Rd Laing Quotes

Life is a sexually transmitted disease and the mortality rate is one hundred percent.

Whether life is worth living depends on whether there is love in life.

There is a great deal of pain in life and perhaps the only pain that can be avoided is the pain that comes from trying to avoid pain.

Insanity -- a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world.

Schizophrenia cannot be understood without understanding despair.

They are playing a game. They are playing at not playing a game. If I show them I see they are, I shall break the rules and they will punish me. I must play their game, of not seeing I see the game

Pain in this life is not avoidable, but the pain we create avoiding pain is avoidable.

We are effectively destroying ourselves by violence masquerading as love.

We live in a moment of history where change is so speeded up that we begin to see the present only when it is already disappearing.

The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one’s mind, is the condition of the normal man. Society highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal. Normal men have killed perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years.

In a world full of danger, to be a potentially seeable object is to be constantly exposed to danger. Self-consciousness, then, may be the apprehensive awareness of oneself as potentially exposed to danger by the simple fact of being visible to others. The obvious defence against such a danger is to make oneself invisible in one way or another.

Human beings seem to have an almost unlimited capacity to deceive themselves, and to deceive themselves into taking their own lies for truth.

we are all murderers and prostitutes – no matter to what culture, society, class, nation one belongs, no matter how normal, moral, or mature, one takes oneself to be.

There are good reasons for being obedient, but being unable to be disobedient is not one of the best reasons.

Attempts to wake before our time are often punished, especially by those who love us most. Because they, bless them, are asleep. They think anyone who wakes up, or who, still asleep, realizes that what is taken to be real is a ‘dream’ is going crazy.

We all live under the constant threat of our own annihilation. Only by the most outrageous violation of ourselves have we achieved our capacity to live in relative adjustment to a civilization apparently driven to its own destruction.

Our 'normal' 'adjusted' state is too often the abdication of ecstasy, the betrayal of our true potentialities.

Perfection is something we should all strive for. It's a duty and a joy to perfect one's nature... The most difficult thing is love. A loveless, driving person that just competes in the rat race is far from perfection in my book.

What we call ‘normal’ is a product of repression, denial, splitting, projection, introjection and other forms of destructive action on experience. It is radically estranged from the structure of being. The more one sees this, the more senseless it is to continue with generalized descriptions of supposedly specifically schizoid, schizophrenic, hysterical ‘mechanisms.’ There are forms of alienation that are relatively strange to statistically ‘normal’ forms of alienation. The ‘normally’ alienated person, by reason of the fact that he acts more or less like everyone else, is taken to be sane. Other forms of alienation that are out of step with the prevailing state of alienation are those that are labeled by the ‘formal’ majority as bad or mad.

Truth is literally that which is without secrecy, what discloses itself without a veil.

The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one's mind, is the condition of the normal man.

The Lotus opens. Movement from earth, through water, from fire to air. Out and in beyond life and death now, beyond inner and outer, sense and non-sense, meaning and futility, male and female, being and non-being, Light and darkness, void and full. Beyond all duality, or non-duality, beyond and beyond. Disincarnation. I breathe again.

What we call 'normal' is a product of repression, denial, splitting, projection, introjection and other forms of destructive action on experience.

This last possibility [of developing psychosis] is aways present if the individual begins to identify himself too exclusively with that part of him which feels unembodied.

Jack falls in love with Jill’s image of Jack, taking it to be himself.

What an interesting finger let me suck it. It's not an interesting finger take it away.

We all know from our personal experience that we can be ourselves only in and through our world and there is a sense in which 'our' world will die with us although 'the' world will go on without us.

If I could turn you on, if I could drive you out of your wretched mind, if I could tell you I would let you know.

Life is a sexually transmitted disease.

Even facts become fictions without adequate ways of seeing "the facts". We do not need theories so much as the experience that is the source of the theory. We are not satisfied with faith, in the sense of an implausible hypothesis irrationally held: we demand to experience the "evidence".

