R D 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Few books today are forgivable. Black on canvas, silence on the screen, an empty white sheet of paper are perhaps feasible. ~ 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

Experience is mad when it steps beyond the horizons of our common, that is, our communal sense. ~ R.D. Laing

The truth brings with it a great measure of absolution, always. ~ R.D. Laing

Life is a sexually trasmitted disese. ~ 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

Perhaps God is not dead; perhaps God himself is mad. ~ R.D. Laing

In the society of men the truth resides now less in what things are than in what they are not. Our social realities are so ugly if seen in the light of exiled truth, and beauty is no longer possible if it is not a lie. ~ R.D. Laing

Human beings seem to have an almost unlimited capacity to deceive themselves, and to deceive themselves into taking their own lies for truth. ~ R.D. Laing

The experience and behavior that gets labeled schizophrenic is a special strategy that a person invents in order to live in an unlivable situation. ~ R.D. Laing

True guilt is guilt at the obligation one owes to oneself to be oneself. False guilt is guilt felt at not being what other people feel one ought to be or assume that one is. ~ R.D. Laing

Long before a thermonuclear war can come about, we have had to lay waste our own sanity. We begin with the children. It is imperative to catch them in time. Without the most thorough and rapid brainwashing their dirty minds would see through our dirty tricks. Children are not yet fools, but we shall turn them into imbeciles like ourselves, with high I.Q.s if possible. ~ R.D. Laing

A man who says that men are machines may be a great scientist. A man who says he is a machine is 'depersonalized' in psychiatric jargon. ~ R.D. Laing

A little girl of seventeen in a mental hospital told me she was terrified because the Atom Bomb was inside her. That is a delusion. The statesmen of the world who boast and threaten that they have Doomsday weapons are far more dangerous, and far more estranged from 'reality' than many of the people on whom the label 'psychotic' is fixed. ~ R.D. Laing

If I hazard a guess as to the most endemic, prevalent anxiety among human beings-including fear of death, abandonment, loneliness-nothing is more prevalent than the fear of one another. ~ R.D. Laing

Insanity
a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world. ~ 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 risks.

But since society, without knowing it, is starvingfor the inner, the demands on people to evoke it in a "safe" way, in a way that need not be taken seriously, etc., is tremendous - while the ambivalence is equally intense. Small wonder that the list of artists, in say the last 150 years, who have become shipwrecked on these reefs is so long... ~ R.D. Laing

Doctors have throughout time made fortunes on killing their patients with their cures. The difference in psychiatry is that it is the death of the soul. ~ 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

Conventions are convenient. It is inconvenient to say people are dead when they are alive, or alive when they have been buried, or that the world is crumbling when it is, as everyone can see, there as usual. If all A that does not fit B is ipso facto disqualified, we have to tailor A to shape and size to avoid serious trouble, and not all are equally gifted in this art. ~ R.D. Laing

Creative people who can't help but explore other mental territories are at greater risk, just as someone who climbs a mountain is more at risk than someone who just walks along a village lane. ~ R.D. Laing

Being embodied as such is no insurance against feelings of hopelessness or meaningslessness. Beyond his body, he still has to know who he is. ~ R.D. Laing

What is to be done? We who are still half alive, living in the often fibrillating heartland of a senescent capitalism
can we do more than reflect the decay around and within us? Can we do more than sing our sad and bitter songs of disillusion and defeat? ~ R.D. Laing

Jack falls in love with Jill's image of Jack, taking it to be himself. ~ R.D. Laing

We are effectively destroying ourselves by violence masquerading as love. ~ R.D. Laing

One cannot say everything at once. ~ R.D. Laing

The greatest psychopathologist has been Freud. 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. We who follow Freud have the benefit of the knowledge he brought back with him and conveyed to us. He survived. We must see if we now can survive without using a theory that is in some measure an instrument of defense. ~ R.D. Laing

One may see his behaviour as 'signs' of a 'disease'; one may see his behaviour as expressive of his existence. The existential-phenomenological construction is an inference about the way the other is feeling and acting [...] The clinical psychiatrist, wishing to be more 'scientific' or 'objective', may propose to confine himself to the 'objectively' observable behaviour of the patient before him. The simplest reply to this is that it is impossible. To see 'signs' of 'disease' is not to see neutrally. Nor is it neutral to see a smile as contractions of the circumoral muscles. ~ R.D. Laing

Our civilization represses not only "the instincts", not only sexuality, but any form of transcendence. Among one-dimensional men, it is not surprising that someone with an insistent experience of other dimensions, that he cannot entirely deny or forget, will run the risk either of being destroyed by the others, or of betraying what he knows. ~ R.D. Laing

In order to have the next generation of modems, you would need to pour in even more R&D spending. We came to the conclusion that we're going to have a tough time to really see that we are going to succeed in the modems business. ~ Hans Vestberg

The fact that used cars is our largest category is a good example. We would not have sat in a conference room and said, "Hey, how about used cars?" So what can be learned that is extensible to other companies is to ask what are your customers doing with your products that maybe you didn't anticipate that they would do? How do you think of your customers as your research and development lab, as opposed to having an R&D lab at headquarters? ~ Meg Whitman

40% of what I've done was a mistake. I now call it R&D. ~ Jamie Oliver

Innovation has nothing to do with how many R & D dollars you have. When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at least 100 times more on R & D. It's not about money. It's about the people you have, how you're led, and how much you get it. ~ Steve Jobs

If you are rigorous in your own R&D in whatever your area is, you do your own testing, and you really stress-test the thing that you do, I think that gives you a tremendous amount of inner fortitude when you come up against the monolith. ~ Brian Koppelman

There is no greater country on Earth for entrepreneurship than America. In every category, from the high-tech world of Silicon Valley, where I live, to University R&D labs, to countless Main Street small business owners, Americans are taking risks, embracing new ideas and - most importantly - creating jobs. ~ Eric Ries

The bar staff and croupiers all wore black with the same green triangle logo emblazoned on their shirts, and contact lenses which made their eyes shine an eerie, vibrant green. The bar optics glowed with the same green light, the intensity of which was linked to the music. As the bartender walked away to fetch the drinks, a breakdown in the techno track commenced and the bottles began to palpitate. The bartender's eyes glowed with a hallucinatory felinity that made Mangle feel nervous. ~ R.D. Ronald

F*ck a duck and sh*t on a goldfish cracker! ~ R.D. Cole

Just been poisoned by my gran. Nothing says Christmas better than familicide and anaphylactic shock. ~ R.D. Ronald

Faith is state of mind & Faithfulness is hard to Find. ~ R.D.

Sometimes truths are what we run from, and sometimes they are what we seek. ~ R.D. Ronald

Fair enough, that's what most people look for to begin with, but money can be a sliding scale, the more you have, the more you want, the more you need,' McBlane said as he sharpened the ash on the tip of his cigar into a point against the rim of the ashtray. It gave him the appearance of wielding a dagger as he gestured with his cigar holding hand. ~ R.D. Ronald

Because I rant not, neither rave of what I feel, can you be so shallow as to dream that I feel nothing? ~ R.D. Blackmore

No success or achievement in material terms is worthwhile unless it serves the needs or interests of the country and its people and is achieved by fair and honest means. ~ J.R.D. Tata

A lot of times, the internal R&D doesn't pan out. You go down one route, you find that it doesn't work the way you planned, and you have to switch and go down another one. ~ Brendan Iribe