The Facts of Life: An Essay in Feelings, Facts and Fantasy

by R.D. Laing

The book is made of bits of journals, bits of lectures, memories, meditations--some impenetrably abstract & logically involuted, some embarrassingly speculative & poetic--among which one may wander at will. But in content it's new, evidence that Laing's moved on, deeper into himself, deeper into the mystery of life. It's a meditation without answers, philosophical, personal & biological, on the question, "Who am I?" Perhaps the most striking part of it is the personal. Laing's no longer talking only about patients or people in trouble, but about himself. His own quite bleak & repressed early history is told with a bald plainness that suggests both sadness & harsh humor. He moves from the conundrum conventionally called "the facts of life"--our origin in sexual reproduction--into more bizarre territory: the possibility (documented by incidents in therapy) that we remember, are haunted by, & reenact our conception, implantation, fetal life & birth, the loss of the cord & placenta that were part of us. He relates odd things that have happened to his mind, & odd encounters with others, that hint at the vast mysteries lying iceberg-like beyond consciousness. The whole is informed by an implicit compassion that turns explicit in an attack on "heartless" science unaware of its own unconscious sadistic motives. Despite its flights & obscurities, this is a real contribution to the literature of wonder--rich, disorderly, suggestive, inconclusive & humane.

Genres: Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Nonfiction, Philosophy, Poetry, Psychiatry, Memoir

165 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1976

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

[soulAdmitted]

"Se tu morissi adesso,
e venissi riconcepito stasera
quale donna sceglieresti entro cui trascorrere i primi nove mesi della tua prossima vita?"

Forse è superfluo dire che a Laing non importava nulla della risposta, puntuale, a questa domanda. Tra le sue preferite, immagino. Decisiva. (Forse è anche superfluo dire che ciò che gli importava era la distillazione di tutte le emozioni - pensabili - a disposizione, a partire da questa domanda).

[Andrea]

Unbelievably strange book so I'm not going to attempt to rate it. Some very unusual theories about mythology being a reflection of our lives in the womb and then a bunch of stuff I didn't even remotely understand. Oddly, I still enjoyed quite a lot of this book, even where it was vaguely incoherent. It feels like an intimate look at a person exploring the strangest corners of their own imagination. Laing just lets his mind go wild with ideas, images, theories, and investigations.

Around the World: Scotland

[Amanda Grace · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book makes no pretendions to be a guide to the perplexed. I am myself perplexed. But I have tried, as best I can, to convey the nature of my perplexity. (143)

The older I get, the more I seek to convey without losing my meaning by explaining. Laing does this here, so that we aren’t upset by the connections he makes that we can’t, but celebrate where we share enough experience & perspective to see words written that describe exactly the convictions we ourselves are home to. The author is devoted to a science that includes love as its motivation, and I’m constantly in awe of how his work bestows me with the power to vaidate my own ways of being.

St. Catherine of Siena is credited with the remark:
All the way to Heaven
is Heaven.

And it is.

[Lore · Rating 3 out of 5]

"(de onzichtbare worm die 's nachts in de vreselijke storm vliegt)"

[M.Ankha · Rating 2 out of 5]

Interesting first part, then the author lost me with his clinical cases and student experiments on animals... Without any correlation with the theories from the beginning. I am perplexed.

[Pdx · Rating 4 out of 5]

Accepting of the dark.Pulchitrudinous in essence.

[Benedict Reid · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this book because I love Laing's "knots" and knew that "The facts of life" is perhaps the closest in terms of style to "knots" of Laing's other work.
It is true that Laing plays with the structure and form in an almost poetical way. But unlike "Knots" he attempts to give his own opinion about the situation in many cases. I simply couldn't agree with much of his theory of the physical act of conception (!! no, really, from the point of view of the single cell) and birth as being the core reason for adult's unhappiness. But I couldn't argue with him over the importance of social connection, his stories of mental hospitals in the late 60s/early 70s are terrifying, where people were supposed to get better by being locked away in small rooms and given traquilizers. Definitely an interesting read. I'm not quite sure it's a good read.

[jo · Rating 2 out of 5]

laing is an insufferable poet, and if his notions of pre-nascent psychology have any merit, such is not found here; but there is some decent food for thought regarding psychiatric praxis, especially in regards to schizophrenia, near the back half of this book.

[Alexandra · Rating 3 out of 5]

Strange but good.