Laing understands intimately the nature of alienation personal, social and professional and offers an acute sense of the reality of others as beings in the world as intensely sentient as ourselves. Laing is an immensely humorous author who remains equally capable of spelling out the pathos and tragedy that engulfs so many lives. He holds an immense view of human capability, and of our capacity to deal with the immensity within which we find ourselves.
It is clear that many of the reflections offered in this collection have been inspired by Laings own experience with LSD. They offer a clarifying entry into difficult worlds and of ways of experiencing that can barely be articulated. Laing has skilfully related his insights to both the lived world of those deemed mad, and to the excesses of a civilisation that is itself alienated from its own humanity.
Laing will be long remembered for his insight into the relational rather than genetic dimensions of schizophrenia, for his understanding that madness can be the inevitable expression of an existential impasse created by relation binds and familial collusions. This is a difficult notion that is more easily dismissed than carefully examined. Laing will also be remembered for articulating the notion that madness may also represent a transient mental state that can, with sensitive guidance and support, be resolved and transformed into a deeper understanding of ones place in the world.
VDS, Kallista Revised, Our alienation goes to the roots. The realization of this is the essential springboard for any serious reflection on any aspect of present inter-human life. Viewed from different perspectives, construed in different ways and expressed in different idioms, this realization unites men as diverse as Marx, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger, Tillich and Sartre. We are bemused and crazed creatures, strangers to our true selves, to one another, and to the spiritual and material world - mad, even, from an ideal standpoint we can glimpse but not adopt.
We are born into a world where alienation awaits us. We are potentially men, but are in an alienated state, and this state is not simply a natural system. Alienation as our present destiny is achieved only by outrageous violence perpetrated by human beings on human beings. We can see other peoples behaviour, but not their experience. This has led some people to insist that psychology has nothing to do with the other persons experience, but only with his behaviour.
The other persons behaviour is an experience of mine. My behaviour is an experience of the other. The task of social phenomenology is to relate my experience of the others behaviour to the others experience of my behaviour. Its study is the relation between experience and experience: its true field is inter-experience. It is concerned withn the relation between my experience of you and your experience of me.
That is, with inter-experience, It is concerned with your behaviour and my behaviour as I experience it, and your behaviour and my behaviour as you experience it. Without it the whole structure of our theory and practice must collapse. My experience is not inside my head. My experience of this room is out there in the room.
To say that my experience is intra-psychic is to presuppose that there is a psyche that my experience is in. My psyche is my experience, my experience is my psyche. We can derive the main determinants of our individual and social behaviour from external exigencies. All these views are partial vistas and partial concepts. Theoretically one needs a spiral of expanding and contracting schemata that enable us to move freely and without discontinuity from varying degrees of abstraction to greater or lesser degrees of concreteness.
Theory is the articulated vision of experience. This book begins and ends with the person. When two or more persons are in relation, the behaviour of each towards the other is mediated by the experience by each of the other, and the experience of each is mediated by the behaviour of each. Our capacity to think, except in the service of what we are dangerously deluded in supposing is our self-interest, and in conformity with common sense, is pitifully limited: our capacity even to see, hear, touch, taste and smell is so shrouded in veils of mystification that an intensive discipline of unlearning is necessary for anyone before one can begin to experience the world afresh, with innocence, truth, and love.
We are not self-contained monads producing no effects on each other except our reflections. We are both acted upon, changed for good or ill, by other men; and we are agents who act upon others to affect them in different ways.
Each of us is the other to the others. But as we experience the world, so we act, and this principle holds even when action conceals rather than discloses our experience.
We are not able even to think adequately about the behaviour that is at the annihilating edge. But what we think is less than what we know: what we know is less than what we love: what we love is so much less than what there is.
And to that precise extent we are so much less than what we are. Yet if nothing else, each time a new baby is born there is a possibility of reprieve. Each child is a new being, a potential prophet, a new spiritual prince, a new spark of light, precipitated into the outer darkness. Who are we to decide that it is hopeless? Personal action is either predominantly validating, confirming, encouraging, supportive, enhancing, or it is invalidating, disconfirming, discouraging, undermining and constricting.
It can be creative or destructive. In a world where the normal condition is one of alienation, most personal action must be destructive both of ones own experience and of that of the other. The element of negation is in every relationship and every experience of relationship. The distinction between the absence of relationships, and the experience of every relationship as an absence, is the division between loneliness and a perpetual solitude, between provisional hope or hopelessness and a permanent despair.
The part I feel I play in generating this state of affairs determines what I feel I can or should do about it. These words are not harmless and innocent verbal arabesques, except in the professional philosophism of decadence.
We are afraid to approach the fathomless and bottomless groundlessness of everything. There's nothing to be afraid of. The ultimate reassurance, and the ultimate terror. I cannot say what cannot be said, but sounds can make us listen to the silence.
Within the confines of language it is possible to indicate when the dots must begin. But in using a word, a letter, a sound, OM, one cannot put a sound to soundlessness, or name the unnameable.
The silence of the preformation expressed in and through language, cannot be expressed by language. But language can be used to convey what it cannot say - by its interstices, by its emptiness and lapses, by the latticework of words, syntax, sound and meanings.
The modulations of pitch and volume delineate the form precisely by not filling in the spaces between the lines. But it is a grave mistake to mistake the lines for the pattern, or the pattern for that which it is patterning.
