R.D. Laing Quotes

Schizophrenic behaviour is a special strategy that a person invents in order to live in an unlivable situation.
R.D. Laing
The psychiatrist must become a fellow traveller with his patient.
R.D. Laing
Schizophrenic behaviour is a special strategy that a person invents in order to live in an unlivable situation.
R.D. Laing
The psychiatrist must become a fellow traveller with his patient.
R.D. Laing
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.
R.D. Laing
When family relations are no longer harmonious we have filial children and devoted parents.
R.D. Laing
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
R.D. Laing
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.
R.D. Laing
Madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be break-through. It is potential liberation and renewal as well as enslavement and existential death.
R.D. Laing
Schizophrenia cannot be understood without understanding despair.
R.D. Laing
We are effectively destroying ourselves by violence masquerading as love.
R.D. Laing
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.
R.D. Laing
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.
R.D. Laing
You don't love me.. Believe me! You don't love anyone. How could you? And no one loves you. How could they? Except me, it's only because I love you that I'm telling you all this. I Love you.. R. D. Laing.
R.D. Laing
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
R.D. Laing
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.
R.D. Laing
What we call 'normal' is a product of repression, denial, splitting, projection, introjection and other forms of destructive action on experience.
R.D. Laing
Pain in this life is not avoidable, but the pain we create avoiding pain is avoidable.
R.D. Laing
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.
R.D. Laing
Life is a sexually transmitted disease and the mortality rate is one hundred percent.
R.D. Laing
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.
R.D. Laing