Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
spiritual, mystical,political!, 7 Jun 2007
The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise was published in 1967, and was such an astonishing success that it transformed R.D. Laing from the darling of the British Left and artistic avant garde into an international icon on a par with Jean-Paul Sartre, Marshall McLuhan or Allen Ginsberg by the end of the decade.
Sadly, the book's great popularity was not a measure of any lasting effectiveness.
Though Laing was celebrated and reviled for this book throughout the 1970s, the substance of his ideas about interpersonal phenomenology, violence and normality, group psychology, schizophrenia, and so on, were grasped dimly, if at all, by most of his younger admirers, many of whom lacked the requisite background to fathom his work, but simply revelled in his anti-authoritarianism and apocalyptic outbursts.
Because of their somewhat heterogeneous nature, the papers that comprise this volume did not integrate the disparate threads of theory and research that had characterised his work thus far. They were - and are - a pretty mixed bag. The question then emerges; why did this book grip the soul of a generation, making Laing a "household name" on both sides of the Atlantic?
One reason was that The Bird of Paradise, a lengthy fragment appended to The Politics of Experience, is a rambling memoir and a rant against medicine, mindless conformity, nuclear armaments and much else besides, and is often interpreted as a product of drug-induced "streams of consciousness" - and this was at the height of the psychedelic era.
Laing flatly denied that this was so, but these denials were ignored by friends and critics alike, contributing mightily to his popularity at the time, and just as surely, to his posthumous neglect (Laing, 1994).
Another reason for the book's popularity was that the burgeoning "counter-culture" and the militant left were becoming increasingly critical of the nuclear family.
Laing's work appealed to people like these (e.g. Poster, 1980). For example, in chapter three of The Politics of Experience, entitled "The Mystification of Experience", Laing characterized the average family as a "mutual protection racket", whose function is....................
........ to repress Eros; to induce a false consciousness of security; to deny death by avoiding life; to cut off transcendence [...] to promote respect, conformity, obedience [...] (and) respect for "respectability" (p. 55).
While railing against the family, Laing attacked a prominent American psychoanalyst named Theodor Lidz, who described schizophrenia as a failure of adaptation. "Adaptation to what?" asked Laing indignantly. "To society? To a world gone mad?"
Despite his shrill tone, Laing was making a valid point.
You cannot be for adaptation to prevailing social norms and claim to be "value-neutral" at the same time, as Theodor Lidz imagined. In fairness to Lidz, perhaps, the idea that you can be both simultaneously was a widespread conceit among mental health workers and social scientists at that time, and Laing was quite right to call attention to it. But Laing's own antinomian view of adaptation, in which normal people trade-in, depth and authenticity in exchange for security and a kind of brittle pseudo-sanity, while less disingenuous, is also somewhat problematic.
Why? Because from a Darwinian standpoint , adaptation is neither good nor bad. It is a purely neutral and a-moral process. It is not "progressive" or "positive". It just is what it is (Gould, 1977). And from a psychological standpoint, adaptation is actually a profoundly ambiguous notion, denoting transformations which may enhance or diminish our humanity, depending on circumstances. Before we leap to any conclusions on this score, we must always specify what we are adapting to, and how we are adapting to it, before we can determine whether "adaptation" is good or bad for our mental health. This book should be read if you wish to further your understanding of the paradox ( confusion) of mind!!
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1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Coming of age, 26 Oct 2007
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.
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6 of 56 people found the following review helpful:
Accident and Emergency Experiences, 14 Jan 2001
If you ever wanted to know what it is like to work in an A&E department read this neo Joycean account
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