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the politics of experience by rd laing excerpts ch1 sections 5-6: the negation of experience & the experience of negation
Each person may take two fundamentally distinguishable forms of action in this interpersonal system. Each may act on his own experience or upon the other personās experience, and there is no other form of personal action possible within this system. That is to say, as long as we are considering personal action of self to self or self to other, the only way one can ever act is on oneās own experience or on the otherās experience.
Personal action can either open out possibilities of enriched experience or it can shut off possibilities. Personal action is either predominantly validating, confirming, encouraging, supportive, enhancing, or it is invalidating, disconfirming, discouraging, undermining and constricting. It can be creative or destructive.
In a world where the normal condition is one of alienation, most personal action must be destructive both of oneās own experience and of that of the other. I shall outline here some of the ways this can be done. I leave the reader to consider from his own experience how pervasive these kinds of action are.
Under the heading of ādefence mechanismsā, psychoanalysis describes a number of ways in which a person becomes alienated from himself. For example, repression, denial, splitting, projection, introjection. These āmechanismsā are often described in psychoanalytic terms as themselves āunconsciousā, that is, the person himself appears to be unaware that he is doing this to himself. Even when a person develops sufficient insight to see that āsplittingā, for example, is going on, he usually experiences this splitting as indeed a mechanism, so to say, an impersonal process which has taken over, which he can observe but cannot control or stop.
There is thus some phenomenological validity in referring to such ādefencesā by the term āmechanismā. But we must not stop there. They have this mechanical quality, because the person as he experiences himself is dissociated from them. He appears to himself and to others to suffer from them. They seem to be processes he undergoes, and as such he experiences himself as a patient, with a particular psychopathology.
But this is so only from the perspective of his own alienated experience. As he becomes de alienated he is able first of all to become aware of them, if he has not already done so, and then to take the second, even more crucial, step of progressively realizing that these are things he does or has done to himself. Process becomes converted back to praxis, the patient becomes an agent.
Ultimately it is possible to regain the ground that has been lost. These defence mechanisms are actions taken by the person on his own experience. On top of this he has dissociated himself from his own action. The end-product of this twofold violence is a person who no longer experiences himself fully as a person, but as a part of a person, invaded by destructive psychopathological āmechanismsā in the face of which he is a relatively helpless victim.
These ādefencesā are action on oneself. But ādefencesā are not only intrapersonal, they are transpersonal. I act not only on myself, I can act upon you. And you act not only on yourself, you act upon me. In each case, on experience.
[...]
All experience is both active and passive, the unity of the given and the construed; and the construction one places on what is given can be positive or negative: it is what one desires or fears or is prepared to accept, or it is not. The element of negation is in every relationship and every experience of relationship. The distinction between the absence of relationships, and the experience of every relationship as an absence, is the division between loneliness and a perpetual solitude, between provisional hope or hopelessness and a permanent despair. The part I feel I play in generating this state of affairs determines what I feel I can or should do about it. [...]
Nothing, as experience, arises as absence of someone or something. No friends, no relationships, no pleasure, no meaning in life, no ideas, no mirth, no money. As applied to parts of the body ā no breast, no penis, no good or bad contents ā emptiness. The list is, in principle, endless. Take anything, and imagine its absence.
Being and nonbeing is the central theme of all philosophy, East and West. These words are not harmless and innocent verbal arabesques, except in the professional philosophism of decadence.
We are afraid to approach the fathomless and bottomless groundlessness of everything.
āThereās nothing to be afraid of.ā The ultimate reassurance, and the ultimate terror.
[...]
We experience the objects of our experience as there in the outside world. The source of our experience seems to be outside ourselves. In the creative experience, we experience the source of the created images, patterns, sounds, to be within ourselves but still beyond ourselves. Colours emanate from a source of pre-light itself unlit, sounds from silence, patterns from formlessness. This pre-formed pre-light, this pre-sound, this pre-form is nothing, and yet it is the source of all created things.
[...]
Two people with first and finally nothing between us. Between us nothing. No thing. That which is really ābetweenā cannot be named by any things that come between. The between is itself no-thing.
[...]
We are not so much concerned with experiences of āfilling a gapā in theory or knowledge, of filling up a hole, of occupying an empty space. It is not a question of putting something into nothing, but of the creation of something out of nothing. Ex nihilo. The no thing out of which the creation emerges, at its purest, is not an empty space, or an empty stretch of time.
[...]
That is to say, the ground of the being of all beings is the relation between them. This relationship is the āisā, the being of all things, and the being of all things is itself no-thing. Man creates in transcending himself in revealing himself. But what creates, wherefrom and whereto, the clay, the pot and the potter, are all not-me. I am the witness, the medium, the occasion of a happening that the created thing makes evident.
Man, most fundamentally, is not engaged in the discovery of what is there, nor in production, nor even in communication, nor in invention. He is enabling being to emerge from nonbeing.
The experience of being the actual medium for a continual process of creation takes one past all depression or persecution or vain glory, past, even, chaos or emptiness, into the very mystery of that continual flip of nonbeing into being, and can be the occasion of that great liberation when one makes the transition from being afraid of nothing, to the realization that there is nothing to fear. Nevertheless, it is very easy to lose oneās way at any stage, and especially when one is nearest.
Here can be great joy, but it is as easy to be mangled by the process as to swing with it. It will require an act of imagination from those who do not know from their own experience what hell this borderland between being and nonbeing can become. But that is what imagination is for.
What we call ānormalā is a product of repression, denial, splitting, projection, introjection and other forms of destructive action on experience (see below). It is radically estranged from the structure of being.
