The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise

by R.D. Laing

Unorthodox to some, brilliantly original to others, The Politics of Experience goes beyond the usual theories of mental illness & alienation, making a convincing case for the 'madness of morality.'
Introduction
The Politics of Experience
Persons and Experience
The Psychotherapeutic Experience
The Mystification of Experience
Us and Them
The Schizophrenic Experience
Transcendental Experience
A Ten-Day Voyage
The Bird of Paradise

Genres: Psychology, Philosophy, Nonfiction, Sociology, Politics, Psychiatry, Science

156 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1967

About the author

Ronald David Laing was a Scottish psychiatrist who wrote extensively on mental illness – in particular, the subjective experience of psychosis. Laing's views on the causes and treatment of serious mental dysfunction, greatly influenced by existential philosophy, ran counter to the psychiatric orthodoxy of the day by taking the expressed feelings of the individual patient or client as valid descriptions of lived experience rather than simply as symptoms of some separate or underlying disorder.

Laing was associated with the anti-psychiatry movement although he rejected the label.

Reviews

[Fergus, Weaver of Autistic Webs · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you always try to be good nowadays, you run the very real risk of being labelled a weirdo. So says the late good doctor R.D. Laing in this still utterly fresh and groundbreaking expose of the immorality of what now passes as Morality.

So do we trash our ethics?

Not if you’re Laing, you don’t. And being Christian I don’t either.

Now, this was a great example of a total volte-face for Laing, a revolt against the official medical party-line, and it’s exhilarating.

About the time I read this, in the eighties, I made a trip to the hospital to get my meds renewed. The quick trip turned out to be a long wait. Sitting across from me was a lower-level worker from the office, and I nodded hello.

What brings you here, he nonchalantly asked (aiming for a tidbit to channel into the office gossip mill)?

I thought quickly.

I’m here to get something to help me try to relax, I said: I’m headed to Central Ontario for a Supply Logistics course - and it’s gonna be tough as nails. That seemed to appease him, and he returned to his magazine.

You see, since I continually watch my ethical behaviour, I’m against lying. And Laing, when he wrote this, was also sick of the lies that a physician’s bedside manner can lead to.

So he trashed his class act.

He followed his heart - and the compassion which is the core of the code of Aescelapius. He stood up for the helpless victims of their own demons.

Do you know WHY these poor folks are in the mess they find themselves? he berated his fellow physicians.

I’ll tell you, he yelled: it’s because they’re being Good at heart in a Bad world. And THEY DON’T GET NO RESPECT!

You tell ‘em, Ronnie.

Anyway, back to my story: the logistics course was tough, but by paying attention to its principles in the years ahead I learned much that would make my life easier.

When I got back home that spring, I started my management career with the logistician’s credo ringing in my years: for without taking the pains to daily resurrect my innate goodness, the guidelines of Prudence and Probity would have rung hollow.

For though I struggled for the next 25 years against all odds to maintain my workplace integrity, under the duress of my bipolar disorder -

Without a carefully inculcated sense of goodness -

It would have all been quite useless.

So, go ahead, world - trash morality!

I certainly WON'T.

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

What if the "delusions" reported by patients during psychotic episodes were not symptoms of a disease, but valid descriptions of their experiences?

Laing describes schizophrenia as a kind of journey into the inner self, one that is misunderstood by people in the "normal" world and labelled as madness. Why do we misunderstand it? Because we are so alienated from our own inner worlds that we cannot comprehend someone else's experiences there. Indeed, we are so alienated that even the thought of going there scares us, threatens us. So we lock people up and call them crazy.

I don't know nearly enough about schizophrenia to know whether this view of schizophrenia is correct. I am a complete layman. I know that Laing's views have not been accepted by mainstream psychiatry, which has, in the 40 years since he wrote this book, simply gone further down the road of clinical diagnosis which Laing criticised so vehemently.

Still, I was fascinated by his description of psychotic episodes as a kind of misunderstood spiritual journey back to something we've lost. After quoting a lengthy and fascinating first-person account of a psychotic episode by a former sailor called Jesse Watkins, Laing concludes:

"We can no longer assume that such a voyage is an illness that has to be treated... If we can demystify ourselves, we see 'treatment'... as ways of stopping this sequence from occurring. Can we not see that this voyage is not what we need to be cured of, but that it is itself a natural way of healing our own appalling state of alienation called normality?" (emphasis in the original).