I am not fond of the word psychological. There is no such thing as the psychological. Let us say that one can improve the biography of the person. JEAN-PAUL SARTRE

A little girl of seventeen in a mental hospital told me she was terrified because the Atom Bomb was inside her. That is a delusion. 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 many of the people on whom the label 'psychotic' is fixed.

He had all along felt that he was, in his own words (which incidentally are also Heidegger's), 'on the fringe of being', with only one foot in life and with no right even to that. He felt that he was not really alive and that anyway he was of no value and had hardly the right to the pretension of having life.

The term schizoid refers to an individual the totality of whose experience is split in two main ways: in the first place, there is a rent in his relation with his world and, in the second, there is a disruption of his relation with himself. Such a person is not able to experience himself 'together with' others or 'at home in' the world, but, on the contrary, he experiences himself in despairing aloneness and isolation; moreover, he does not experience himself as a complete person but rather as 'split' in various ways, perhaps as a mind more or less tenuously linked to a body, as two or more selves, and so on.

How dare you have fun when Christ died on the cross for you! Was he having fun?

If the blind must lead the blind, it is as well that the leader knows he is.

But if my conviction is a knife, the blade is a mirror I must face myself in as I raise it. Who could I be, if I were one of them? How beautiful? How bad? And how secure? Maybe I, too, could be safe, veiled within layers of frivolity and boredom and beauty.

This writing is not exempt. It remains like all writing an absurd and revolting effort to make an impression on a world that will remain as unmoved as it is avid. If I could turn you on, if I could drive you out of your wretched mind, if I could tell you, I would let you know.

What we call ‘normal’ is a product of repression, denial, splitting, projection, introjection and other forms of destructive action on experience (see below). It is radically estranged from the structure of being.

The reason I suggest that one speaks of a false-self system is that the 'personality', false self, mask, 'front', or persona that such individuals wear may consist in an amalgam of various part-selves, none of which is so fully developed as to have a comprehensive 'personality' of its own.

YOU You are that song that plays rarely on the radio, But when it does I have to sing it out loud… You are the water that formed a puddle on a rainy day,that I played in, When I was only eight years old. You are the first snowfall of the season, And the reason I like the morning... You’re a single seashell that washed up onto the shore. You are my set of old medals Hidden deep in a drawer… You are the sun, the moon, the stars, and all the planets. You are the first breath of a baby just born. Eres una dandelion que encuentro, I pull, make a wish, then blow. You are the sunrise that I tried to paint after I woke up in Eilat. You give the nights its meaning… to dream, while others just sleep. You are my 3rd grade valentine, Read, frayed and loved a thousand times. Eres perfección envuelto en humildad… Eres oro, plata, y diamantes… Eres mi querido viejito Pooh, que nunca lo abandonare. You are my first time driving my brother’s Impala, When I was just fourteen. You are the name hidden deep inside my name… And I’m the fingers interlaced with yours. Eres el PS: I love you at the end la carta, Y yo soy el PS: I love you too. Somos el principio, el medio y la ultima palabra De mi libro final. Eternamente nosotros, nosotros, nosotros… Porque nosotros siempre es mejor Que solamente… yo… YOU

The girl was not specifically religious; [...] yet although her faith was nameless her way of living was somehow an affirmation of life rather than a negation of it.

The scientific method is based on tampering with what would be happening if we were doing nothing to it.

It seems also that the preferred method of attack on the other is based on the same principle as the attack felt to be implicit in the other's relationship to oneself. Thus, the man who is frightened of his own subjectivity being swamped, impinged upon, or congealed by the other is frequently to be found attempting to swamp, to impinge upon, or to kill the other person's subjectivity.

One may see his behaviour as 'signs' of a 'disease'; one may see his behaviour as expressive of his existence. The existential-phenomenological construction is an inference about the way the other is feeling and acting [...] The clinical psychiatrist, wishing to be more 'scientific' or 'objective', may propose to confine himself to the 'objectively' observable behaviour of the patient before him. The simplest reply to this is that it is impossible. To see 'signs' of 'disease' is not to see neutrally. Nor is it neutral to see a smile as contractions of the circumoral muscles.

