R. D. Laing Quotes

He had all along felt that he was, in his own words (which incidentally are also Heidegger's), 'on the fringe of being', with only one foot in life and with no right even to that. He felt that he was not really alive and that anyway he was of no value and had hardly the right to the pretension of having life.

Even when the [schizophrenic] patient is striving to tell us, in as clear and straightforward a way as he knows how, the nature of his anxieties and his experiences, structured as they are in a radically different way from ours, the speech content is necessarily difficult to follow. Moreover, the formal elements of speech are in themselves ordered in unusual ways, and these formal peculiarities seem, at least to some extent, to be the reflection in language of the alternative ordering of his experience, with splits in it where we take coherence for granted, and the running together (confusion) of elements that we keep apart.

A man without a mask’ is indeed very rare. One even doubts the possibility of such a man. Everyone in some measure wears a mask, and there are many things we do not put ourselves into fully. In ‘ordinary’ life it seems hardly possible for it to be otherwise. The false self of the schizoid individual differs, however, in certain important respects from the mask worn by the ‘normal’ person, and also from the false front that is characteristically maintained by the hysteric.

I am doing it the it I am doing is the I that is doing it the I that is doing it is the it I am doing it is doing the I that am doing it I am being done by the it I am doing it is doing it

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

"هرکس باید بتواند در خاطره خود بازپس بنگرد و مطمئن شود که مادری داشته که وی را دوست می‌داشت؛ یعنی همه موجودیت وی و حتی ادرار و کثیف کردن او را. او باید مطمئن شود که مادرش وی را فقط به خاطر خودش دوست داشته، نه به خاطر آنچه او می‌توانست انجام دهد. در غیر این صورت، او احساس می‌کند که حقی برای وجود داشتن ندارد. او احساس می‌کند که هرگز به دنیا نیامده‌است.

مهم نیست که در زندگی چه اتفاقی برای این شخص رخ می‌دهد و مهم نیست که او چقدر آسیب می‌بیند؛ او همیشه می‌تواند به این (خاطره) بازپس بنگرد و احساس کند که دوست‌داشتنی بوده‌است. او می‌تواند خود را دوست بدارد و در هم شکسته نشود. اگر او نتواند چنین بازگشتی به گذشته داشته‌باشد، در هم شکسته می‌شود.

تو تنها در صورتی می‌توانی درهم‌شکسته شوی که قبلا تکه تکه بوده باشی. تا جایی که خویشتن نوزادی من، هرگز مورد علاقهٔ دیگران نبوده‌است، من تکه تکه بوده‌ام. تو با دوست داشتن من به منزلهٔ یک بچه، مرا به یک کل تبدیل می‌کنی."

(نقل از گزارش‌های یک بیمار اسکیزوفرنیک در مرحلهٔ بهبود- خویشتن از هم گسیخته- صص 276 و 277)

If you had actually screwed me it would have wrecked everything. It
would have convinced me that you were only interested in pleasure with
my animal body and that you didn't really care about the part that was
a person. It would have meant that you were using me like a woman
when I really wasn't one and needed a lot of help to grow into one. It
would have meant you could only see my body and couldn't see the real
me which was still a little girl. The real me would have been up on the
ceiling watching you do things with my body. You would have seemed
content to let the real me die. When you feed a girl, you make her feel
that both her body and her self are wanted. This helps her get joined
together. When you screw her she can feel that her body is separate and
dead. People can screw dead bodies, but they never feed them.

I'm ridiculous to feel ridiculous when I'm not. You must be laughing at me for feeling you are laughing at me if you are not laughing at me.

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.

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.

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

We have all been processed on Procrustean beds. At least some of us have managed to hate what they have made of us. Inevitably we see the other as the reflection of the occasion of our own self-division. The others have become installed in our hearts, and we call them ourselves. Each person, not being himself either to himself or the other, just as the other is not himself to himself or to us, in being another for another neither recognizes himself in the other, nor the other in himself. Hence being at least a double absence, haunted by the ghost of his own murdered self, no wonder modern man is addicted to other persons, and the more addicted, the less satisfied, the more lonely.

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

What we call ‘normal’ is a product of repression, denial, splitting, projection, introjection and other forms of destructive action on experience (see below). It is radically estranged from the structure of being.

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.