Laing uses the analogy of a formation of planes. One plane may be out of formation, and viewed as abnormal, but in fact it may be the formation of planes that is off course and the solitary plane that is going in the right direction. Laing sees society as being off course in major ways, and so individuals are put in a "double bind" - they find themselves subject to so many contradictory forces that in some circumstances a psychic break is the only way to cope. He is scathing about the "normal" person, who is so worldly, has forgotten about childhood and dreams, has no idea of the inner world and consequently is a "shriveled, dessicated fragment of what a person can be." He sees this as contributing to the insane state of society:

"The condition of alienation, 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."

The book is one of those cobbled-together affairs - one chapter was a lecture here, another was an essay there. They've been edited into a whole, but not a particularly coherent one. The ideas in the book are fascinating, and in places, particularly towards the end, the writing was clear and even beautiful. But some parts were tangential or even impenetrable to me. The book's opening chapter, with long explanations of how I do not experience your experience, but I experience you as experiencing, and experience myself as experienced by you, etc., etc., etc., etc., almost put me off. I'm glad I persevered, though. The payoff came later in the book, in the form of fascinating ideas that set me thinking in new ways.

[Esteban del Mal · Rating 3 out of 5]

Psychology as imperialism.

While the writing is at times clunky and some chapters are top-heavy with psycho-analyst speak -- gibberish to the non-specialist -- Liang does string together some powerful stuff at times:

“Madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be breakthrough. It is potentially liberation and renewal as well as enslavement and existential death.”

“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; to con children out of play; to induce a fear of failure; to promote a respect for work; to promote a respect for ‘respectability’.”

Stuff with which he indicts the social structure at large, and psychology in particular.

His thesis is that we are socialized to function in a mad world. No great insight here, but his claim that madness (schizophrenia) is a way for the truly sane to cope, his flirtation with mysticism (citing the Gospel of Thomas, Zen Buddhism, the Tao Te Ching) and rage against duality is comforting to read, although it has been said better and more completely elsewhere. And while he acknowledges the symptoms of alienation, he never seems to make the effort to treat the root disease. But perhaps this is too much to ask of such a short work.

In all, a decent primer. If you are sympathetic to the concepts of the unconscious, the quest and the archetype, I would suggest reading Joseph Campbell, Aldous Huxley (The Perennial Philosophy), Jung and even Nietzsche, among others. If you are of a literary inclination, The Lively Image (Richard Hughes) and Mrs. Dalloway (Virginia Woolf) come to mind.

[Holly Lindquist · Rating 3 out of 5]

Is schizophrenia an understandable response to the unreasonable pressures of a terminally insane society? It's a notion with perennial appeal, one that's been brought up by many, many people (not just this guy). Certainly our modern world is a three-ring circus of demented behavior accepted as "normal". In a world of Honey Boo Boo, Beliebers, drone strikes, and mass government surveillance, the concept of what is "sane" or "normal" may just as well be vacationing off-planet at this point.

However, it's dangerous to enclose something as diverse as schizophrenia in a prefabricated box created specifically for an existential hate letter to modern society. Yes, some people termed as mad may be having a genuine mystical experience.* But many others may have a physical difference in the way their brains are operating.. Not a religious experience, and not something that merely causes distress to friends and family, but significant distress and sometimes danger to the person experiencing the symptoms. Why invalidate an entire illness to make a philosophical statement? And if it IS the fault of our modern society and first world family dynamics, then where does that leave the mad people who existed before our current culture? In third world countries? In indigenous societies? And how would the author explain childhood schizophrenia, which can present very early and in the absence of obvious external stresses?

The good news is that since this book was written, medical scientists have learned a lot more about the biologic and genetic components of schizophrenia. Also, the treatments since Laing's time are considerably less torturous, although there's still vast improvements to be made. It is sometimes true that subtle undercurrents in society can come into crystalline focus through the lens of madness. Paranoid fantasies can scrape at truths the majority aren't aware of. At times, the ramblings of the mad can even anticipate the future in uncanny ways. (Examples: the visions of Philip K. Dick, James Tilly Matthews*.) But every schizophrenic is unique. They shouldn't be generalized and squeezed into someone's personal agenda mailbox. It's really not helpful.

