THE CRITICAL PSYCHOLOGY OF

R. D. LAING
by
Carl Ratner
Humboldt State College

The works of R. D. Laing and his colleagues must be experienced in order to

be comprehended. No description can capture their depiction of the horror and
forlornness of what it means for so many to be alive in western culture. Nor is it
possible to convey the sense of overwhelming terror that one feels upon reading
any of these volumes. One can only wonder how a man like Laing can function in
daily life with his extraordinary sensitivity to the profound madness which is in
and around the most normal of people. Laing writes about what most of us
protect ourselves from seeing: the relationship between normalcy and madness.
The link is so close that if he did not clarify it for us, it would be nearly
impossible to know which of these he was discussing at any given time.
Perhaps it is because Laing feels so absorbed in the insanity of normal life
that he has formulated an approach to psychology which makes the discipline into
an instrument for further understanding the situation and for pointing a way out
of it. For Laing's phenomenological psychology does what no other psychology
does — it questions the social context in which the individual acts and has
experiences. Laing argues that disorientation for people (both 'normal' and
insane) is a mystery without an understanding of what they are reacting to, and
their confusion will persist if the circumstances of their lives remain unaltered.
Laing maintains throughout his works that if we look to the individual for
the explanation of his disorientation, we will necessarily come up with some
incapacity on his part, which, from a psychiatric point of view, would be a
disease. Given a diseased or maladjusted person, the solution is to cure his
incapacity and return him to being a healthy, i.e., adjusted member of society.
Some investigators seek the source of the incapacity to adjust in the person's
genes; some look at his physio-chemical make-up; some look at (for) unconscious
mechanisms which work on childhood experiences that occurred some twenty or
thirty years away; and some psychologists attend to the inappropriateness of
response and inaccurate stimulus differentiation. All these individualistic notions
take the social context for granted and place the locus of personal failure in the
person. From this perspective, one can cure people but never society, which
remains outside the bounds of inquiry. The individual is regarded as inferior to,
and powerless in the face of, the society at large which looms over him and
controls his fate. It is never explained how, if we are all dominated by 'society',
society is established and directed. The implication is that society runs according
Laing's Psychology 99

to some kind of natural law and that nobody is responsible for what happens.^
And it is to this inert mass that the misguided individual is to be adjusted!
Furthermore, he is to be adjusted by psychologists animated by the purpose of
adjusting him to a world in which individual purposiveness is ruled out. 2
Laing and his colleagues have the view that men very definitely can step
outside the stream of history and alter their own actions. History is made by
people; it is not an inert abstraction standing over them. Accordingly, it can be
evaluated and changed. In Reason and Violence,^ which is an examination of
Sartre's works between 1950 and 1960 (including his monumental Critique of
Dialectical .Reason),Laing and Cooper reiterate Sartre's notion of a project, which
is an individual's choosing what he wants to accomplish from among the
possibilities that exist under present conditions. The situation one finds orieself in
is amenable to modifications in certain directions, and within this context the
individual has the freedom to realize those potentialities which are important to
him. The subject's project depasses the given conditions, which means that
although the subject may restructure the original situation to meet his needs and
desires, he continues to be influenced by the original that he is changing. The old
is simultaneously surpassed and retained in the new, "The project is both negation
and realization: it retains and unveils the depassed which it has negated in its very
movement of depassment." (p. 52). Thus man finds himself circumscribed by
various conditions, however he can act on these to change them. The human
world is indeed matter and yet has a dimension which is more-than-matter. "Man
is characterized above all else by the depassment of a situation because he is able
to do or undo what has been done to him . . . We find this depassment at the root
of what is human." (p. 51).
At certain times man does not attempt to mold the world to suit him but
rather accepts the given and seeks to live within it even though it has not been
made by him and does not express his interests. Here the dialectic between self
and world appears to be broken, and the status quo dominates. The two-way
relationship seems to have become one-dimensionalized. According to Laing, this
is the state of western culture, and this is the nature of 'normal', everyday life.
This is what Laing explores in his writings, and he relates it to what is called
insanity, and to what is called sanity.
I
The above discussion points to the fact that inattention to the purposiveness
of individuals is associated with taking the larger social context for granted, and
that, conversely, recognition of the individual's initiative in making his life is

1. B. F. Skinner is particularly blunt about this, stating that "Behavior is not a

function of a person 'stepping outside the stream of history and altering' his own
actions but a function of differential reinforcement from the culture." Quoted in
T. W. Wann, ed., Behaviorism and Phenomenology, Chicago, p. 102-103.
2. Laing, R. D., "The Obvious", in D. Cooper, To Free a Generation, Collier, p.
27.
3. Laing, and Cooper, D. G., Reason and Violence, London, Tavistock, 1964.
100 TELOS

