed as schizophrenics this book has assisted, not in a Haynes manual dissassembling a motorbike sort of way, but to work with them to ensure grounding is undertaken to unravel their life stories. Too often dismissed as "mad" the place where I now work has begun to change their milieu to meet the needs of the people inhabiting the structure rather than vice versa.
Guess what? It produces more life affirming change, with the most "stuck" accessing further intense psycholgical treatment and support. Obviously not just relied on Laing but he is a catalyst to energise rather than sit back and quote the DSM Manual categorise and drift into a fugue of categorisation and pharmocopia.
Laing had prescience and vision to think far ahead. This book provides the master keys to escape the self imposed prison.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
3 reviews
10 of 10 people found the following review helpful
A very good read
27 Feb 2006
Format:Mass Market Paperback
I was pleasantly surprised by this book. It looked so unassuming at the library and so ancient with it's old dust jacket, but this book is another timeless work, by someone I wish I had come into contact with in my early twenties as opposed to now in my thirties. This book shows people in very easy to understand language how Schizophrenia actually happens and how people often use "difference" to equate with wrong or right thinking. He shows how Cartesian Dualism fails to address the real underlying problems at hand in interpersonal relationships. The self defines itself through the eyes of others and can constantly feel the need for justification of importance or merit to the point of irrationality. But also that others can come to associate the irrationality as something wrong or immoral about the person as opposed to a disorder the self is just completely unconscious of. In other words the person comes to believe that they are in and of themselves wrong or right based on their interactions with other people and begin to define themselves opposite to anything they feel is not their self in order to feel right or prove someone elses falsity. This places the individual in a "untenable" position. They are no more an actor upon themselves but constantly re-evaluating everyone around them in order to try to escape this position, what they fail to realize is that no escape is possible and that life can present unanswerable conditions. Often the person going through this experience will feel as though they are unable to decide what is right or wrong for themselves. This leads to a sort of paranoia of the sort that nobody likes them or that nobody thinks about them and they project the image that they could care less about what anyone else thinks about them. There seems to be a sort of thrashing about and rehashing of thoughts with an inability to relate to others and alienation sets in. The book uses many literature examples of untenable positions as well as psychiatric situations and recordings to illustrate the process of the mind of someone dealing with schizophrenia and the inability of the disorder to exist outside of a relation to others. I still liked Politics of Experience more but this book is highly recommended as well.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
A Gem
16 Mar 2009
Format:Kindle Edition
With examples from clinical experience and theory, existential literature, fine art, and children's stories, R. D. Laing illustrates how the pressures of conformity act upon individuals in our society. Each of us is constantly influenced by others as we influence them. Authority figures judge others and create realities for both themselves and those being judged.
The book affirms a personal world. It debunks the idea that phantasy can be observed by another as a series of facts. Phantasy, an object relations term intentionally not spelled with an `f,' is the real experience of a subject. A social phantasy is an internalized experience by a group. For example, a dominant group phantasy is that the therapist has the `answers.' We can think of this as `expertise phantasy'. If only the patient could find the answer he would cease to suffer.
One person can only infer through language and gesture what the experience of another can be. Laing said elsewhere: I cannot experience your experience.
We must tolerate ambiguity and paradox. Laing cites the teachings of Hsi Yun, a Zen Master of about 840 A.D: "That the real difficulty is not so much in his questions being unanswerable as in his continuing in the state of mind that leads him to ask them."
Selves for Liang can be either authentic or false. False selves are an adaptation to false realities. Laing explores and illustrates everyday untenable situations, identity, attribution, pretense, elusion, delusion, and collusion.
This is well worth reading. I read it first at age 17 and didn't understand it well. Forty years later it makes for better reading. It's a gem.
The book affirms a personal world. It debunks the idea that phantasy can be observed by another as a series of facts. Phantasy, an object relations term intentionally not spelled with an `f,' is the real experience of a subject. A social phantasy is an internalized experience by a group. For example, a dominant group phantasy is that the therapist has the `answers.' We can think of this as `expertise phantasy'. If only the patient could find the answer he would cease to suffer.
One person can only infer through language and gesture what the experience of another can be. Laing said elsewhere: I cannot experience your experience.