(Giving this book 3 stars, though I can't say I particularly liked it. Never-the-less, 4 stars for bringing up interesting points about the intersections between mystical experience & mental illness.. For the delivery of said points and the associated personality of the writer, 2 stars only. Averages out to 3.)

* Pet peeve: Just because you did a truckload of acid, it does not make you the omniscient director into the world of schizophrenia. They are not the same.

* For a fascinating read on James Tilly Matthews, one of the first officially diagnosed schizophrenics, The Air Loom Gang by Mike Jay is highly recommended.

[Adam · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am having a hard time finding words for this book. It is ostensibly about Psychiatry, and a few sections treat that subject fairly specifically, but the more striking parts of the book seem to have a much more general significance. In particular, chapters 1, 3, and 4 are . . . woah. They are incredibly striking and left me stunned. It fits in a lot with Derrick Jensen themes, although his wording is much more severe and "prophetic" than Jensen's. Particularly, Chapter Four, Us and Them, takes the traditional Anarchist rejection of nations and borders and all that garbage, and applies it in a much wider, more profound sense, bringing it to its logical and very scary conclusion.

Definitely read this, put it on the top of a list or something, go get it, and read it now! It is very short and very worthwhile.

[Fede · Rating 5 out of 5]

R. D. Laing's work appeals to me for its attacks against two cultural strongholds that, due to my personal experience of both, I regard with feelings ranging from unease to overt antipathy: psychotherapy and the family.
Laing being a psychotherapist himself, one can safely say he was neither biased nor unaware of the risks he was taking in attacking such holy cows. Thus he became part of the Anti-psychiatry movement of the early 60s, possibly the one and only attempt at dignifying the theory and practice of psychotherapy, not to mention a source of inspiration for many philosophical currents whose achievements - though apparently under way in Laing's time - are yet to be fully implemented.

After reading his famous essay The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness, which focuses on the double splitting of the self (between inside and outside, and subsequently between 'fake' outer self and 'real' inmer self) that takes place in schizoid and schizophrenic cases, in more or less intense degrees (from psychosis to psychopathology) I had sufficiently made up my mind about Laing's take on several issues; in fact I knew I had finally come across a truly convincing approach to mental illnesses and the social background that engenders them.
Such wider perspective is further analysed in this collection of short essays that brings together lectures and articles from the mid-60s. The result is an uncannily exhaustive text that reads as though its chapters had originally been conceived as parts of a whole. It's a text on alienation that not only captures the atmosphere of an era on the brink of a revolution that never occurred, but first and foremost describes what men have been doing to each other and to themselves ever since.

As a doctor and a thinker, Laing was primarily concerned with the causes of mental illness, whose roots go deep into the alienation we've come to accept as mankind's natural state.
As long as we keep splitting our being between a body and a mind, between an 'outside' and an 'inside' - which is in turn fragmented into a horde of ghosts and demons forever waging war against each other; as long as we build walls and buffer zones preventing our inner experience and our outward behaviour to communicate; as long as we dwell in our own bodies like strangers in a strange land; as long as we allow this to happen to the others and to ourselves, we are bound to live in a schizoid, paranoid, psychotic world of estrangement surrounded by other estranged beings, whose existence we only acknowledge in terms of illusory relationships or (self)destructive clashes.

Due to its role of checkpoint between the individual and the world, the family is the first agent of such alienation, imposing on each and every member its gangster logic of duty, gulit, expectations, manipulative love and emotional blackmailing. It's an enforced debt affecting the self and bringing about all sorts of pathological conditions in the attempt to reshape both the personal and the social identity of the child, in such a way that is deemed ideal or at least acceptable.
Such a surrendering of all that is genuinely human in our being leads to much greater manifestations of alienated behaviour, those cancerous growths in the social organism called ideology, patriotism, racial hatred and religious extremism. The author was indeed in a position to observe the nefarious effects of this body/mind, inner experience/outer behaviour dichotomy: at the time these essays were written (1962-65) the Cold War was still raging in several war zones and minor conflicts all over the world. The 'Us-and-Them' logic of the Iron Curtain era was the obvious outcome of an all-pervading loss of identity, turning the human being into a compliant function of the familial, social, racial and political machineries he'd been forcibly attached to. Such is the modern man's birthright and doom, sense of belonging and existential prison at one and the same time.