associated with examining the conditions which he is depassing. For the individual
and the social structure to be taken seriously, they must be seen in terms of each
other. Thus, those in control of a social system - be it the family or the larger
society — find it in their interest to de-individualize and de-humanize the other
members, since the more depersonalized one is, the more impotent his projects
will be and the less he will attempt to depass the status quo. This leaves the social
structure intact and its control unchallenged, which the weakened members seek
some sort of protection for their shrunken souls. If the 'system' is strong enough
and the members weak enough, the latter will seek protection in the system itself
since it is the only strength available. The system can perpetuate its control over
people only if it generates so much anxiety that they come to it for relief. Laing
illustrates this as follows: "A boy of three is held by his mother out of a six-story
window by his neck. His mother says: 'See how much I love you.' The
demonstration being that if she did not love him she would drop him." "This is an
example of extreme normality. The normal way parents get their children to love
them is to terrorize them, to say to them in effect: 'Because I am not dropping
you, because I am not killing you, this shows that I love you, and therefore you
should come for the assuagement of your terror to the person who is generating
the terror that you are seeking to have assuaged.' The above mother is rather
hyper-normal."4
According to Laing, the normal family is dominated by parents who, in
western culture, are themselves terrorized, confused, insecure, bored, lonely, and
hostile as a result of the kinds of experiences they had with their parents, their
bosses, their bankers, their realtors, their teachers, their politicians, their
sergeants, their merchants, their friends, etc. The normal parents are motivated to
keep a tight reign on their children due to a need for security and stability,
something they can be sure of and hold on to. Private life is the only area of
security since interactions with the outside world are so strained. The parents'
goal, consequently, is to have their children validate them in the sense of
providing the strength, encouragement, and certainty that is missing in the
extra-family experiences. In other terms, the parents desire the children to be just
like them, to be extensions of them. Furthermore, if the children are just like
them, the adults' uncertainty, anxiety and hostility will remain hidden since there
will exist no foreign perspective which might conflict with theirs and call it into
doubt.
The parents' need to have agreement with their definition of reality points
up the fact that their conception is valid for them only to the extent that it is
valid for others as well. And repudiation of the conceptualization in anyone
shatters it in the parents as well. "That is to say, for each member of the family,
the family is a shared group presence that exists in so far as each member of the
family has it inside themselves. This helps to explain .. . how each member of the
family requires the other members of the family to keep the same image (image,
introject, internalized group structure) inside themselves, since each person's

4. Laing, R. D., "Family and Individual Structure" in P. Lomas, ed.. The

Predicament of the Family, International Universities Press, pp. 119-120.
Laing's Psychology 101

identity as a member of a family rests on a shared 'family' inside the others, who
by that token, are otherwise spoken of as being in the same family. To be in the
same family, means having the same 'family' inside oneself. "
"The 'family' is then a structure that a parent cannot allow a child to break
down within the child's own self, without feeling his own structure threatened; in
other words, without feeling that he or she is being destroyed."
"This means that the preservation of the 'family' cannot be a purely private
affair. The 'family' has to be felt to be preserved by all its members. Failure or
refusal of one member of the family to preserve the 'family' in himself has
immediate repercussions on the others whose internal family is immediately
threatened, by any dissolution of damage to the internal family of someone else
'in' that 'family'. Conversely, a new aspirant for membership of the family may
present an equally serious threat." 5
Thus, "in actual families and in real life generally, persons attempt to act on
the experience of other persons, in order to preserve their own inner worlds, just
as we know that obsessionals for instance frequently arrange and rearrange the
external world of objects in order to preserve their own inner worlds."^ It is the
techniques used by the parents to act on the experience of their children, as well
as the child's reactions to these, that Laing explores so brilliantly.
Because the parents of the normal family are confused about themselves,
they frequently issue contradictory commands to the child. The problem is not
only that the parents are unaware of the confusion they are generating, but also
that they prevent the child from becoming aware of it. They accomplish this by
subtly cancelling out one of the injunctions, which leaves the child in a position of
being able to deal with only one command, and incapable of dealing with the total
situation. This occurred in the case of the mother who simultaneously generated
terror in her child, and assuaged it. Not admitting the first aspect, there could be
communication only about the second, which meant the child was forced to
ignore part of his perception. Such a situation is termed a 'double bind' because
repressing a portion of one's perception leads to confusion about the nature of
reality, while challenging the parents and bringing up forbidden topics of
conversation (and reality) results in rejection and punishment. Thus, there is no
acceptable solution. The individual is forced into blind acceptance of a
paradoxical situation with no possibility of understanding it, resolving it, or
escaping it. Confusion becomes the norm, and an unrecognized one at that7
A technique that has much in common with double-binding consists of one
person instructing another (non-verbally) that reality is a certain way, rather than
it should be that certain way. For instance, desiring the child to see himself the
way they do, the parents could order him (in various subtle ways) to view himself
in that light. However, "the best i s . . . not to tell him what to be, but to tell him
what he is. Such attributions, in context, are many times more powerful than
orders (or other forms of coercion or persuasion)."8 The value of this form of

5. Ibid., p. 119.
6. Laing, R. D., Self and Others, Pantheon, N. Y., 1969, pp. 125-131.
7. Laing, R. D., Politics of the Family, Toronto,CBC, 1969, p.l 1.
8. Ibid., p . 11.
102 TELOS

communication is that "if one is (this or that), it is not necessary to be told to be

