Laing Quotes

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

I am quite sure that a good number of "cures" of psychotics consist in the fact that the patient has decided, for one reason or other, once more to play at being sane. ~ R.D. Laing

When family relations are no longer harmonious, we have filial children and devoted parents. ~ R.D. Laing

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]. ~ R.D. Laing

Society highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal. ~ R.D. Laing

The being of any group from the point of view of the group members themselves is very curious. If I think of you and him as together with me, and others again as not with me, I have already formed two rudimentary syntheses, namely, We and Them. However, this private act of synthesis is not in itself a group. In order that We come into being as a group, it is necessary not only that I regard, let us say, you and him and me as We, but that you and he also think of us as We. I shall call such an act of experiencing a number of persons as a single collectivity, an act of rudimentary group synthesis. ~ 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

No one has schizophrenia, like having a cold. The patient has not "got" schizophrenia. He is schizophrenic. ~ R.D. Laing

Loneliness, longing, does not mean one has failed, but simply that one is alive. ~ Olivia Laing

Alienation as our present destiny is achieved only by outrageous violence perpetrated by human beings on human beings. ~ R.D. Laing

Physically, Echo Spring is nothing more than a nickname for a liquor cabinet, drawn from the brand of bourbon it contains. ~ Olivia Laing

Speech failures, communication breakdowns, misunderstandings, mishearings, episodes of muteness, stuttering and stammering, word forgetfulness, even the inability to grasp a joke: all these things invoke loneliness, forcing a reminder of the precarious, imperfect means by which we express our interiors to others. They undermine our footing in the social, casting us as outsiders, poor or non-participants. ~ Olivia Laing

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 perce ~ Alexander Lowen

Psychological breakdowns are actually breakthroughs to enlightenment. ~ R.D. Laing

He was thinking about men like his Uncle Ted, a Cornishman to his bones, who lived and would die in St. Mawes, part of the fabric of the place, remembered as long as there were locals, beaming out of fading photographs of the Life Boat on pub walls. When Ted died - and Strike hoped it would be twenty, thirty years hence - they would mourn him as the unknown Barrovian Grammar boy was being mourned: with drink, with tears, but in celebration that he had been given to them. What had dark, hulking Brockbank, child rapist, and fox-haired Laing, wife-torturer, left behind in the towns of their birth? Shudders of relief that they had gone, fear that they had returned, a trail of broken people and bad memories. ~ Robert Galbraith

Loneliness is personal, and it is also political. Loneliness is collective; it is a city. As to how to inhabit it, there are no rules and nor is there any need to feel shame, only to remember that the pursuit of individual happiness does not trump or excuse our obligations to each another. We are in this together, this accumulation of scars, this world of objects, this physical and temporary heaven that so often takes on the countenance of hell. What matters is kindness; what matters is solidarity. What matters is staying alert, staying open, because if we know anything from what has gone before us, it is that the time for feeling will not last. ~ Olivia Laing

I was starting to realise, which isn't to say I was transitioning from one thing to another, but rather that I inhabited a space in the centre, which didn't exist, except there I was. ~ Olivia Laing

The psychiatrist must become a fellow traveler with his patient. ~ R.D. Laing

You can be lonely anywhere, but there is a particular flavour to the loneliness that comes from living in a city, surrounded by millions of people. ~ Olivia Laing

Is sex a cure for loneliness, and if it is, what happens if our body or sexuality is considered deviant or damaged, if we are ill or unblessed with beauty? ~ Olivia 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

What does it feel like to be lonely? It feels like being hungry: like being hungry when everyone around you is readying for a feast. It feels shameful and alarming, and over time these feelings radiate outwards, making the lonely person increasingly isolated, increasingly estranged. It hurts, in the way that feelings do, and it also has physical consequences that take place invisibly, inside the closed compartments of the body. It advances, is what I'm trying to say, cold as ice and clear as glass, enclosing and engulfing. ~ Olivia Laing

Children do not give up their innate imagination, curiosity, dreaminess easily. You have to love them to get them to do that. ~ R.D. Laing

I don't believe the cure for loneliness is meeting someone, not necessarily. I think it's about two things: learning how to befriend yourself and understanding that many of the things that seem to afflict us as individuals are in fact a result of larger forces of stigma and exclusion, which can and should be resisted. ~ Olivia Laing

I don't know if it's a actor thing or just growing as an adult, but the best thing I've learned is that everyone wants to do a great job, and everyone wants you to do a great job, too! ~ Christie Laing