The cases described in this section (The Fear of Being) may seem extreme, but I have become convinced that they are not as uncommon as one would think. Beneath the seemingly rational exterior of our lives is a fear of insanity. We dare not question the values by which we live or rebel against the roles we play for fear of putting our sanity into doubt. We are like the inmates of a mental institution who must accept its inhumanity and insensitivity as caring and knowledgeableness if they hope to be regarded as sane enough to leave. The question who is sane and who is crazy was the theme of the novel One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest. The question, what is sanity? was clearly asked in the play Equus. The idea that much of what we do is insane and that if we want to be sane, we must let ourselves go crazy has been strongly advanced by R.D. Laing. In the preface to the Pelican edition of his book The Divided Self, Laing writes: "In the context of our present pervasive madness that we call normality, sanity, freedom, all of our frames of reference are ambiguous and equivocal." And in the same preface: "Thus I would wish to emphasize that our 'normal' 'adjusted' state is too often the abdication of ecstasy, the betrayal of our true potentialities; that many of us are only too successful in acquiring a false self to adapt to false realities." Wilhelm Reich had a somewhat similar view of present-day human behavior. Thus Reich says, "Homo normalis blocks off entirely the perception of basic orgonotic functioning by means of rigid armoring; in the schizophrenic, on the other hand, the armoring practically breaks down and thus the biosystem is flooded with deep experiences from the biophysical core with which it cannot cope." The "deep experiences" to which Reich refers are the pleasurable streaming sensations associated with intense excitation that is mainly sexual in nature. The schizophrenic cannot cope with these sensations because his body is too contracted to tolerate the charge. Unable to "block" the excitation or reduce it as a neurotic can, and unable to "stand" the charge, the schizophrenic is literally "driven crazy." But the neurotic does not escape so easily either. He avoids insanity by blocking the excitation, that is, by reducing it to a point where there is no danger of explosion, or bursting. In effect the neurotic undergoes a psychological castration. However, the potential for explosive release is still present in his body, although it is rigidly guarded as if it were a bomb. The neurotic is on guard against himself, terrified to let go of his defenses and allow his feelings free expression. Having become, as Reich calls him, "homo normalis," having bartered his freedom and ecstasy for the security of being "well adjusted," he sees the alternative as "crazy." And in a sense he is right. Without going "crazy," without becoming "mad," so mad that he could kill, it is impossible to give up the defenses that protect him in the same way that a mental institution protects its inmates from self-destruction and the destruction of others.

I, for instance, regard any particular man as finite, as one who has had a beginning and who will have an end. He has been born, and he is going to die. In the meantime, he has a body that roots him to this time and this place.

Since the self, in maintaining its isolation and detachment does not commit itself to a creative relationship with the other and is preoccupied with the figures of phantasies, thought, memories, etc. (imagos), which cannot be directly observable by or directly expressed to others, anything (in a sense) is possible. Whatever failures or successes come the way of the false-self system, the self is able to remain uncommitted and undefined. In phantasy, the self can be anyone, anywhere, do anything, have everything. It is thus omnipotent and completely free - but only in phantasy. Once it commits itself to any real project it suffers the agonies of humiliation - not necessarily for any failure, but simply because it has to subject itself to necessity and contingency. It is omnipotent and free only in phantasy. The more this phantastic omnipotence and freedom are indulged, the more weak, helpless, and fettered it becomes in actuality. The illusion of omnipotence and freedom can be sustained only within the magic circle of its own shut-upness in phantasy. And in order that this attitude be not dissipated by the slightest intrusion of reality, phantasy and reality have to be kept apart.

The group, whether We or You or Them, is not a new individual or organism or hyperorganism on the social scene; it has no agency of its own, it has no consciousness of its own. Yet we may shed our own blood and the blood of others for this bloodless presence.

The more aware of our feelings, the more competent we are likely to be in restraining them when necessary, and the more easily will we loosen such restraint when circumstances no longer seem to require it. Also in this way we will not need to use up any more energy than necessary. The release of pent-up feelings almost always seems to be refreshing and energizing, so long as they do not explode into destructive conduct which we later have good reason to regret.