what one has already been 'given to understand' one is." 9 If the child asks, "Why
do you want me to be like that," the parents reply sweetly, "We never asked you
to do that, darling." The child's perception is denied, what he sees doesn't exist.
And, importantly, he is not permitted to discuss what he 'thought' he said. The
victim cannot get an overview of the scene and resolve the differing notions of
reality. Rather, his experience is ruled invalid and he is pressured into accepting
his parents' conception as the only valid definition of reality.
It should be evident that the techniques employed to alter someone's
experience are extremely well disguised. In fact, one of the rules by which
experience is ruled invalid is that there are no rules. Laing describes the model for
this interaction as follows. "Rule A: Don't. Rule A. ].: Rule A does not exist.
Rule A. 2.: Do not discuss the existence of non-existence of Rules A., A. 1., or A.
2 "10 i ^ parent communicates injunctions in an extraordinarily delicate manner,
and then overlays this communication with an injunction that there was no
injunction, and that this second injunction does not exist either.
It is almost impossible for the child to discover the rules by which he's living
since these rules are the kind that "one cannot talk about without breaking the
rule that one should not talk about them." 1 1 Laing says that, "The product
arrived at is the outcome of many rules without which it would not be generated
or maintained, but to admit the rules would be to admit what the rules and
operations are attempting to render non-existent."1^ Performing operations on
our experiences in order to make them come out the way we (or they) want them
to, and then denying these operations, is a common feature of normal life. Laing
describes this in a blistering statement. "The 'normal' product requires that these
operations are themselves denied. We like the food served up elegantly before us:
we do not want to know about the animal factories, the slaughter houses and
what goes on in the kitchen. Our own cities are our animal factories; families,
schools, churches are the slaughter-houses of our children; colleges and other
places are the kitchens. As adults in marriages and business, we eat the
product." 13
Breaking these rules, and the rules against seeing the rules, is met by
deterrents and punishments, "But neither deterrence nor punishment can be
defined as such in words since such a definition would itself be a breach of the
rules against seeing the rules."
"Talking about talking about the rules about the rules about the rules about
the rules, as I am doing, is just possible, if I do not push it too far, or be too
direct. If I push it further, to be safe, I must become more abstract. " 1 4

9. Ibid., p. 41.
10. Ibid., p. 41.
11. Ibid., p. 30.
12. Ibid., pp. 30-31.
13. Ibid., p. 35.
14. Ibid., p. 43.
Laing's Psychology 103

One insane consequence of this deadly game is that, "In order to comply
with the rules, rules have to be broken" 15 since, in complying with the rules (that
say there are no rules) one violates the notion that there are no rules.
Furthermore, the more one obeys the rules, the less he will know what he is
doing, since one of the rules he is obeying is that there are no rules. "By obeying a
rule not to realize he is obeying a rule, he will deny that there is any rule he is
obeying."^ Therefore, one can know about these rules only in violating them. As
Laing says, "Unless we can 'see through' the rules, we can only see through
them.""
In accepting the rules, the child must perform 'operations' on his
experiences in order to make them congruent with the parents'; any expression of
liberty or autonomy must be repressed if the parents' world-view is to be
maintained. The repression takes the following form: "(a) we forget X; (b) we are
unaware that there is an X that we have forgotten; (c) we are unaware that we
have forgotten X; (d) and unaware that we are unaware that we have forgotten we
have forgotten X. Repression is the annihilation not only from memory of, but of
memory of, a part of E (experience), together with, the annihilation of the
experience of the operation. It is a product of at least three operations."
"We forget something. And forget that we have forgotten it. So far as we are
subsequently concerned, there is nothing we have forgotten. It is very
effective."18
Repression entails annihilating that part of experience which is at odds with
how oneself or another would like the experience to be .Consequently, it involves
giving up what is personal, or one's own. It is renouncing one's self.19 Now, since
everybody constitutes himself as the reference point around which events take
place, the individual who abdicates his self (this is a continuing process which is
never completely successful, as we shall see later) is losing his orientation in the
world. In seeking to stabilize himself he adopts various attitudes and actions, one
of which is to look to the parents for support and guidance. To the extent that
this occurs, the person becomes a full and valuable member of the family;
someone who has a stake in maintaining it, and who will resist its break-up. He
accepts the parents' view of things, incorporates it into himself, but localizes its
origin and the responsibility for its existence in them. He denies the responsibility
for holding the views which he now professes. Because the parents are weak,
self-less, confused individuals who have unwittingly looked to some authority for
ideology, they too deny responsibility for their views and actions, frequently
blaming the child for 'forcing' them to behave in certain ways. A situation obtains
where everybody looks to another ('Them') in order to account for themselves.

15. Ibid., p. 42.

16. Ibid., p. 34.
17. Ibid., p. 28.
18. Ibid., p. 28.
19. Laing describes the family context surrounding this as follows: "We indicate
to them (the children) how it is: they take up their positions in the space we
define. They may then choose to become a fragment of their possibilities we
indicate they are." Ibid., p. 12.
104 TELOS

