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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

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
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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
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