Given the dysfunctional way of life we have embraced, it's clear enough that what is at stake is our mental health. Except that it is by escaping rather than accepting alienation that one's condition shifts from the plane of sanity to that of insanity. And, as far as our society and part of the medical establishment are concerned, insanity is a one-way road leading to a place form which there can (must?) be no return.
Just like the other members of the Anti-psychiatry movement (Guattari, Foucault, Cooper, Basaglia) Laing denounces the failure of well-established methods and dogmatic approaches to mental issues, particularly as regards schizophrenia and its diagnosis. The main flaw of the system is that, despite the huge progress made by psychotherapy and psychiatric research, the patient's illness is generally regarded as a given fact whose causes are either physiological or psychological - depending on each therapist's biases and intellectual background - whereas no attention is paid to the 'schizophrenogenic' dynamics to be found in the patient's relationship to his environment. Illness is therefore a reaction, an attempt at either adaptation or escape, to be analysed and dealt with accordingly. The patient is not necessarily 'wrong' once the judgement is no longer based on some pre-established criterion of what is sane and what is not, the pathogenic circumstances/mechanisms are taken into account and the patient's experience is regarded as an essential part of the dialogue rather than the symptom of a disease.

But there's so much hope in these pages, too. Hope in what we all can achieve, change and understand; hope in our capacity to discern between truth and lie, good and bad, right and wrong, based on individual freedom and consciousness, as opposed to being co-opted by a cutthroat system that is the very source of its own evils.
Hope in the future, too: in a time of enlightenment in which schizophrenia and other mental issues will no longer be seen as a total breakdown, but rather explored as a breakthrough, thresholds to a dimension of the self that may, in some cases, lead to an inner world we've lost touch with; a journey to the core of our being, and back.

Some hastily dismiss Laing's 'hipster' attitude as a relic of bygone times; others deplore the author's 'feverish' writing style. In my humble opinion, both definitions are so shallow they aren't even worth being commented on.
Laing's talent as a writer was equal to his skills as a doctor. He gave an essential contribution to the theory and practice of psychotherapy, and this is something each of us might have to thank him for, someday.
One never knows.
That's the moral to be drawn: one never knows. One should learn to shut up and listen once in a while. And, possibly, think.



* this edition comes with the beautiful text "The Bird of Paradise", a short account of Laing's experience with LSD. Visionary, poetic, crazy, marvellous.

[Ricardo Acuña · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best books I have ever read, where Laing exposes the real nature of our social madness. The world in which we live, inevitably leads us to alignment, and make us blind. We can see other people’s behavior, but not their experience. Therefore, the experience of each other are inaccessible, invisible, and interpreted through the observed behavior. Laing says that psychiatrists have paid very little attention to the experience of the patient and the diagnosis, psychotherapy and treatment of madness (schizophrenia) needs a new approach. “There is no such ‘condition’ as ‘schizophrenia’, but the label is a social fact and the social fact a political event”.

Through the entire book, you could find important references to psychologists and philosophers like Sartre and Kierkegaard´s existentialism, and the Freud and Jung´s insights. I enjoy the “Ten day Voyage” last chapter to discover that a “psychotic episode” is not really a madness case, but a significant and transcendent experience that confronts us to our alienated view of the world.

I keep with me a key concept from the Laing´s great book: Insanity is not what we all believe to be. We need to reconsider our understanding of our social reality, self-alienation and the relativity of experience and behavior to diagnose who is insane, and who do not.

[Stephanie · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book starts off very theoretical, but once you get past the beginning it becomes entirely absorbing. It entirely changed my perspective from which to view mental illness, in a good way -- basically, Laing posits that we're all alienated from ourselves in some shape or form; those labelled schizophrenic just express this alienation in forms non-acceptable to mainstream society. His ideas were very liberating for me.

[Viddy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Schizophrenia, in some cases, may be a healthy reaction to an unhealthy situation. Laing views society and the family as positively destructive to its members; that shared, naked experience with another human being is nearly impossible. He claims we connect with others only by forming an Us mentality where a nexus of kinship is formed, but in doing so the nexus necessarily excludes some group of others and calls it Them. By forming these nexuses we create antagonistic relationships with Them and, often as a result of viewing the nexus of Us as an entity in itself, we form antagonisms toward each other in the hopes of maintaining the group of Us. Quickly the group becomes superior to the individuals that compose it and seemingly takes on a life of its own.