We must tolerate ambiguity and paradox. Laing cites the teachings of Hsi Yun, a Zen Master of about 840 A.D: "That the real difficulty is not so much in his questions being unanswerable as in his continuing in the state of mind that leads him to ask them."
Selves for Liang can be either authentic or false. False selves are an adaptation to false realities. Laing explores and illustrates everyday untenable situations, identity, attribution, pretense, elusion, delusion, and collusion.
This is well worth reading. I read it first at age 17 and didn't understand it well. Forty years later it makes for better reading. It's a gem.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Typically Illuminating Existentialism
12 May 2011
Format:Mass Market Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
While =SAO= may not have the emotional impact of Laing's =The Politics of Experience=, =Knots=, or (especially) =Sanity, Madness & the Family=, it's right there with his "classics" insofar as conceptual revelation is concerned. The author's explorations of Bateson's and Watzlawick's "double binds" and "paradoxical injunctions" alone are worth the discerning reader's time.
Usually classified as an existentialist (and sometimes as "anti-psychoanalytic"), Laing is now credited by some as at least supporting, if not leading, the charge towards the cognitivistic views of contemporaries like Albert Ellis. He certainly saw -- as much later cognitive behavioralists like Stephen Hayes and Victoria Follette have more definitively stated -- the problems with language as mere representations of reality rather than reality itself, and what such mis-representationalim leads to.
As one of the previous reviewers here noted, Laing "shows how Cartesian Dualism fails to address the real underlying problems at hand in interpersonal relationships." In that, Laing is also a forerunner of current-day thinking, especially among the dualism-cracking, dialectical behaviorist crowd. His grasp of ambiguity and irresolvable confusion (at the common cultural level) between evidently conflicting demands and contradictory behavioral impulses is right down on the ground with DBT types like Thomas Marra.
But the thing I like most about this and other books by Laing (and others like Laing, such as his contemporaries, Jules Henry, Jay Haley and Don Jackson) is how effectively they identify the family systems mystifications our parents and grandparents were stuck in that lead to the general screwiness of the consumption-as-emotional-salve-obsessed, baby boomer generation.
Though not for the typical 12 Stepper, Laing's work makes the downhill road to alcoholism, eating disorders, codependence, workaholism and sexual obsession =much= easier to understand and forgive oneself for. Alan Marlatt didn't come up with the "abstinence violation effect" until several decades later, but one can see the precise fundaments of the "AVE" in Laing's work... and utilize Laing's many anecdotes to help obsessive-compulsives who get stuck =in= it get =out= of it.
Usually classified as an existentialist (and sometimes as "anti-psychoanalytic"), Laing is now credited by some as at least supporting, if not leading, the charge towards the cognitivistic views of contemporaries like Albert Ellis. He certainly saw -- as much later cognitive behavioralists like Stephen Hayes and Victoria Follette have more definitively stated -- the problems with language as mere representations of reality rather than reality itself, and what such mis-representationalim leads to.
As one of the previous reviewers here noted, Laing "shows how Cartesian Dualism fails to address the real underlying problems at hand in interpersonal relationships." In that, Laing is also a forerunner of current-day thinking, especially among the dualism-cracking, dialectical behaviorist crowd. His grasp of ambiguity and irresolvable confusion (at the common cultural level) between evidently conflicting demands and contradictory behavioral impulses is right down on the ground with DBT types like Thomas Marra.
But the thing I like most about this and other books by Laing (and others like Laing, such as his contemporaries, Jules Henry, Jay Haley and Don Jackson) is how effectively they identify the family systems mystifications our parents and grandparents were stuck in that lead to the general screwiness of the consumption-as-emotional-salve-obsessed, baby boomer generation.
Though not for the typical 12 Stepper, Laing's work makes the downhill road to alcoholism, eating disorders, codependence, workaholism and sexual obsession =much= easier to understand and forgive oneself for. Alan Marlatt didn't come up with the "abstinence violation effect" until several decades later, but one can see the precise fundaments of the "AVE" in Laing's work... and utilize Laing's many anecdotes to help obsessive-compulsives who get stuck =in= it get =out= of it.
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