Sanity today appears to rest very largely on a capacity to adapt to the external world—the interpersonal world, and the realm of human collectivities. As this external human world is almost completely and totally estranged from the inner, any personal direct awareness of the inner world already has grave risks. But since society, without knowing it, is starvingfor the inner, the demands on people to evoke it in a "safe" way, in a way that need not be taken seriously, etc., is tremendous—while the ambivalence is equally intense. Small wonder that the list of artists, in say the last 150 years, who have become shipwrecked on these reefs is so long...

the schizophrenic ceases to be schizophrenic when he meets someone by whom he feels understood. When this happens most of the bizarrerie which is taken as the ‘signs’ of the ‘disease’ simply evaporates.

The greatest psychopathologist has been Freud. Freud was a hero. He descended to the “Underworld” and met there stark terrors. He carried with him his theory as a Medusa's head which turned these terrors to stone. We who follow Freud have the benefit of the knowledge he brought back with him and conveyed to us. He survived. We must see if we now can survive without using a theory that is in some measure an instrument of defense.

Many people used to believe that angels moved the stars. It now appears that they do not. As a result of this and like revelations, many people do not now believe in angels. Many people used to believe that the ‘seat’ of the soul was somewhere in the brain. Since brains began to be opened up frequently, no one has seen ‘the soul’. As a result of this and like revelations, many people do not now believe in the soul. Who could suppose that angels move the stars, or be so superstitious as to suppose that because one cannot see one’s soul at the end of a microscope it does not exist?

For such a patient it would probably be a complete non sequitur to attempt to kill his self, by cutting his throat, since his self and his throat may be felt to bear only a tenuous and remote relationship to each other, sufficiently remote for what happens to the one to have little bearing on the other.

One is inside then outside what one has been inside One feels empty because there is nothing inside oneself One tries to get inside oneself that inside of the outside that one was once inside once one tries to get oneself inside what one is outside: to eat and be eaten to have the outside inside and to be inside the outside

The anti-psychiatrists held various, sometimes conflicting views but one particular line of reasoning is attributable to all of them—they all pitched their arguments against the power of the psychiatric establishment. They argued that the psychiatric diagnosis is scientifically meaningless. It is a way of labeling undesirable behaviour, under the guise of medical intervention. Those who are diagnosed ill are subjected to treatment which is a violation of human rights and dignity. The situation amounts to psychiatry having a mandate to declare some citizens unfit to live in an ‘ordinary’ community. It claims to cure but the supposed beneficiaries of that cure are often held in hospitals against their will. Within a structure like this it is impossible to understand the real nature of mental suffering and it is just as impossible to develop a coherent system of help.

If the formation is itself off course, then the man who is really to get "on course" must leave the formation.

Only experience is evident. Experience is the only evidence. Psychology is the logos of experience. Psychology is the structure of the evidence and hence psychology is the science of sciences.

Even when the [schizophrenic] patient is striving to tell us, in as clear and straightforward a way as he knows how, the nature of his anxieties and his experiences, structured as they are in a radically different way from ours, the speech content is necessarily difficult to follow. Moreover, the formal elements of speech are in themselves ordered in unusual ways, and these formal peculiarities seem, at least to some extent, to be the reflection in language of the alternative ordering of his experience, with splits in it where we take coherence for granted, and the running together (confusion) of elements that we keep apart.

[...] our 'normal' 'adjusted' state is too often the abdication of ecstasy, the betrayal of our true potentialities, that many of us are only too successful in acquiring a false self to adapt to false realities.

We have all been processed on Procrustean beds. At least some of us have managed to hate what they have made of us. Inevitably we see the other as the reflection of the occasion of our own self-division. The others have become installed in our hearts, and we call them ourselves. Each person, not being himself either to himself or the other, just as the other is not himself to himself or to us, in being another for another neither recognizes himself in the other, nor the other in himself. Hence being at least a double absence, haunted by the ghost of his own murdered self, no wonder modern man is addicted to other persons, and the more addicted, the less satisfied, the more lonely.