So what is the rational choice to an irrational situation? Laing believes schizophrenia sometimes is, and further that psychotherapeutic interventions in attempt to "cure" schizophrenia, more often than not, have the reverse effect of stalling a natural process of recovery. Shock therapy, psychoanalysis, or any form of forcing the patient to exit the interior space where the problem is currently being solved will only hinder recovery. Laing thinks it is sometimes necessary to stand back and allow the schizophrenic to go through the process (however he doesn't give any hint of how you differentiate these *some* from the others who would benefit from therapy).

The first chapter will probably boggle the reader, not because it is difficult to grasp the concepts but because Laing uses the word "experience" so many times in such rapid succession that the word itself becomes devoid of meaning. Say any word twenty times in a row and it starts to sound strange or meaningless. This is essentially what Laing does "I experience you experiencing me experiencing you, and you experience me experiencing you experiencing me, and I experience you experiencing me experiencing you experiencing.... ad infinitum".

The final chapter, Birds of Paradise, is Laing's attempt to portray a schizophrenic voyage deep into the "illness" and back out again, so don't expect it to make much sense. It's more like a poetic autobiographical narrative than anything else. Just remember the egghead is the patient, and he thinks he is dead but is pronounced alive by the doctors and treated by frying the egg. Don't fry the egg.

[Ryan · Rating 5 out of 5]

dear reader,

hello! what weather! welcome to another edition of "small talk" wherein i review a VERY recently published novel by an up-and-coming author! on the docket this week, it's "the politician's experience" by r.d. "swingin' low" laing (you may know his sister, k.d. laing!). ok, let's GO!


REVIEW:

all previous psychiatry is fundamentally flawed.
what is considered "mental illness" is rather a healthy reaction to an oppressive society, and insane standards of living.
existentialism.
psychoses - schizophrenic episodes, in particular - are "growing" experiences, which one must necessarily pass through, and which can have extreme benefit.
if nobody listened to what you said, because they thought you were crazy, wouldn't you start writing on the walls with your own shit too?


VERDICT:

make sure you put your kids on ritalin and prozac! it will really help them develop into whole, well-balanced people!

[Erik Graff · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a short collection which, as I recall, contains the most substantial piece I've seen by Laing about psychedelic drugs. I read the thing in the midst of studying a lot of other work by him and his colleagues in "the antipsychiatry movement" in the context of doing independent study work in the nebulous field of "humanistic psychology" in college. The essay, "The Bird of Paradise", appears to have been written under the influence.

[Liam O'Leary · Rating 5 out of 5]

In content, Laing was a bit like Philip K. Dick was to science fiction. Both write about how alienation leads to dissociation and other alterations in consciousness. Some parts remind me of the darker sentences in VALIS, Ubik or A Scanner Darkly.

In style, Laing was a bit like Nietzsche was to existential philosophy. Both write concise polemics integrating a lot of former theories into a highly stylised, radical and practical summary. Both seem highly readable at first, but are actually more understandable (and perhaps discreditable) with knowledge of the original sources. I think it is important to see this work as a collection of ideas rather than a dogmatic worldview, either interpretation is valid but the latter might discredit the exceptional clarity and style for a book in this field. In this sense, I'd say that Laing is a more insightful read as a secondary source than some of the primary sources he references.

Every sentence here is strong, and there are some really thought-provoking ideas here in The Politics of Experience. The Bird of Paradise is a brilliant and visionary prose poem that is so complicated that it makes me distrust the GoodReads reviews for this book. The Bird of Paradise resonated with me well although I could not explain why so easily. It was like reading unstructured and detailed diary entries of someone during a dark and neurotic period in their life, that had imagery and emotions that seemed familiar but as a narrative and in form was hard to understand. It was, perhaps, as difficult for a 'sane' person to understand an 'insane' person without trying to see the situation of the 'other' person from their own perspective—this understanding without empathy being the main focus for criticism written in The Politics of Experience. Nobody seems to have had any problem grasping everything he has written and forming an opinion on it (ironically often by how well it fits their given 'experience' of sanity). I have no problem saying that this book offers so close a description of 'insanity' that it sometimes induces dread, but at others, confusion insofar as it is understandable and revolutionary.

