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In ‘The Politics of Experience’ and the visionary ‘Bird of Paradise’, R.D. Laing shows how the straitjacket of conformity imposed on us all leads to intense feelings of alienation and a tragic waste of human potential. He throws into question the notion of normality, examines schizophrenia and psychotherapy, transcendence and ‘us and them’ thinking, and illustrates his ideas with a remarkable case history of a ten-day psychosis. ‘We are bemused and crazed creatures,’ Laing suggests. This outline of ‘a thoroughly self-conscious and self-critical human account of man’ represents a major attempt to understand our deepest dilemmas and sketch in solutions.
‘Everyone in contemporary psychiatry owes something to R.D. Laing’ Anthony Clare, the Guardian.
About the Author
R.D. Laing, one of the best-known psychiatrists of modern times, was born in Glasgow in 1927 and graduated from Glasgow University as a doctor of medicine. In the 1960's he developed the argument that there may be a benefit in allowing acute mental and emotional turmoil in depth to go on and have its way, and that the outcome of such turmoil could have a positive value. He was the first to put such a stand to the test by establishing, with others, residences where persons could live and be free to let happen what will when the acute psychosis is given free rein, or where, at the very least, they receive no treatment they do not want. This work with the Philadelphia Association since 1964, together with his focus on disturbed and disturbing types of interaction in institutions, groups and families, has been both influential and continually controversial.
R.D. Laing's writings range from books on social theory to verse, as well as numerous articles and reviews in scientific journals and the popular press. His publications are: The Divided Self, Self and Others, Interpersonal Perception (with H. Phillipson and A. Robin Lee), Reason and Violence (introduced by Jean-Paul Sartre), Sanity, Madness and the Family (with A. Esterson), The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise, Knots, The Politics of the Family, The Facts of Life, Do You Love Me?, Conversations with Children, Sonnets, The Voice of Experience and Wisdom, Madness and Folly.
R.D. Laing died in 1989. Anthony Clare, writing in the Guardian, said of him: "His major achievement was that he dragged the isolated and neglected inner world of the severely psychotic individual out of the back ward of the large gloomy mental hospital and on to the front pages of influential newspapers, journals and literary magazines... Everyone in contemporary psychiatry owes something to R.D. Laing."
EVEN facts become fictions without adequate ways of seeing 'the facts'. Read the first page Browse Sample Pages
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Customer Reviews
Some people have never experienced passion, for example, and so may regard love as something purely physical. Others may have done so and matured emotionally having then sought and acquired an extensive vocabulary they share in common with everyone else which they use to communicate their experience.
Your maturity and knowledge act as a brake on how much you will understand, however, the book's content is not subjective.
Laing's view is that WE exist within our little culture - or as he puts it a straight jacket of conformity - and like anyone living and working within an abnormal system or environment are prone to errors. Laings view is that it's the systems we live in that are the problem, and not us. 96% of the time I expect he's right.
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.
And do you know, for all the accusations of self-indulgent anti-conformism, Laing is just about the most lucid, compassionate, rational and pragmatic philosopher of psychiatry imaginable. Once he gets going.
His main thesis also benefits from being devastatingly simple: If you want to know the best way to treat someone who's 'gone mad' ask someone who's 'been mad'. If you want to get better, allow yourself to go through the process of being unwell. If, as a culture, you want to be able to deal with your own mental spaces, give it a context with which it can be explored.
Of course even in 2009 this is still largely unrealised stuff. Psychotherapy has perhaps become somewhat more 'client-orientated', non-judgemental. We dont accept the dogmatic extremism of behaviourism quite like we used to, and can now acknowledge our private spaces, to some limited extent, once more.
Although this is all pretty meagre 'progress' from where we started out. We still treat mentally ill patients much the same as well did before, still erroneously refer to them as being 'ill', and in mainstream academia physicalism looks set to bring the spectre of behaviourism back to life all over again.
It's all abit depressing, and other than Szasz you do wonder where the much needed voices of descent have gone. Perhaps it's because as Laing suggests: the interior life is just something we're fundmanetally uncomfortable with as a culture. How often for instance do you talk about your dreams with your friends? Even amongst close relatives refering to your internal dramas in a public setting can still be regarded as 'socially deviant'.
There's something about 'experience' that continues to bug us. Is it too unquantifiable to satisfy our occidental addiction for charts and statistics? Possibly. Although i expect you could point to any number of social/political causes for our failure to engage with ourselves. In mean time however, you cant do much worse than picking up this book and having a wee think for yourself.
The proto-Irvine Welsh ramble at the end is pretty good as well.
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