It began to occur to me that the whole story of love might be nothing more than a wicked lie; that simply sleeping beside another body night after night gives no express right of entry to the interior world of their thoughts or dreams;that we are separate in the end whatever contrary illusions we may cherish; and that this miserable truth might as well be faced, since it will be dinned into one, like it or not by the failings of those we hold dear. I wasn't so bitter now. I'd begun to emerge into a sense of satisfaction with my not, but it would be a long time before I trusted someone, for I'd seen how essentially unknowable even the best loved might prove to be. ~ Olivia Laing

In my downtime, I love eating. It's pretty much my favorite hobby. Discovering new restaurants and revisiting consistent favorites is one of my top things to do when not filming. ~ Christie Laing

I wanted very much not to be where I was. In fact part of the trouble seemed to be that where I was wasn't anywhere at all. My life felt empty and unreal and I was embarassed about its thinness, the way one might be embarassed about wearing a stained or threadbare piece of clothing. I felt like I was in danger of vanishing, though at the same time the feelings I had were so raw and overwhleming that I often wished I could find a way of losing myself altogether, perhaps for a few months, until the intensity diminished. ~ Olivia Laing

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. ~ R.D. Laing

We have to realize that we are as deeply afraid to live and to love as we are to die. ~ R.D. Laing

What we call 'normal' [sane] is a product of repression, denial, splitting, projection, introjection and other forms of destructive action on our experience" (R. Laing, 1967, p. 27). ~ Michael Guy Thompson

Cities can be lonely places, and in admitting this we see that loneliness doesn't necessarily require physical solitude, but rather an absence or paucity of connection, closeness, kinship: an inability, for one reason or another, to find as much intimacy as is desired. ~ Olivia Laing

I was an ambassador for Betway during the Rugby World Cup and at the moment I'm working as an ambassador for Artemis Investment Management. I also organised the first Rugby Aid in 2015. We had celebrities playing rugby against former England team players and raised a ton of money for Rugby For Heroes [a charity for former servicemen and women]. Only one celeb got crunched quite badly - Jaime Laing from Made in Chelsea ended up with cracked ribs. ~ Mike Tindall

Philosophy does not exist. It is nothing but an hypostatized abstraction. ~ R.D. Laing

Life is a sexually transmitted disease and the mortality rate is one hundred percent. ~ R.D. Laing

Truth is literally that which is without secrecy, what discloses itself without a veil. ~ R.D. Laing

You could go two ways from there. You could keep on marinating in blame, in helpless submission to your circumstance. Or you could stop, just clean stop, and take up the liberating burden of responsibility for yourself. ~ Olivia Laing

The art of writing was independently born in these four regions and I do not think it a coincidence that the advent of the written word was nourished by river water. ~ Olivia Laing

Spend more time to learn the skill of contouring your mind. Spend more time to highlight the features of your mind. The world is filled with beautiful faces what we lack are beautiful minds

©SaccheenLaing2015 ~ Saccheen Laing

If the blind must lead the blind, it is as well
that the leader knows he is. ~ R.D. Laing

But despite its shared nature, language is also dangerous, a potentially isolating enterprise. Not all players are equal. In fact, Wittgenstein was by no means always a successful participant himself, frequently experiencing extreme difficulty in communication and expression. In an essay on fear and public language, the critic Rei Terada describes a scene repeated throughout Wittgenstein's life, in which he would begin to stammer while attempting to address a group of colleagues. Eventually, his stuttering would give way to a tense silence, during which he would struggle mutely with his thoughts, gesticulating all the while with his hands, as if he was still speaking audibly. ~ Olivia Laing

If I don't know I don't know, I think I know. If I don't know I know, I think I don't know. ~ R.D. Laing

There is no possibility of permanent tenancy on this circling planet. It isn't part of the deal. ~ Olivia Laing

[of Nan Goldin] In an afterword to Ballad written in 2012, she declared: 'I decided as a young girl I was going to leave a record of my life and experience that no one could rewrite or deny. ~ Olivia Laing

Moral beauty, so Gerard Manley Hopkins said, is dangerous. If such individuals could take his advice to meet it, then let it alone, things would be easier. But it is just which they can not do. ~ R.D. Laing

What a waste, what a crime to wreck a world so abundantly full of different kinds of flowers. Kathy hated it, hated living at the end of the world, but then she couldn't help but find it interesting, watching people herself included compulsively foul their nest. ~ Olivia Laing

I've read about how alienated we've become, tethered to our devices, leery of real contact; how we are heading for a crisis of intimacy, as our ability to socialise withers and atrophies. But this is like looking through the wrong end of a telescope. We haven't just become alienated because we've subcontracted so many elements of our social and emotional lives to machines. It's no doubt a self-perpetuating cycle, but part of the impetus for inventing as well as buying these things is that contact is difficult, frightening, sometimes intolerably dangerous. ~ Olivia Laing