Our sanity is not true sanity, a sensitive person, pushed by an unhealthy environment, escapes into another world so as not to deal with the disconnectedness and horror of the consensual reality. R.D. LAING, The Politics of Experience

A man without a mask’ is indeed very rare. One even doubts the possibility of such a man. Everyone in some measure wears a mask, and there are many things we do not put ourselves into fully. In ‘ordinary’ life it seems hardly possible for it to be otherwise. The false self of the schizoid individual differs, however, in certain important respects from the mask worn by the ‘normal’ person, and also from the false front that is characteristically maintained by the hysteric.

When I certify someone insane, I am not equivocating when I write that he is of unsound mind, may be dangerous to himself and others, and requires care and attention in a mental hospital. However, at the same time, I am also aware that, in my opinion, there are other people who are regarded as sane, whose minds are as radically unsound, who may be equally or more dangerous to themselves and others and whom society does not regard as psychotic and fit persons to be in a madhouse.

Death isn’t the end of a life, but the division of it. When someone dies, their soul scatters into all the things they’ve ever given away. Love. Bruises. Gifts. You struggle to piece together what’s left—even the things that hurt —just to feel haunted.

If you had actually screwed me it would have wrecked everything. It would have convinced me that you were only interested in pleasure with my animal body and that you didn't really care about the part that was a person. It would have meant that you were using me like a woman when I really wasn't one and needed a lot of help to grow into one. It would have meant you could only see my body and couldn't see the real me which was still a little girl. The real me would have been up on the ceiling watching you do things with my body. You would have seemed content to let the real me die. When you feed a girl, you make her feel that both her body and her self are wanted. This helps her get joined together. When you screw her she can feel that her body is separate and dead. People can screw dead bodies, but they never feed them.

We can put no trust in princes, popes, politicians, scholars, or scientists, our worst enemy or our best friend. With the greatest precautions, we may put trust in a source that is much deeper than our egos-if we can trust ourselves to have found it, or rather, to have been found by it

Freud insisted that our civilization is a repressive one. There is a conflict between the demands of conformity and the demands of our instinctive energies, explicitly sexual. Freud could see no easy resolution of this antagonism, and he came to believe that in our time the possibility of simple natural love between human beings had already been abolished.

Under the heading of "defense mechanisms,” psychoanalysis describes a number of ways in which a person becomes alienated from himself. For example, repression, denial, splitting, projection, introjection. These "mechanisms" are often described in psychoanalytic terms as themselves "unconscious,” that is, the person himself appears to be unaware that he is doing this to himself. Even when a person develops sufficient insight to see that "splitting", for example, is going on, he usually experiences this splitting as indeed a mechanism, an impersonal process, so to speak, which has taken over and which he can observe but cannot control or stop. There is thus some phenomenological validity in referring to such "defenses" by the term "mechanism.” But we must not stop there. They have this mechanical quality because the person as he experiences himself is dissociated from them. He appears to himself and to others to suffer from them. They seem to be processes he undergoes, and as such he experiences himself as a patient, with a particular psychopathology. But this is so only from the perspective of his own alienated experience. As he becomes de-alienated he is able first of all to become aware of them, if he has not already done so, and then to take the second, even more crucial, step of progressively realizing that these are things he does or has done to himself. Process becomes converted back to praxis, the patient becomes an agent.

Personal relatedness can exist only between beings who are separate but who are not isolates. We are not isolates and we are not parts of the same physical body. Here we have the paradox, the potentially tragic paradox, that our relatedness to others is an essential aspect of our being, as is our separateness, but any particular person is not a necessary part of our being.

As I lose myself in the heart of certain children, I have lost myself in the sea many times. Ignorant of the water I go seeking a death full of light to consume me. — Federico García Lorca, from “Gacela De La Huida (Garcela Of The Flight),” The Selected Poems of Federico García Lorca. Trans. Stephen Spender and J. L. Gili. (New Directions; unknown edition May 17, 2005) Originally published December 3rd 1915.

