R. D. Laing Quotes

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

We are effectively destroying ourselves by violence masquerading as love. I am a specialist, God help me, in events in inner space and time, in experiences called thoughts, images, reveries, dreams, visions, hallucinations, dreams of memories, memories of dreams, memories of visions, dreams of hallucinations, refractions of refractions of refractions of that original Alpha and Omega of experience and reality, that Reality on whose repression, denial, splitting, projection, falsification, and general desecration and profanation our civilisation as much as anything is based.

Personal relatedness can exist only between beings who are separate but who are not isolates. We are not isolates and we are not parts of the same physical body. 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.

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.

"If the formation is itself off course, then the man who is really to get "on course" must leave the formation."

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.

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.

The scientific method is based on tampering with what would be happening if we were doing nothing to it.

We cannot help but see the person in one way or other and place our constructions or interpretations on "his" behaviour, as soon as we are in a relationship with him.

The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one’s mind, is the condition of the normal man. Society highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal. Normal men have killed perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years.

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].

We can put no trust in princes, popes, politicians, scholars, or scientists, our worst enemy or our
best friend. With the greatest precautions, we may put trust in a source that is much deeper than
our egos-if we can trust ourselves to have found it, or rather, to have been found by it

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.

The behaviour of the patient is to some extent a function of the behaviour of the psychiatrist in the same behavioural field. The standard psychiatric patient is a function of the standard psychiatrist, and of the standard mental hospital.

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.