No doubt it was ridiculous to be so sensitive. But there was something almost agonising about speaking and being misunderstood or found unintelligible, something that got right to the heart of all my fears about aloneness. No one will ever understand you. No one wants to hear what you say. Why can't you fit in, why do you have to stick out so much? It wasn't hard to see why someone in this position might come to mistrust language, doubting its ability to bridge the gap between bodies, traumatised by the revealed gulf, the potentially lethal abyss that lurks beneath each carefully proferred sentence. Dumbness in this context might be a way of evading hurt, dodging the pain of failed communication by refusing to participate in it at all. That's how I explained my growing silence, anyway; as an aversion akin to someone wishing to avoid a repeated electric shock. ~ Olivia Laing

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

Obama. Kathy was becoming obsessed with the numbness, the way the news cycle was making her incapable of action, a beached somnolent whale. No one could put anything together, that was the problem. She had recently read an article that listed all the reasons why monarch butterflies were dying, before equations were too difficult, you knew intellectually, but you never really saw the consequences, since they tended to impact other poorer people in other poorer places. There is no away to throw things to didn't quite work as an axiom if you were a species that depended so stubbornly on the evidence of its eyes. ~ Olivia Laing

The city reveals itself as a set of cells, a hundred thousand windows, some darkened and some flooded with green or white or golden light. Inside, strangers swim to and fro, attending to the business of their private hours. You can see them, but you can't reach them, and so this commonplace urban phenomenon, available in any city of the world on any night, conveys to even the most social a tremor of loneliness, its uneasy combination of separation and exposure. ~ Olivia Laing

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. ~ R.D. Laing

Schizophrenia is the name for a condition that most psychiatrists ascribe to patients they call schizophrenic. ~ R.D. Laing

From the alienated starting point of our pseudo-sanity, everything is equivocal. Our sanity is not "true" sanity. Their madness is not "true" madness. The madness of our patients is an artifact of the destruction wreaked on them by us, and by them on themselves. ~ R.D. Laing

Our time has been distinguished, more than by anything else, by a mastery, a control, of the external world, and by an almost total forgetfulness of the internal world. If one estimates human evolution from the point of view of knowledge of the external world, then we are in many respects progressing. If our estimate is from the point of view of the internal world, and of oneness of internal and external, then the judgment must be very different. ~ R.D. Laing

Honestly, there isn't anywhere in the world that I can say I would never travel to, given the opportunity. ~ Christie Laing

The universe was a vast machine yesterday, it is a hologram today. Who knows what intellectual rattle we'll be shaking tomorrow. ~ R.D. Laing

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. ~ R.D. Laing

What we take anything to be profoundly affects how we go about describing it, and how we describe something profoundly affects how we go about explaining, accounting for, or understanding what is what we are, in a sense, defining, by our description. ~ R.D. Laing

In many ways, the internet made me feel safe. I liked the contact I got from it: the small accumulation of positive regard, the favoriting on Twitter, the Facebook likes, the little devices designed and coded for maintaining attention and boosting client egos. ~ Olivia Laing

Ten years ago, maybe even five, it was possible to ignore atrocities, to believe that these things happened somewhere else, in a different order of reality from your own. Now, perhaps because of the internet, it was like the blind spot had got very small, and motional like a marble. You couldn't rely on it. You could go on holiday but you knew corpses washed up there, if not now then then, or later. ~ Olivia Laing

I was working, but I didn't have anything like enough to do, and the bad times came in the evenings, when I went back to my room, sat on the couch and watched the world outside me going on through glass, a light bulb at a time. ~ Olivia Laing

So much of the pain of loneliness is to do with concealment, with feeling compelled to hide vulnerability, to tuck ugliness away, to cover up scars as if they are literally repulsive. But why hide? What's so shameful about wanting, about desire, about having failed to achieve satisfaction, about experiencing unhappiness? Why this need to constantly inhabit peak states, or to be comfortably sealed inside a unit of two, turned inward from the world at large? ~ Olivia Laing

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. ~ R.D. Laing

I'm ridiculous to feel ridiculous when I'm not. ~ R.D. Laing

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. ~ R.D. Laing

Beauty is almost no longer possible if it is not a lie. ~ R.D. Laing

If I do not know that I do not know, I think I know.
If I do not know that I know, I think I do not know. ~ R.D. Laing

A lot of the time I'm in the present, and I'm thinking about the past or scheming about the future and missing every present moment, instead of actually partaking of the sacrament of every present moment. ~ R.D. Laing

If you have passion for what you do, the company you keep, the life you live, it will be reflected in whatever you create. Passion is like that; it springs out, jumps, unpredictable and unplanned, into everything we touch. If it doesn't, others know. Passion can't be faked and it can't be manufactured. Which is why it is so priceless. ~ R.D. Laing

Later, as he sat on his balcony eating the dog, Dr Robert Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within this huge apartment building during the previous three months. ~ J.G. Ballard