"Now the peculiar thing about Them is that They are created only by each of us
repudiating his own identity. When we have installed Them in our hearts, we are
only a plurality of solitudes in which what each person has in common is his
allocation to the other of the necessity for his own actions. Each person, however,
as other to the other, is the other's necessity. Each denies any internal bond with
the others; each person claims his own inessentiality: 'I just carried out my orders.
If I had not done so, someone else would have.'... In this collection of reciprocal
indifference, or reciprocal inessentiality and solitude, there appears to exist no
freedom. There is conformity to a presence that is everywhere elsewhere. " 2 0
(Emphasis added to first sentence.)
Laing related this description of the family to ethnocentric groups in
general, groups which use 'the Reds', 'The Blacks', 'The Jews' as excuses for their
own actions. Here, as with the family, "The invention of Them creates Us, and We
may need to invent Them to reinvent Ourselves."21 Furthermore, "In the social
cohesion of scandal, gossip, unavowed racial discrimination, the Other is every-
where and nowhere. The Other that governs everyone is everyone in his position,
not of self, but as other. Every self, however, disavows being himself that other
that he is for the Other. The Other is everyone's experience. Each person can do
nothing because of the other. The other is everywhere elsewhere. " 2 2 (Emphasis
added.)
It should be clear that the participants to these groups are oblivious to what
is actually transpiring. Although the group is created and maintained by each one
of us, we all disclaim responsibility. Because I need the group to validate me I will
strive to perpetuate the maneuvers which tie the members together rather than
admit that in my position of other to other I can effect some change in him and
thereby shatter the falseness of our beliefs. I will induce the others to become
indebted to me as to ensure their loyalty, and I will accept the most inhuman
behavior of the other members as a token of some kind of solidarity. I myself also
promise to avoid penetrating beneath the myth of what is going on. Now in the
midst of all this activity I am losing myself since every act is a giving up of my
experience in favor of the validity of another's. However, it is an active
abdication, not a passive one. This induces an entire mentality of looking to and
longing for what one does not have, and despising what belongs to oneself
(advertisers make great use of this psychology, as well as adding to it), while all of
this passes under the guise of stabilizing myself.
In giving up part of himself to join the family (or other group), the
individual is pretending that he is different from what he actually is, since he is
pretending to be an extension of his parents when, in fact,'he is a person in his
own right. 23 At some point it becomes uncomfortable to pretend this any longer,

20. Laing, R. D., Politics of Experience, Pantheon, N.Y., 1967, pp. 55-56.
21. Ibid., p. 61.
22. Ibid., p. 62,
23. Sartre explores this in the section on "Bad Faith" in Being and Nothingness,
and shows that one must be a subject in order to relinquish one's subjectivity to
another. One must have subjectivity in order to give it up. So the very attempt to
make oneself into an object is self-defeating — one is actively trying to do it.
Laing's Psychology 105

since it greatly limits one's freedom and closes one off to a variety of interesting
possibilities. The typical resolution of this discomfort entails putting oneself
deeper into the pretension and making it seem even more real. The child forgets
that he is pretending and becomes what he was pretending to be. He pretends he is
not pretending to be pretending. Pretending that one's original pretence is real is
elusion, and it consists in mistaking reality for a double pretence. "A double
pretence simulates no pretence." 24
After several years' practice, withdrawing (further) into imagination
becomes the standard mode of coping with an alienated and mystified life. To
illustrate: "Jill is married to Jack. She does not want to be married to Jack. She
is frightened to leave Jack. So she stays with Jack but imagines she is not married
to him. Eventually she does not feel married to Jack. So she has to imagine she is.
'I have to remind myself that he is my husband'."2**
"Jill is not entirely gratified by her private phantom relationships and yet is
unable sufficiently to forgo the phantom relationships to make way for the naked
actual one. No 'real' relationship can be trusted not to disappoint by turning out
to be false like everything else. One knows where one is with one's imagination. It
does not let one down."26
To an individual striving to stabilize a floundering self, phantasy is more
satisfying than reality because phantasy at least is one's own, one can be sure of it.
The person who is in the process of losing himself searches for security above all
else, and because reality places demands on him, the less he confronts reality the
more secure he will be. "Jill feels real sexual excitement in imaginary anticipation
of real intercourse, but when it comes to the real thing she experiences once again
no desire and no fulfillment." "It is an attempt to live outside time by living in a
part of time, to live timelessly in the past, or in the future. The present is never
realized."2''
Although this retreating from reality is undertaken as a solution to
confusion, it has rather the opposite effect. "The dilution of what is with what is
not, in this elusive confusion, has the effect not of potentiating either but of
diluting each, and entails some degree of depersonalization and derealization, only
partly recognized. In this case one lives in a peculiar limbo."2** The more one
withdraws from reality the less one knows what's real. Confusion cannot be
attenuated through the means ordinarily employed. "In the search for something
outside time, there is an enervating sense of pointlessness and hopelessness."2^
Speaking about a woman who lived in phantasy, Laing writes, "Perhaps she eluded
the experience of unequivocal frustration, but the price she paid was that
unequivocal gratification eluded her." 3 0

24. Laing, R. D. Self and Others, Pantheon, N. Y., 1969, p. 30.

25. Ibid., p. 32.
26. Ibid., p. 33.
27. Ibid., p. 33.
28. Ibid., p. 34.
29. Ibid., p. 33.
30. Ibid., p. 35.
106 TELOS

Retreating from reality includes isolating oneself from other people.