Nevertheless, it is very easy to lose ones way at any stage, and especially when one is nearest. They are bridgeheads into alien territory. They are acts of insurrection. Their source is from the Silence at the centre of each of us. Wherever and whenever such a whorl of patterned sound or space is established in the external world, the power that it contains generates new lines of forces whose effects are felt for centuries. Psychotherapy consists in the paring away of all that stands between us, the props, masks, roles, lies, defences, anxieties, projections and introjections, in short, all the carry-overs from the past, transference and counter-transference, that we use by habit and collusion, wittingly or unwittingly, as our currency for relationships.
He may set out actively to disrupt old patterns of experience and behaviour. He may actively reinforce new ones. One hears now of therapists giving orders, laughing, shouting, crying, even getting up from that sacred chair. Zen, with its emphasis on illumination achieved through the sudden and unexpected, is a growing influence.
Of course such techniques in the hands of a man who has not unremitting concern and respect for the patient can be disastrous. Within its own framework it has no concepts of social collectivities of experience shared or unshared between persons.
This theory has no category of you, as there is in the work of Feuerbach, Buber, Parsons. It has no way of expressing the meeting of I with an other, and of the impact of one person on another. It has no concept of me except as objectified as the ego.
The ego is one part of a mental apparatus. Internal objects are other parts of this system. Another ego is part of a different system or structure. How two mental apparatuses or psychic structures or systems, each with its own constellation of internal objects, can relate to each other remains unexamined.
Within the constructs the theory offers, it is possibly inconceivable. Projection and introjection do not in themselves bridge the gap between persons. We are left with, thehealingproject. We are not concerned with the interaction of two objects, nor with their transactions within a dyadic system; we are not concerned with the communication patterns within a system comprising two computer-like sub-systems that receive and process input, and emit outgoing signals.
Our concern is with two origins of experience in relation. That is only the beginning. As a whole generation of men, we are so estranged from the inner world that there are many arguing that it does not exist; and that even if it does exist, it does not matter. Even if it has some significance, it is not the hard stuff of science, and if it is not, then lets make it hard.
Let it be measured and counted. Quantify the hearts agony and ecstasy in a world which, when the inner world is first discovered, we are liable to find ourselves bereft and derelict.
For without the inner the outer loses its meaning and without the outer the inner loses its substance. We must know about relations and communications. But these disturbed and disturbing patterns of communication reflect the disarray of personal worlds of experience whose repression, denial, splitting, introjection, projection, etc.
From the moment of birth, when the stone-age baby confronts the twentieth-century mother, the baby is subjected to these forces of violence, called love, as its mother and father have been, and their parents and their parents before them. These forces are mainly concerned with destroying most of its potentialities.
This enterprise is on the whole successful. By the time the new human being is fifteen or so, we are left with a being like ourselves. A half-crazed creature, more or less adjusted to a mad world. It is clear that many of the reflections offered in this collection have been inspired by Laings own experience with LSD. They offer a clarifying entry into difficult worlds and of ways of experiencing that can barely be articulated.
Laing has skilfully related his insights to both the lived world of those deemed mad, and to the excesses of a civilisation that is itself alienated from its own humanity. Laing will be long remembered for his insight into the relational rather than genetic dimensions of schizophrenia, for his understanding that madness can be the inevitable expression of an existential impasse created by relation binds and familial collusions.
This is a difficult notion that is more easily dismissed than carefully examined. Laing will also be remembered for articulating the notion that madness may also represent a transient mental state that can, with sensitive guidance and support, be resolved and transformed into a deeper understanding of ones place in the world.
VDS, Kallista Revised, Our alienation goes to the roots. The realization of this is the essential springboard for any serious reflection on any aspect of present inter-human life. Viewed from different perspectives, construed in different ways and expressed in different idioms, this realization unites men as diverse as Marx, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger, Tillich and Sartre. We are bemused and crazed creatures, strangers to our true selves, to one another, and to the spiritual and material world - mad, even, from an ideal standpoint we can glimpse but not adopt.
We are born into a world where alienation awaits us. We are potentially men, but are in an alienated state, and this state is not simply a natural system. Alienation as our present destiny is achieved only by outrageous violence perpetrated by human beings on human beings. We can see other peoples behaviour, but not their experience. This has led some people to insist that psychology has nothing to do with the other persons experience, but only with his behaviour.
The other persons behaviour is an experience of mine. My behaviour is an experience of the other. The task of social phenomenology is to relate my experience of the others behaviour to the others experience of my behaviour. Its study is the relation between experience and experience: its true field is inter-experience. It is concerned withn the relation between my experience of you and your experience of me. That is, with inter-experience, It is concerned with your behaviour and my behaviour as I experience it, and your behaviour and my behaviour as you experience it.
Without it the whole structure of our theory and practice must collapse. My experience is not inside my head. My experience of this room is out there in the room. To say that my experience is intra-psychic is to presuppose that there is a psyche that my experience is in. My psyche is my experience, my experience is my psyche.
We can derive the main determinants of our individual and social behaviour from external exigencies. All these views are partial vistas and partial concepts. Does it lift a veil from our eyes? Well, to a certain extent yes, it does. It reveals the power structures in place; from parents, the family, society and the State that enforce that reality. It reveals to us that the reality in which we exist is an imposed one that we are all prisoners within.
But it tells us also that another reality is possible. That another reality can be created. And in that tiny straw to be clutched lies hope not only for the individual but for the whole of mankind. Laing amazon Madness Radio: R.
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