R. D. Laing Quotes

Truth is literally that which is without secrecy, what discloses itself without a veil.

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.

I cannot experience your experience. You cannot experience my experience. We are both invisible men. All men are invisible to one another. Experience used to be called The Soul. Experience as invisibility of man to man is at the same time more evident than anything. Only experience is evident. Experience is the only evidence. Psychology is the logos of experience. Psychology is the structure of the evidence, and hence psychology is the science of sciences.

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. From the moment of birth, when the Stone Age baby confronts the twentieth-century mother, the baby is subjected to these forces of violence, called love, as its mother and father, and their parents and their parents before them, have been. These forces are mainly concerned with destroying most of its potentialities, and on the whole this enterprise is successful.

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.

A child born today in the United Kingdom stands a ten times greater chance of being admitted to a mental hospital than to a university … This can be taken as an indication that we are driving our children mad more effectively than we are genuinely educating them. Perhaps it is our way of educating them that is driving them mad.

A most curious phenomenon of the personality, [...] is that in which the individual seems to be the vehicle of a personality that is not his own. Someone else's personality seems to 'possess' him and to be finding expression through his words and actions, whereas the individual's own personality is temporarily 'lost' or 'gone'. This phenomenon is one of the most important in occasioning disruption in the sense of one's own identity when it occurs unwanted and compulsively. [...] The way in which the individual's self and personality is profoundly modified even to the point of threatened loss of his or her own identity and sense of reality by engulfment by such an alien sub-identity [Ontological insecurity].

The cracked mind of the schizophrenic may let in light which does not enter intact minds of many sane people whose minds are closed.

[...] if you are sitting opposite me, I can see you as another person like myself; without you changing or doing anything differently, I can now see you as a complex physical chemical system, perhaps with its own idiosyncrasies but chemical none the less for that; seen in this way, you are no longer a person but an organism [...]. There is no dualism in the sense of the coexistence of two different essences or substances there in the object, psyche and soma; there are two different experiential Gestalts: person and organism.

This writing is not exempt. It remains like all writing an absurd and revolting effort to make an impression on a world that will remain as unmoved as it is avid. 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.

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

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

Life is a sexually transmitted disease.

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.

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.