Complete withdrawal, however, would leave the insecure individual extremely
lonely, so he covers up his separation from others with sham contracts. This can
be seen in the general culture, largely in the form of competition. Laing contends
that competition is a tenuous coming together which masks the underlying
estrangement of the competitors. People involved in the routine of competing
with each other may feel sustained by the interaction with human beings while
the personal contact is almost non-existent. "One of the most tentative forms of
solidarity between us exists when we each want the same thing, but want nothing
from each other. We are united, say by a common desire to get the last seat on the
train, or to get the best bargain at the sale. We might gladly cut each other's
throats; we may nevertheless feel a certain bond between us, a negative unity so to
speak, in that each perceives the other redundant, and each person's
metaperspective shows him that he is redundant for the other. Each as
other-for-the-other is one-too-many. In this case, we share a desire to appropriate
the same common object or objects: food, land, a social position, real or
imagined, but share nothing between ourselves and do not wish to. Two men both
love the same woman, two people both want the same house, two applicants both
want the same job. This common object can thus both separate and unite at the
same time. A key question is whether it can give itself to all, or not. How scarce is
it?"31
In 'normal life', a man can return to the office after an evening of
rough-housing with the kids (and the wife) and feel refreshed by having spent a
night with the family. Since it required the barest minimum of human relatedness,
the self-less man survived another day without exposing himself to reality.
Laing also uses Sartre's discussion of Genet's masturbating to illustrate
pretended sociality which masks individual isolation. Sartre states that in
masturbation two people are phantasized (the masturbator and the person being
'made love to'), yet both are the product of the masturbator who can call them
into being without having to leave the privacy of his own thoughts. The
masturbator can be with someone while being alone (just as less perverted people
can be alone while being with someone). Genet can thereby control his relations
with others; there is no uncertainty at all. He has found the stability he needs plus
companionship.32 There is one difficulty, which is that one's phantasies do affect
one's real life. Laing writes of one young man who "bumped into a girl in the
corridor whom he had just been fucking in the office lavatory, and was so
embarrassed that he had to give up that job." 3 3 It seems that even phantasies
cannot protect one from reality.
Exhibitionism is an alternative mode of engaging on contacts with others
while keeping oneself hidden. A part of the person is exposed but the self is held
in. "The man who does not reveal himself or is not 'seen' by the others when he
does, may turn, in partial despair, to other modes of self-disclosure. The

31. Laing, R. D., Politics of Experience, Pantheon, N. Y., 1967, pp. 61-62.
32. Laing, R. D., Self and Others, Pantheon, N. Y., 1969, pp. 39-41.
33. Ibid., p. 42.
Laing's Psychology 107

exhibitionist shows off his body, or a part of his body, or some highly prized
function or skill trying to overcome that haunting isolation and loneliness of one
who feels his 'real' or 'true' self has never been disclosed to and confirmed by
others. The man who compulsively exhibits his penis substitutes disclosure
through this 'thing' rather than through living. Analysis of such a person can show
that it is not just this thing that he would have others gasp at, but himself, whose
actions are 'weak', 'phoney', 'unreal', and impress no one. He wishes to put this
would-be 'true' self into his penis. But instead of making patent this latent self
and thereby 'intensifying' his being, he holds himself in (inhibits himself) and
holds out (exhibits) his penis." 34
A final form of retaining one's (insecure) identity while participating in
sham personal relations is where an individual colludes with another to get the
other to see him as he sees himself. If this is successful, the person feels his
identity validated. Of course, since collusion is a protection against exposing one's
false notions of himself, insofar as collusion is successful the individual will never
find true fulfillment — he will be entangled in a game of disguise and evasion of
the truth. "Collusion is always clinched when self finds in other that other who
will 'confirm' self in the false self that self is trying to make real, and vice versa.
The ground is then set for prolonged mutual evasion of truth and true fulfillment.
Each has found an other to endorse his own false notion of himself and to give
this appearance a semblance of reality." 35
If the other refuses to collude, self will attempt to instill guilt in him, or
perhaps feel that other is incapable of a 'decent' relationship. Finally, a third
party is always a danger to a two-person collusion since there is a danger that he,
not having a stake in the collusion, may not have any qualms about seeing through
it. This is one reason the 'normal' parents frequently restrict their child's activities
and friendships, and attempt to keep him as close to home as possible. The further
away from home he gets, the more outside influences may break through the
smokescreen relation they have set up with him for their own protection.
When one person feels that his involvement in a relationship with another is
destroying his individuality, he may try to diminish the other's influence over him
rather than pretend the relationship is working out. One attempt consists of
destroying the other in phantasy, another means is withdrawal from the other.
Laing illustrates the latter with an analysis of sexual frigidity. In the case of a
frigid woman who feels dominated and oppressed by her man, her frigidity
prevents him from 'giving her satisfaction'. Thus, he might be able to cause her to
do any number of things, but one way she can retaliate and limit his dominance
over her is to make it impossible for him to cause her to climax. "The impotent,
analogously to the frigid woman, is often determined not give the woman the
satisfaction of satisfying him." 3 6 Destruction in phantasy of the other is also
resorted to when an individual feels that he cannot hold his own in a relationship,
and hence must limit the potency of the other. However, as Laing points out,