Highly, highly recommend to people interested in reading a brilliant convergence of psychiatry, sociology and existential philosophy.

[xenia · Rating 3 out of 5]

cute prose poem

oh, and a 100 page preface on intersubjectivity, social construction and existentialism, outlining how schizophrenic behaviours arise as defense mechanisms to disturbing social realities, behaviours which are further exacerbated by the subjugation, imprisonment and control of such persons labelled as schizophrenic, and how insanity in an insane world may be the only sane action left for some, for to lose one's ego but to reach the archetypal void of one's self is the first step towards reintegration of one's alienated inner world with one's alienating outer world, and thus, the illumination necessary for social change

real cute poem tho

[Roberta McDonnell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Even more mindblowing!!

[winnie · Rating 5 out of 5]

ik <3 laing. dit boek trekt (onder andere) 'normale' ervaringen in twijfel en past dit toe op het psychiatrische beeld van schizofrenie. met een vleugje spiritualiteit ^_^

[Edward · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was attracted to Laing’s book because it has been said to be a source of Doris Lessing’s novel, A Briefing for a Decent into Hell, which she denied. Laing’s text is a compilation of reworked articles he published between 1962 and 1965 and center on human perception and its relationship to schizophrenia of society as a whole.

Existential relationships are characterized in terms of experience and behavior within the framework a feedback loop but Laing’s method of presentation seems to be too repetitive and has a tone that smacks of the mystic dialogue of the 70's revolutionary youth movement and Lao Tzu's mindfulness mumbo jumbo. It can leave you feeling that you understand a concept simply because you're only carried along by the cadence of the prose.

There is an element of validity to Laing's thesis that society is insane but it's presented at a superficial level and is cloaked in the radical coffee house banter of the Vietnam era that, at times, has the academic preachiness of a screed. Nonetheless, the text can be more useful in understanding the cultural mindset of that period than it can in helping understand and treat schizophrenia.

The first half of Chapter 4, Us & Them, is understandable in the framework of control theory with feedback loops but the second half veers off into New Left rhetoric with reference to Sartre's Marxist dialectic which can unintelligible in today’s culture. Laing’s articles have their origins within the transition between the Beat and the Hip culture and the influences of Taoism and Herbert Marcuse are clearly visible. Laing's ideas easily dovetail with the early prophets of the drug culture such as Leary and Castaneda.

The Schizophrenic Experience in Chapter 5 is presented from a clinical perspective rather than in New Left/New Age rhetoric of earlier chapters; hence more credible. According to Laing, schizophrenia has its origins in the separation between our inner self bereft of substance, our outer self bereft of meaning (i.e. alienation) and confusing the realities of one with the other. The concepts of We, Them, Us, and the Other presented in earlier chapters helps support Laing’s thesis that it's not really evident whose sane and who is not, viz. The Gadarene Swine Fallacy which seems to have originated by him.

Chapter 6 proceeds into transcendental experience (guided & purposeful) and its similarities to schizophrenia (unguided & terrifying). It is here that we see the outlines of Lessing's novel and his own subtle references to drug induced exploration of the 70s culture. Chapter 7 is a clinical transcription of a recovered schizophrenic patient and, although mundane, is helpful in understanding that a patient can occupy two worlds and can recollect the emotional impact of both.

The final chapter, The Bird of Paradise, is apparently Laing’s articulation of his own drug induced exploration of the schizophrenic state but it seems more like his foray into a new literary form than it being meant to support his thesis. His prose is neither mundane nor clinical but is related to us like a reading of a rambling Ginsberg poem using syntactically correct but meaningless sentences like Chomsky’s, “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.”
In retrospect Lessing clearly articulates her character’s vivid schizophrenic experiences as well as the mundane clinical experiences. The schizophrenic experiences of her patient are lucid and have the “logic” of a dream sequence whereas Laing’s presentation in his Bird of Paradise may sound profound but is meaningless.