All groups operate by means of phantasy. The type of experience a group gives us is one of the main reasons, if not for some people the only reason, for being in a group. What do people want to get from the experience of being in a particular set of human collectivities? The close-knit groups that occur in some families and other groupings are bound together by the need to find pseudo-real experience that can be found only through the modality of phantasy. This means that the family is not experienced as the modality of phantasy but as ‘reality’. However, ‘reality’ in this sense is not a modality, but a quality attachable to any modality. If a family member has a tenable position within the family phantasy system, his call to leave the system in any sense is likely only to come from outside the phantasy system. We vary in readiness, and in desire, to emerge from the unconscious phantasy systems we take to be our realities. As long as we are in apparently tenable positions, we find every reason not to suppose that we are in a false sense of reality or unreality, security or insecurity, identity or lack of identity. A false social sense of reality entails, among other things, phantasy unrecognized as such. If [someone] begins to wake up from the [group] phantasy system, he can only be classified as mad or bad by [that group] since to them their phantasy is reality, and what is not their phantasy is not real.

All that you can see is not me,' he says to himself. But only in and through all that we do see can he be anyone (in reality). If these actions are not his real self, he is irreal; wholly symbolical and equivocal; a purely virtual, potential, imaginary person, a 'mythical' man; nothing 'really'. If, then, he once stops pretending to be what he is not, and steps out as the person he has come to be, he emerges as Christ, or as a ghost, but not as a man: by existing with no body, he is no-body.

His whole life has been torn between his desire to reveal himself and his desire to conceal himself. [...] We have our secrets and our needs to confess. We may remember how, in childhood, adults at first were able to look right through us, and into us, and what an accomplishment it was when we, in fear and trembling, could tell our first lie, and make, for ourselves, the discovery that we are irredeemably alone in certain respects, and know that within the territory of ourselves there can be only our footprints.

[...] if you are sitting opposite me, I can see you as another person like myself; without you changing or doing anything differently, I can now see you as a complex physical chemical system, perhaps with its own idiosyncrasies but chemical none the less for that; seen in this way, you are no longer a person but an organism [...]. There is no dualism in the sense of the coexistence of two different essences or substances there in the object, psyche and soma; there are two different experiential Gestalts: person and organism.

Have a Caesar, and Keep Your Passage Honeymoon Fresh’ was emblazoned across a large billboard advertising Caesarean births.  Many people arriving in Los Angeles in 1972 would have thought no more about it; they might not have even realised what was being advertised.  For R.D. Laing, in the midst of a grueling lecture tour, it was a perfect example of the crazy world we live in.  It was worse than the five-star hotel with plastic grass, in a different league from the plastic Buddha converted into a lampshade, more horrible than de-homogenised milk, more threatening than an armed policeman. ​Such matters affected Ronnie to the core.  He cried over less.  He was painfully sensitive, and had an empathy with the bewildered and downtrodden; an intellectual awareness that set him apart from others.  But Ronnie’s distinguishing feature was his heartfelt desire to do something about what he perceived to be the injustices of the world.  Despite his many faults Ronnie maintained his defiant personality until his last breath.

When you feed a girl, you make her feel that both her body and her self are wanted. When you screw her she can feel that her body is separate and dead. People can screw dead bodies, but they never feed them.

Hatred is gained as much by good works as by evil.” -Niccolo Macchiavelli, The Prince “Everyone has his own idea of good and evil and must choose to follow the good and fight evil as he conceives them. That would be enough to make the world a better place.” - Pope Francis, 2013, Interview by La Repubblica's founder, Eugenio Scalfari

After lots of talk and not much action, mainly because there was hardly any information around on how to deal with drug problems, Peter arranged an appointment for Syd with the eminent psychiatrist R.D. Laing. I think Roger drove Syd up to North London for the consultation, but Syd refused to go through with it, so Laing didn’t have much to go on. But he did make one challenging observation: yes, Syd might be disturbed, or even mad. But maybe it was the rest of us who were causing the problem, by pursuing our desire to succeed, and forcing Syd to go along with our ambitions. Maybe Syd was actually surrounded by mad people.