The family's function is to repress Eros; to induce a false consciousness of security; to deny death by avoiding life; to cut off transcendence; to believe in God, not to experience the Void; to create, in short, one-dimensional man; to promote respect, conformity, obedience. . . ~ R.D. Laing

Pain in this life is not avoidable, but the pain we create avoiding pain is avoidable. ~ R.D. Laing

There are kinds of solitude that provide a respite from loneliness, a holiday if not a cure. ~ Olivia Laing

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. ~ R.D. Laing

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. ~ R.D. Laing

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. ~ R.D. Laing

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. ~ R.D. Laing

All these people talk about [Vivian Maier's] hoarding, the pack-rat way she went through life. Watching, I couldn't help but feel their reactions were at least partly about money and social status; about who has the right to ownership and what happens when people exceed the number of possessions that their circumstance and standing would ordinarily allow. I don't know about you but if I was asked to put everything I own in a small room in someone else's house, I might well look like a hoarder. Although neither extreme poverty nor wealth makes one immune to craving an excess of possessions, it's worth asking of any behaviour presented as weird or freakish whether the boundary being transgressed is class, not sanity at all. ~ Olivia Laing

There are sights too beautiful to swallow. They stay on the rim of the eye; it cannot contain them. ~ Olivia Laing

Many of these men and women who claim to be kings and queens only dress for the role. Behind the exterior is a low priced character.

©SaccheenLaing2015 ~ Saccheen Laing

We live equally out of our bodies and out of our minds. ~ R.D. Laing

Any experience of reality is indescribable! ~ R.D. Laing

He loved the energy of the place, though he barely ever visited without getting shoved around or having his pockets picked. The slam of the city, the assault of neon and electric light, the roiling mass of people, made up of mixed elements: sailors, tourists, cops, hookers, hustlers and dealers. He wandered through the crowds, fascinated; a skinny boy with big teeth and glasses, his ribs sticking out. At the same time he was drawn to quieter, more inward pursuits. He liked to draw, liked going to the movies on his own or wandering round the dioramas in the Natural History Museum; the dusty smell, the long unpopulated corridors. ~ Olivia Laing

What did I want? What was I looking for? What was I doing there, hour after hour? Contradictory things. I wanted to know what was going on. I wanted to be stimulated. I wanted to be in contact and I wanted to retain my privacy, my private space. ~ Olivia Laing

The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice. And because we fail to notice that we fail to notice, there is little we can do to change; until we notice how failing to notice shapes our thoughts and deeds. ~ R.D. Laing

Whether life is worth living depends on whether there is love in life. ~ R.D. Laing

Love is the world, pain is the world. ~ Olivia Laing

The brotherhood of man is evoked by particular men according to their circumstances. But it seldom extends to all men. In the name of our freedom and our brotherhood we are prepared to blow up the other half of mankind and to be blown up in our turn. ~ R.D. Laing

Before one goes through the gate one may not be aware there is a gate One may think there is a gate to go through and look a long time for it without finding it One may find it and it may not open If it opens one may be through it As one goes through it one sees that the gate one went through was the self that went through it no one went through a gate there was no gate to go through no one ever found a gate no one ever realized there was never a gate ~ R.D. Laing

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. ~ R.D. Laing

The individual in the ordinary circumstances of living may feel more unreal than real; in a literal sense, more dead than alive; precariously differentiated from the rest of the world, so that his identity and autonomy are always in question ... He may not possess an over-riding sense of personal consistency or cohesiveness. He may feel more insubstantial than substantial, and unable to assume that the stuff he is made of is genuine, good, valuable. And he may feel his self as partially divorced from his body. ~ R.D. Laing

I cannot experience your experience. You cannot experience my experience. We are both invisible men. ~ R.D. Laing

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. ~ R.D. Laing

Why do you put yourself in unsafe places? Because something in you feels fundamentally devoid of worth. ~ Olivia Laing

The 'data' (given) of research are not so much given as taken out of a constantly elusive matrix of happenings. We should speak of capta rather than data. ~ R.D. Laing

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. ~ R.D. Laing

Strike, who had heard the testimony of Brittany Brockbank and Rhona Laing and many others like them, knew that most women's rapists and killers were not strangers in masks who reached out of the dark space under the stairs. They were the father, the husband, the mother's or the sister's boyfriend ... ~ Robert Galbraith

We must remember that we are living in an age in which the ground is shifting and the foundations are shaking. I cannot answer for other times and places. Perhaps it has always been so. We know it is true today. ~ R.D. Laing

Acting, as a child, I remember being lots of fun. I know it must have been very stressful on my parents, since auditions were unpredictable, and they both worked full time jobs. ~ Christie Laing