[James · Rating 1 out of 5]

‘The sky is blue’ suggests that there is a substantive ‘sky’ that is ‘blue’. This sequence of subject verb object, in which ‘is’ acts as the copula uniting sky and blue, is a nexus of sounds, and syntax, signs and symbols, in which we are fairly completely entangled and which separates us from at the same time as it refers us to that ineffable sky-blue-sky. The sky is blue and blue is not sky, sky is not blue. But in saying ‘the sky is blue’ we say ‘the sky’ ‘is’. The sky exists and it is blue. ‘Is’ serves to unite everything and at the same time ‘is’ is not any of the things that it unites… ‘Is’ is that no-thing whereby all things are.

The relevance of Freud to our time is largely his insight and, to a very considerable extent, his demonstration that the ordinary person is a shrivelled, desiccated fragment of what a person can be.

[Prabodh Sharma · Rating 5 out of 5]

First the quotes...


"Two men sit facing each other and both of them are me. Quietly, meticulously, systematically, they are blowing out each other’s brains, with pistols. They look perfectly intact. Inside devastation."


"Saints may still be kissing lepers. It is high time that the leper kissed the saint."


‘There’s nothing to be afraid of.’ The ultimate reassurance, and the ultimate terror.


"When the ultimate basis of our world is in question, we run to different holes in the ground, we scurry into roles, statuses, identities, interpersonal relations."


"Our social realities are so ugly if seen in the light of exiled truth, and beauty is almost no longer possible if it is not a lie."


"EVEN facts become fictions without adequate ways of seeing ‘the facts’. The choice of syntax and vocabulary are political acts that define and circumscribe the manner in which ‘facts’ are to be experienced."


And now the book itself...


Social phenomenology is the science of own and of others’ experience. It differs from natural sciences as it considers both observer's views of things and how things experience us. The author was a Scottish psychiatrist and describes humans as a experiential behavioral system. He states:


"I see you, and you see me. I experience you, and you experience me. I see your behaviour. You see my behaviour. But I do not and never have and never will see your experience of me. Just as you cannot ‘see’ my experience of you. I do not experience your experience. But I experience you as experiencing. I experience myself as experienced by you."


Human beings relate to each other not simply externally, like two billiard balls, but by the relations of the two worlds of experience that come into play when two people meet. Our behaviour is a function of our experience. We act according to the way we see things. We anticipate the experience of us to others through their behaviour towards us. This leads to unsaid rules of social interaction such as giving gifts (enforced debts) and the fact that you are supposed to like it and reciprocate; projecting on us the anticipated experience of others, "I don't mind my daughter marrying in a lower caste, but what would the society say!" (This creating a scandal network which may be unified by ideas to which no one will admit in his own person); each person claiming his own inessentiality: ‘I just carried out my orders. If I had not done so, someone else would have.’, ‘Why don’t you sign? Everyone else has’, etc. Yet although I can make no difference, I cannot act differently. In this collection of reciprocal indifference, of reciprocal inessentiality and plurality of solitudes, there appears to exist no freedom.


The author says that, "If our experience is destroyed, our behaviour will be destructive. All those people who seek to control the behaviour of large numbers of other people work on the experiences of those other people. Once people can be induced to experience a situation in a similar way, they can be expected to behave in similar ways."


The author presents a scathing account of social conditioning. He says, "We seem to need to share a communal meaning to human existence, to give with others a common sense to the world, to maintain a consensus. Men do not become what by nature they are meant to be, but what society makes them…. generous feelings… are, as it were, shrunk up, seared, violently wrenched, and amputated to fit us for our intercourse with the world, something in the manner that beggars maim and mutilate their children to make them fit for their future situation in life. Education in practice has never been an instrument to free the mind and the spirit of man, but to bind them."


The product of such a brutal fitment is what is considered a normal human being. "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. "


Alduous Huxley in "the doors of perception" had mentioned of his Psychedelic experience under the influence of drug mescaline. Such experiences have been the basis of many religions. Yet, today such experiences are denounced. The author says, "As domains of experience become more alien to us, we need greater and greater open-mindedness even to conceive of their existence. Many of us do not know, or even believe, that every night we enter zones of reality in which we forget our waking life as regularly as we forget our dreams when we awake. The texture of the fabric of these socially shared hallucinations is what we call reality, and our collusive madness is what we call sanity."


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 labelled by the ‘normal’ majority as bad or mad. The author calls schizophrenia a successful attempt not to adapt to pseudo social realities.