34. Ibid., pp. 112-113.

35. Ibid., p. 93.
36. Ibid., p. 69.
108 TELOS

these actions fail to solve the problem, the reason being that one can feel strong
only if he is confirmed by another, whereas these behaviors weaken the other (or
at least are designed to). The individual will thus feel less oriented if the
relationship is maintained with a depersonalized other. A vicious cycle ensues such
that, "The more self destroys other, the more empty self becomes. The more
empty the more envious, the more envious, the more destructive."37
Thus far, all of the attempts to alleviate emptiness and de-individualization
have not only failed, but engrain the person further in confusion and irreality,
making it more difficult to understand and strengthen himself. A spiral begins in
which the individual is sucked further into the depths of mystification which
motivates him to try harder to get out, which drags him further into the morass,
which motivates him even more to escape, etc., etc., etc. Thus we find individuals
clinging even more tenaciously to that which is destroying life. There is no lack of
examples from 'normal', everyday life. Suffice it to recall the My Lai massacre in
which ordinary, 'good', 'god-fearing', American boys systematically murdered
over five hundred Vietnamese women and children simply because they were told
to. This kind of occurrence being almost too terrifying to think about, Laing
presents the results of a laboratory experiment in social psychology which
confirms the existence of this kind of mentality in an astonishing proportion of
'normal' Americans. Stanly Milgran at Yale University contrived a setting where
people thought they were participating in a study testing the effectiveness of
shock as a stimulant to learning. Whenever a 'student' answered a question
incorrectly, the experimental subject was instructed to shock him. If he got the
next question wrong, the voltage was increased, and so on, until the voltage
reached four hundred and fifty volts which was marked 'severe shock'. Twenty-six
out of forty subjects delivered the maximum four hundred and fifty volts, 38 and
only five refused to carry on after three hundred volts were apparently received.
Some of the subjects who continued to the end showed definite signs of conflict
and concern, however they completed the task anyway. Laing comments: "The
conflict that the subjects faced in this experiment was between obeying an
authority they trusted and respected, and doing something they felt to be wrong.
The real-life situation is more horrible. There is, for many, perhaps no conflict at
all. My guess is that most people feel guilty at not doing what they are told, even
though they think it is wrong, and even though they mistrust those who give the
orders. They feel guilty at trusting their own mistrust." 39
A feature of the experiment Laing doesn't include is that some of the
subjects placed the responsibility for what they'd done with the experimenter.
The following was one exchange between an interviewer (who was not the
experimenter) and one of the subjects. "I'd like to ask you a few questions. How
do you feel? I feel all right, but I don't like what happened to that fellow in there

37. Ibid., p. 68.

38. The experiment was rigged, of course, and the student did not actually
receive any shock. However, the subjects thought he was being shocked and
continued anyway.
39. Laing, R. D., "The Obvious", in D. Cooper, To Free a Generation, Collier, p.
32.
Laing's Psychology 109

(the victim). He's been hollering, and we had to keep giving him shocks. I didn't
like that one bit. I mean, he wanted to get out, but he (the experimenter) just
kept going, he kept throwing 450 volts. I didn 't like that.
Who was actually pushing the switch? I was, but he kept going . . .
Why didn't you just disregard what the experimenter said? He said it's got
to go on, the experimenter." 40 (Emphasis added.)
Another aspect of the experiment was that, "When persons who have not
performed in the experiment are provided with a description of the experimental
situation and are asked to predict their own performances, almost all subjects see
themselves as defying the experimenter at some point in the command series.
Moreover, they justify their hypothetical behavior in terms of positive qualities of
character, employing such statements as 'I'm not the kind of person who is willing
to hurt others even for the cause of science'."
"Yet there is a marked discrepancy between this value judgment and the
actual performance of subjects in the laboratory." 41

II

Laing and his colleagues are perhaps best known for their investigations on
schizophrenia, and what they seek is to comprehend why someone living the
'normal' life would break down and become insane. In every piece of his writing
Laing emphasizes that the schizophrenic is comprehensible only if considered in
light of the 'normal' family (and, more generally, in light of the society-at-large) in
which he lives. Laing contends that if this perspective is utilized, schizophrenia
may be understood as an attempt to survive in the midst of an unbearable
situation. Accordingly, madness is not 'in' a person but in a system of
relationships in which the labeled 'patient' participates: schizophrenia, if it means
anything, is a more or less characteristic mode of disturbed group behavior.4^
The potential schizophrenic comes from a family that is hypernormal in the
sense that it embodies to a greater extent the attributes found in the normal
family. The double binds are more frequent, the parents more confused, anxious,
uncaring and oblivious, and the child's life more restricted. Where the normal
child has some minimum degree of freedom, autonomy, and ego, the potentially
schizophrenic child has virtually no experience he can call his own, no sense of
himself as an individual, no orientation by which he can make sense of the world.
He comes to feel that as a person he does not exist, he feels lost. As Laing says,
"The loss of the experience of an area of unqualified privacy, by its
transformation into a quasi-public realm, is often one of the decisive changes
associated with the process of going mad."4"* The child can not cling to his
parents (as the normal child can) because they simply are too unapproachable,
and because their view of reality, being too distorted, confused, and fearful,

40. Milgran, S., "Liberating Effects of Group Pressure", Journal of Personality

and Social Psychology, vol. 1 (1965), pp. 127-134.
41. Ibid.
42. Laing, R. D., Self and Others, Pantheon, N. Y., 1969, p. 21.
43. Ibid., pp. 88-89.
110 TELOS

doesn't provide the security he needs. Consequently, he constructs for himself an

