R. D. Laing > Quotes

“The tremendous social realities of our times are ghosts, spectres of the murdered gods and our own humanity returned to haunt and destroy us.
The Negroes, the Jews, the Reds. Them. The texture of the fabric of these socially shared hallucinations is what we call reality, and our collusive madness is what we call sanity.”
― R. D. Laing, THE POLITICS OF EXPERIENCE

“Let us call schizophrenia a successful attempt not to adapt to pseudo social realities. s ths also an objective fact? Schizophrenia is a failure of ego functioning. Is this a neutralist definition? But what is, or who s, the 'ego'? In order to get back to what the ego is, to what actual reality it most nearly relates to, we have to desegregate it, de-depersonalize it, de-extrapolate, de-abstract, de-objectify, de-reify, and we get back to you and me, to our particular idioms or styles of relating to each other in social context. The ego is by definition an instrument of adaptation, so we are back to all the questions this apparent neutralism is begging. Schizophrenia is a successful avoidance of ego-type adaptation? Schizophrenia is a label affixed by some people to others in situations where an interpersonal disjunction of a particular kind s occurring. This is the nearest one can get at the moment to something like an 'objective' statement, so called.”
― R. D. Laing, THE POLITICS OF EXPERIENCE