Thus, in the relationship that the self has with itself, one finds a second duality developing whereby the inner self splits to have a sado-masochistic relationship with itself. When this happens, the inner self, which has arisen, we suggested, in the first place as a means of clinging to a precarious sense of identity, begins to lose even what identity it had to begin with.

He: Have you read Tolkien? Me: No. He: He's behind a lot of the way young people's minds are working. I can't make head or tail of it. Chief of R&D for a transworld chemical industry (He) holding forth to R.D Laing (Me) about the infiltration of the 'extreme left wing' into American society [28 January 1973].

هرکس باید بتواند در خاطره خود بازپس بنگرد و مطمئن شود که مادری داشته که وی را دوست می‌داشت؛ یعنی همه موجودیت وی و حتی ادرار و کثیف کردن او را. او باید مطمئن شود که مادرش وی را فقط به خاطر خودش دوست داشته، نه به خاطر آنچه او می‌توانست انجام دهد. در غیر این صورت، او احساس می‌کند که حقی برای وجود داشتن ندارد. او احساس می‌کند که هرگز به دنیا نیامده‌است. مهم نیست که در زندگی چه اتفاقی برای این شخص رخ می‌دهد و مهم نیست که او چقدر آسیب می‌بیند؛ او همیشه می‌تواند به این (خاطره) بازپس بنگرد و احساس کند که دوست‌داشتنی بوده‌است. او می‌تواند خود را دوست بدارد و در هم شکسته نشود. اگر او نتواند چنین بازگشتی به گذشته داشته‌باشد، در هم شکسته می‌شود. تو تنها در صورتی می‌توانی درهم‌شکسته شوی که قبلا تکه تکه بوده باشی. تا جایی که خویشتن نوزادی من، هرگز مورد علاقهٔ دیگران نبوده‌است، من تکه تکه بوده‌ام. تو با دوست داشتن من به منزلهٔ یک بچه، مرا به یک کل تبدیل می‌کنی." (نقل از گزارش‌های یک بیمار اسکیزوفرنیک در مرحلهٔ بهبود- خویشتن از هم گسیخته- صص 276 و 277)

LIFE" wHat is tHIs? I tHInk itz n0tHIng n0thIng n0thIng I mEt maNy p30pLe in mY LiFe...buT 0nE daY AccIdentLy G0D haVe sh0wn mE a beAutIfuL m0vemEnt buT I waX n0t awAre ab0uT tHIs dat itZ m0rE pAinFuLL . I Can't eXpLaIn in Few W0rdZ .In sh0rt juS waNa saY L0st mY eVerytHing buT aLL g0ex In vAin.....In 0ther xEnce My Life br0keD mE in unLimItED piceS.....buT wHen these past m0vemEnts runz In mY mInd jus FeeLing huRteD & i can't xpLain dat wat i feeL ...

A man says he is dead but he is alive. But his 'truth' is that he is dead. He expresses it perhaps in the only way common (i.e. the communal) sense allows him. He means that he is 'really' and quite 'literally' dead, not merely symbolically or 'in a sense' or 'as it were', and is seriously bent on communicating his truth. [...] He either is God, or the Devil, or in hell, estranged from God. When someone says he is an unreal man or that he is dead, in all seriousness, expressing in radical terms the stark truth of his existence as he experiences it, that is - insanity. [...] What is required of us? Understand him? [...] As long as we are sane and he is insane, it will remain so. [...] We have to recognize all the time his distinctiveness and differentness, his separateness and loneliness and despair.

When I tell him to look he does not look properly. You there, just look! What is it?What is the matter? Attend; he attends not. I say, what is it, then? Why do you give me no answer? Are you getting impudent again? How can you be so impudent? I'm coming! I'll show you! You don't whore for me. You mustn't be smart either; you're an impudent, lousy fellow, such an impudent, lousy fellow I've never met with. Is he beginning again? You understand nothing at all, nothing at all; nothing at all does he understand. If you follow now, he won't follow, will not follow. Are you getting still more impudent? Are you getting impudent still more? How they attend, they do attend,' and so on. At the end, he scolds in quite inarticulate sounds.