explanatory schema of what the world is like and why it is that way. Laing
emphasizes that this schema is the person's own and that it is different from the
parents'. This rejection of the parents' world-view is threatening to them so they
have him examined by the proper psychiatric authorities who label his world-view
crazy, and the parents (and the proper authorities) are reassured that anyone
differing from their Weltanschauung must be severely disturbed.
Laing devotes Sanity, Madness, and the Family and The Divided Self to
exploring the circumstances surrounding the breakdown and the nature of the
breakdown itself. In the first place, the schizophrenic is attempting to understand
why his 'normal' life was so strained and confused. To reiterate, his existence was
so extremely chaotic that he could not accept it and cover it up the way the
ordinary person could. He was simply forced to escape it, and this entailed
repudiating it. Many of the schizophrenic's statements reveal his attempt at
understanding what his life was like. It is not surprising to find frequent
accusations about the parents' callousness, weakness, and hypocrisy, and about
the estranged quality of life in general. The following interpretation of a
seemingly deranged statement is predicated upon this conceptualization. It is
presented in full because it so clearly exemplified Laing's perfectly sublime
manner of relating the degree of insanity and obtuseness in the 'normal' world. "A
nurse was engaged to look after a somewhat catatonic, hebephrenic schizophrenic
patient. Shortly after they had met, the nurse gave the patient a cup of tea. This
chronically psychotic patient, on taking the tea, said, 'This is the first time in my
life that anyone has even given me a cup of tea.' Subsequent experience with this
patient tended to substantiate the simple truth of this statement.
"It is not so easy for one person to give another a cup of tea. If a lady gives
me a cup of tea, she might be showing off her tea-pot, or her tea-set; she might be
trying to put me in a good mood in order to get something out of me; she may be
trying to get me to like her; she may be wanting me as an ally for her own
purposes against others. . . The action could be a mechanical one in which there is
no recognition of me being given a cup of tea.
"In our tea ceremonial, it is the simplest and most difficult thing in the world
for one person, genuinely being his or her self, to give, in fact and not just in
appearance, another person, realized in his or her own being by the giver, a cup of
tea, really, and not in appearance. This patient is saying that many cups of tea
have passed from other hands to hers in the course of her life, but this
notwithstanding, she has never in her life had a cup of tea really given her."
In separating himself from the 'normal' world, the schizophrenic thus comes
to achieve some insight into the world he has left. However, Laing is quite clear
about the gulf between these insights and sanity: the schizophrenic has been
invalidated for many years and he is confused. Consequently his awareness is
tenuous and uncertain; he does not definitely and firmly confront reality. The
schizophrenic distrusts himself, which is one reason why his perception of reality
has a metaphorical quality: he does not feel sufficiently strong to fully explore
the world, so his awareness of it is vague and partial. Laing's interpretation of the
above statement brings this out, and he feels the same way about what it means
Laing's Psychology 111

when a patient reports believing the walls are talking, people want to poison her,
etc. In virtually every case, these delusions are metaphorical expressions of what is
occurring in reality. In one instance the parents were continually gossiping about
the child, in another they were resentful of her. 44 Rather than directly
acknowledge the gossiping parents, the patient attributed the behavior to the
walls, or, rather than admit the parents' hatred of her, the patient believed that
mysterious others wanted to poison her. As Laing says about patients who have
retreated into their own inner space and time, "They clutch at chimeras. They try
to retain their bearings by compounding their confusion, by projection (putting
the inner on to the outer), and introjection (importing the outer categories into
the inner). They do not know what is happening, and no one is likely to enlighten
them." 4 5
In separating himself from the normal world, the patient constructs a false
self which the world can confront and place demands upon, while the true self is
inside, unexposed to and protected from the unbearable reality. The inner self
disengages itself from the body and is thereby unreachable and invisible. The
schizophrenic solution to deindividualization and depersonalization then is to
withdraw from the circumstances contributing to such a state of existence.
This 'solution' however, resembles those undertaken by 'normal' individuals,
since the attempt is not to find experiences which will confirm and validate one's
identity, but rather to protect oneself from disconfirming, invalidating
experiences. The emphasis is on survival rather than development, and this must
fail since survival entails development. Stagnation is regression. A person must
have experiences with others in order to become himself and know who he is, so
that the individual who covers himself as protection from the other can never be
confirmed or revealed by the other. Consequently, the schizophrenic, like the
normal, becomes more confused as a result of his attempts to avoid confusion. As
Laing says, "Hence, what was designed in the first instance as a guard or barrier to
prevent disruptive impingement on the self, can become the walls of a prison from
which the self cannot escape." 46 "That is to say, the 'true' self, being no longer
anchored to the mortal body, becomes 'phantasized', volitized into a changeable
phantom of the individual's own imagining. By the same token, isolated as is the
self as a defense against the dangers from without which are felt as a threat to its
identity, it loses what precarious identity it already has. Moreover, the withdrawal
from reality results in the 'self's' own impoverishment. Its omnipotence is based
on impotence. Its freedom operates in a vacuum. Its activity is without life. The
self becomes dessicated and dead." 4 '
"The tragic irony is that even finally no anxiety is avoided whereas every
anxiety and all else besides becomes even more tormenting by the infusion into all
experiences in waking life and in dreams of an abiding sense of nothingness and
deadness."

44. Laing, R. D. and A. Esterson, Sanity, Madness and the Family, Basic Books,
N. Y., 1964.
45. Laing, R. D., Politics of Experience, Pantheon, N. Y., 1967, p. 87.
46. Laing, R. D., Divided Self, Penguin, 1960, Md., p. 138.
47. Ibid., p. 141.
112 TELOS