The author also discusses the meaning of existence and the limitation of language in describing it. He says,

"in saying ‘the sky is blue’ we say ‘the sky’ ‘is’. The sky exists and it is blue. ‘Is’ serves to unite everything and at the same time ‘is’ is not any of the things that it unites. None of the things that are united by ‘is’ can themselves qualify ‘is’. ‘Is’ is not this, that, or the next, or anything. Yet ‘is’ is the condition of the possibility of all things. ‘Is’ is that no-thing whereby all things are."


Kierkegaard remarked that one will never find consciousness by looking down a microscope at brain cells or anything. The quest and musings on existence and reality of it all continue. This book presents another brilliant perspective on the same.

[Cliff M · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wonderful stuff (and recommended) but a bit of a mish-mash of existential philosophy, the difficulties of traditional psychiatry, and RD Laing’s preferred approaches.

I recommend watching the film “Did you use to be RD Laing” on YouTube to help bring the book to life.

[Greta · Rating 5 out of 5]

6 stars maybe 7

[Alan · Rating 2 out of 5]

What started out as a promising and innovative read has turned out to be a disappointment. While Laing's writing is much clearer than many other psychoanalyst's I've come across, the evidence for his claims is shotty at best. The Politics of Experience is a book that tries to fundamentally tackle the claim that mental illness (particularly schizophrenia) is a natural reaction to an insane human social world. While a part of me would like to believe this - as to do so implies that mental illness is curable without medication - there is simply too much evidence favoring the reality that schizophrenia is genetically inherited. While studies show that carriers have about a 50% chance of getting 'triggered' by real life circumstances, schizophrenia is still primarily a genetic issue. In this, Laing's work, while well intentioned, argues against what I believe is in the best interest of those suffering from schizophrenia. Understandably, asylums in the 60's (when this book was written) were far from pleasant, and in this I give Laing a pass - asylums were perhaps doing more harm than good! Unfortunately, I cannot say I agree with the book's core point. I believe sufferers of schizophrenia need help and social support from trained professionals. Both suicide and depression are strongly correlated with schizophrenia and to believe that schizophrenics would be best off without professional help (from institutions) is naive.

[Bibibii · Rating 5 out of 5]

Igazából már a Beszélgetés gyerekekekkel közben R.D.Laing rajongó lettem. És ez egyre csak erősödik bennem. Nem tudok minden megközelítését, életszemléletét egy az egyben átvenni, de abban biztos vagyok, hogy keresi, kereste a számára leghelyesebbnek tűnő megoldásokat a különböző helyzetekre, a legelképzelhetőbb EMBERI magyarázatokat. Odafordul őszintén, nyitottan és kíváncsian embertárásaihoz. Ez talán a sok-sok okos gondolat közül a(z egyik) legfontosabb.
Szeretnék mindig nyitott maradni az újra, a másra.

Ezer éve, na jó 7 kb., nem kiemelőztem könyvet. Akkor ballagtam el az egyetemről. Ezt most kellett, mert értelme volt, mert késztetésem lett és mert sokszor fel lesz még lapozva.

[Fred Shaw]

My first foray into the work of Laing - left feeling unsettled but profoundly impacted. Mental illness not as a scientific fact but a social prescription. And so, experience is politicised. Those outside the norm are cast away, confined and labelled 'mad'; denied the insight they could provide or even empathy or understanding of being sick in a thoroughly sick world. They lose their autonomy, and eventually, they lose the very essence of what is means to be human. A book that forces you to ask yourself the question: what makes you sane?

[Kata · Rating 3 out of 5]

None of the ideas/points rang as anything new to me, which attests either to my melon-sized ego or to the success of Laing’s philosophy trickling down and forming the foundation of modern psychology. I think it’s the latter.

“There is nothing to be afraid of. The ultimate reassurance, and the ultimate terror.”

“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.”

[Camille · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very difficult read, it speaks to its time, (the 60's). He mixes talk about mental illness with social theory. I had trouble following it. But I think you should give it a shot.

[Osama · Rating 4 out of 5]

The dreadful has already happened!

[elsalmon L · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one's mind, is the condition of the normal man."

[Abhaysharda · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this as a part of a class and so it made some sense there.

[Jasmine]

im not crazy society is crazy

[Mia · Rating 3 out of 5]

The second story was so wild I got inspired to write my first short story since middle school.