[...] such an impudent, shameless, miserable, lousy fellow I've never met with.

A most curious phenomenon of the personality, [...] is that in which the individual seems to be the vehicle of a personality that is not his own. Someone else's personality seems to 'possess' him and to be finding expression through his words and actions, whereas the individual's own personality is temporarily 'lost' or 'gone'. This phenomenon is one of the most important in occasioning disruption in the sense of one's own identity when it occurs unwanted and compulsively. [...] The way in which the individual's self and personality is profoundly modified even to the point of threatened loss of his or her own identity and sense of reality by engulfment by such an alien sub-identity [Ontological insecurity].

It was the Gnostics, during Christianity’s early centuries, who first proposed that man could live in paradise “while still in the flesh.” Condemned as a heresy in every church council from then until now, the Gnostic viewpoint has never quite died out. Even Time magazine stated, a few years ago, that it was the most important idea in the modern world, underlying such tendencies as socialism, communism, anarchism and even liberalism. Even more, it permeates all the utopian heresies that have separated out from orthodox modern psychiatry – Reich and his Orgone, Brown and Marcuse with their prophecy of future societies that will exist without the repression of Eros, R.D. Laing’s theory of a mental state as far superior to normalcy as normalcy is to paranoia, the joyous hopes of the Gestaltists and sensitivity trainers, and the whole Human Potential Movement.

I read R.D. Laing, I read Victor Frankl. Anything by Ken Kesey or Peter Matthiessen, Gary Snyder, Jack Kerouac, Alan Ginsberg, R. Crumb, Bob Dylan. These sacred texts are passed from one hand to another like relics of a religious past or harbingers of a new faith.

FROM NOW, DHARMICALLY, SPIRITUALLY, OFFICIALLY, FORMALLY - AS PER THE COSMIC LAW OF KAILASA, PARAMASHIVA WILL BE MANIFESTING AS 293RD JAGADGURU MAHA SANNIDHANAM SRI LA SRI BHAGWAN NITHYANANDA PARAMASHIVA JNANASAMBANDHA DESIKA PARAMACHARYA SWAMIGAL AS A LIVING REPRESENTATIVE THROUGH THIS CONTINUOUS, UNBROKEN GURU SISHYA PARAMPARA FROM PARAMASHIVA - WHO MANIFESTED AS IRAIYANAR SUNDERESA PERUMAN.

The behaviour of the patient is to some extent a function of the behaviour of the psychiatrist in the same behavioural field. The standard psychiatric patient is a function of the standard psychiatrist, and of the standard mental hospital.

R.D. Laing’s wise pronouncement: “The only pain that can be avoided is the pain that comes from trying to avoid unavoidable pain.

Paul Watzlavik, among others, has performed classic experiments in which totally sane people will begin to behave with all the irrationality of hospitalized paranoids or schizophrenics — just because they have been lied to in a calculated and systematic way. This sort of “disinformation” matrix is so typical of many aspects of our society (e.g., advertising and organized religion, as well as government) that some psychiatrists, such as R.D. Laing, claim it is the principal cause of psychotic breakdowns. When the politics of lying becomes normal, paranoia and alienation become the “normality” of the day.

¿Qué puede llevar a los padres aprivarse de sueño, sexo, amigos, tiempo propio y básicamente cualquier otroplacer de la vida para satisfacer las demandas de un pequeño ser necesitado,incontinente y con frecuencia exasperantemente escandaloso?

We came as one and left as many. We came with nothing and left with everything.

What is this? This is a maze I’ve failed once before, yet reentered willingly; I’m determined to reach the center of it this time. But what path do I take? Do I integrate, or do I defy? Whichever path, I can’t afford to be intimidated this early on.

Better to drown as myself than to breathe the air of someone else’s life and drown all the same.

Normal men have killed perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years. — R.D. Laing

El cambio interno es una decisión. Por suertes de la vida, a veces ese cambio es impulsado por un ente externo, pero siempre es una decisión propia.