"Thus the point we have already got to is that the self, being transcendent,
empty, omnipotent, free in its own way comes to be anybody in phantasy and
nobody in reality." 48
Laing is explicit about the futility of simply substituting one's own
conception of oneself for the invalidated self resulting from the influence of
another. This is illustrated in the case of John who, in a psychotic state, believed
that he could be anyone he wanted, merely by snapping his fingers. This was
supposed to be an antidote to John's father's attempt to define John's
personality. Thus, originally John thought he was who his father said he was. He
negated this by: 'No, I am who I say I am.' Laing comments that, "True sanity lies
at the other side: the negation of the psychotic negation of the false original
premise. I am not what they say I am, nor what I say I am." 4 9
It should be clear that for Laing, true sanity entails a dialectical relationship
between individuals such that each person is simultaneously 'for-himselP and
'for-others'. One comes to be oneself and know oneself through interaction with
others, yet one must not permit the other to totally constitute oneself: The self
must also participate in constituting itself by picking and choosing from other's
reflections of him, those he wishes to incorporate into his self-image. This means
that the sane individual has an identity he can call his own. It means that he has
an inner time and space which is private, and which he can use as the basis of his
choosing those encounters with the world which he desires to pursue further. Now
it is precisely because the schizophrenic seeks to establish this kind of private
domain that Laing feels psychosis is one path toward sanity, and the beginning of
some awareness of reality. The schizophrenic seeks to live totally in his own.
private realm, and in this respect he will fail to find the sanity that is the only
solution to his confusion. But he at least takes the first timid steps toward
establishing himself as a unique and independent being, which is more than the
'normal' individuals do in their protective actions. This is why Laing states, "The
madness that we encounter in 'patients' is a gross travesty, a mockery, a grotesque
caricature of what the natural healing of that estranged integration we call sanity
might be". 5 0 The sane person, possessing an inner realm of his own, can
voluntarily estrange himself from his day-to-day routines to get a new perspective
on his life and thereby develop and extend himself in new directions. However, he
has the strength and self-control to return from his 'inner voyage', whereas the
schizophrenic doesn't.

HI

"My experience and my action occur in a social field of reciprocal influence

and interaction. I experience myself, identifiable as Ronald Laing by myself and
others, as experienced by and acted upon by others, who refer to that person I

48. Ibid., p. 142.

49. Laing, R. D., Self and Others Pantheon, N. Y., 1969, p. 80.
50. Laing, R. D., Politics of Experience, Pantheon, N. Y., 1967, p. 101.
Laing's Psychology 113

call 'me' as ' y ° u ' or 'him', or grouped together as 'one of us' or 'one of them' or
'one of you'." 5 1
David Cooper expresses the same thought: "What goes on in the reciprocal
relation of a two-person transaction is as follows: I totalize you, but you, in your
reciprocal totalization of me, include my totalization of you, so that my
totalization of you involves a totalization of your totalization of me, and so
on."52
These statements express the fact that for me to have experiences which
reveal to me who and what I am, you must have experiences of who and what I
am, since I see myself (to some extent) through the way you see me. The more
intimately I know you and your experience, the more I know myself. Hence, you
must be willing to experience me and to enter into an intimate relationship with
me if I am to know myself, but you won't be willing if you are like the 'normal'
person. You will impose mediations between us. This means that I cannot be sane,
in the sense of having a confirmed, validated, and clear identity, unless you are —
i.e., unless you have a clear grasp of who you are so that you will not fear
exposing yourself to me in an intimate relationship. And this means that I cannot
be understood in the absence of the social context surrounding me, which was the
opening note of this review. It also points up the fact that to the extent that I
treat you as a non-experiencing object, to that extent I diminish my own
experience of myself and become an object. This has profound implications for
the social scientist since he typically regards his subjects as objects.
According to Laing, virtually every school of psychology neglects personal
experience.53 Behaviorists repudiate experience on 'scientific grounds', i.e., that
they don't know how to get at it with their technology, and Freudians bypass it in
their concern with unconscious material and psychic 'mechanisms'. In any case,
the individual is regarded as relatively passive, and determined by forces over
which he has no control. In this light the human being does not (cannot) strive to
develop himself, nor to achieve self-awareness through intimate relationships, nor
to integrate his experiences into a whole which stabilizes his identity and gives his
life direction and meaning, nor to alter the conditions surrounding him. Laing
questions this: "Why do almost all theories about depersonalization, reification,
splitting, denial, tend themselves to exhibit the symptoms they attempt to
describe? We are left with transactions, but where is the individual? The
individual, but where is the other? Patterns of behavior, but where is the
experience? Information and communication, but where are the pathos and
sympathy, the passion and compassion?"54
According to Laing: "People may be observed to sleep, eat, walk, talk, etc.
in relatively predictable ways. We must not be content with observation of this

51. Ibid., p. 9.
52. Cooper, D., Psychiatry and Anti-Psychiatry, Tavistock, London, p. 7.
53. Laing states, "As a whole, we are a generation of men so estranged from the
inner world that many are arguing that it does not exist; and that even if it does
exist, it does not matter." Politics of Experience, Pantheon, N. Y., 1967, p. 33.
54. Ibid., p. 31.
114 TELOS

kind alone. Observation of behavior must be extended by inference to attributions

about experience. Only when we can begin to do this can we really construct the
experiential-behavioral system that is the human species." 55
Indeed, this is the only approach by which schizophrenia is comprehensible,
since it is clear that even the terribly invalidated pre-schizophrenic, with virtually
no ego at all is capable of finding within himself the wherewithal to repudiate
alienating conditions and begin constructing a world for himself. Obviously he is
not conditioned to do this since the 'reinforcing community' is totally opposed to
his breaking down. There is some experience of his own which serves as the basis
for his creations and his strength. Perhaps Laing's showing us this will encourage
us to act.

55. Ibid., p. 9.

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