The more one sees this, the more senseless it is to continue with generalized descriptions of supposedly specifically schizoid, schizophrenic, hysterical āmechanismsā.
There are forms of alienation that are relatively strange to statistically ānormalā forms of alienation. The ānormallyā 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 ānormalā majority as bad or mad.
The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of oneās 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.
Our behaviour is a function of our experience. We act according to the way we see things.
If our experience is destroyed, our behaviour will be destructive.
If our experience is destroyed, we have lost our own selves.
How much human behaviour, whether the interactions between persons themselves or between groups and groups, is intelligible in terms of human experience? Either our inter-human behaviour is unintelligible, in that we are simply the passive vehicles of inhuman processes, whose ends are as obscure as they are at present outside our control, or our own behaviour towards each other is a function of our own experience and our own intentions, however alienated we are from them. In the latter case, we must take final responsibility for what we make of what we are made of.
We will find no intelligibility in behaviour if we see it as an inessential phase in an essentially inhuman process. We have had accounts of men as animals, men as machines, men as biochemical complexes with certain ways of their own, but there remains the greatest difficulty in achieving a human understanding of man in human terms.
āThe Politics of Experience by R. D. Laing
The self then seeks by being unembodied to transcend the world and hence to be safe. But a self is liable to develop which feels it is outside all experience and activity. It becomes a vacuum. Everything is there, outside; nothing is here, inside. Moreover, the constant dread of all that is there, of being overwhelmed, is potentiated rather than mitigated by the need to keep the world at bay. Yet the self may at the same time long more than anything for participation in the world. Thus, its greatest longing is felt as its greatest weakness and giving in to this weakness is its greatest dread, since in participation the individual fears that his vacuum will be obliterated, that he will be engulfed or otherwise lose his identity, which has come to be equated with the maintenance of the transcendence of the self even though this is a transcendence in a void.
[ā¦] Instead of
(self/body) āļø other
the situation is
self āļø (body-other)
The self, therefore, is precluded from having a direct relationship with real things and real people. When this has happened in patients, one is witness to the struggle which ensues to preserve the self's own sense of its own realness, aliveness, and identity. In the first scheme, one has a benign circle. The reality of the world and of the self are mutually potentiated by the direct relationship between self and other. In [the second scheme], there is a vicious circle. Every element in this diagram comes to be experienced as more and more unreal and dead. Love is precluded and dread takes its place. The final effect is an overall experience of everything having come to a stop. Nothing moves; nothing is alive; everything is dead, including the self. The self by its detachment is precluded from a full experience of realness and aliveness. What one might call a creative relationship with the other, in which there is mutual enrichment of the self and the other (benign circle), is impossible, and an interaction is substituted which may seem to operate efficiently and smoothly for a while but which has no life' in it (sterile relationship). There is a quasi it-it interaction instead of an I-thou relationship. This interaction is a dead process.
[ā¦]
The substitution of an interaction with the other results in the individual coming to live in a frightening world in which dread is unmitigated by love. The individual is frightened of the world, afraid that any impingement will be total, will be implosive, penetrative, fragmenting, and engulfing. He is afraid of letting anything of himself 'go', of coming out of himself, of losing himself in any experience, etc., because he will be depleted, exhausted, emptied, robbed, sucked dry.
[ā¦]
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 freeābut only in phantasy. Once commit itself to any real project and it suffers agonies of humiliationānot 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-up-ness 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.
[ā¦]
There is something final and definitive about an act, which this type of person regards with suspicion. Action is the dead end of possibility. It scleroses freedom. If it cannot be utterly eschewed, then every act must be of such an equivocal nature that the 'self' can never be trapped in it. . . . It can readily be understood why the schizoid individual so abhors action as characterized by Hegel. The act is 'simple, determinate, universalā¦ā. But his self wishes to be complex, indeterminate, and unique. The act is 'what can be said of it'. But he must never be what can be said of him. He must remain always ungraspable, elusive, transcendent. The act is 'such, and such ... it is this, and the individual human being is what the act is.ā But he must at all costs never be what his act is. If he were what his act was, then he would be helpless and at the mercy of any passer-by. . . . 'He', his 'self", is endless possibility, capacity, intention. The act is always the product of a false self. The act or the deed is never his true reality. He wishes to remain perpetually uncommitted 'to the objective element'āhence the deed is always (or at least he believes it to be) a pretended, a supposed performance, and he may actively cultivate as far as he can that 'inner' negation of all that he does in an effort to declare everything that he does 'null and void, so that in the world, in reality, in the objective ele-ment, nothing of 'him' shall exist, and no footprints or fingerprints of the 'self' shall have been left.
[ā¦]
In the absence of a spontaneous natural, creative, relationship with the world which is free from anxiety, the 'inner self' thus develops an overall sense of inner impoverishment, which is expressed in complaints of the emptiness, deadness, coldness, dryness, impotence, desolation, worthlessness, of the inner life.
[ā¦]
If the patient contrasts his own inner emptiness, worthlessness, coldness, desolation, dryness, with the abundance, worth, warmth, companionship that he may yet believe to be elsewhere (a belief which often grows to fantastically idealized proportions, uncorrected as it is by any direct experience), there is evoked a welter of conflicting emotions, from a desperate longing and yearning for what others have and he lacks, to frantic envy and hatred of all that is theirs and not his, or a desire to destroy all the goodness, freshness, richness in the world. These feelings may, in turn, be offset by counter-attitudes of disdain, contempt, disgust, or indifference.
This emptiness, this sense of inner lack of richness, sub-stantiality and value, if it overweighs his illusory omnipotence, is a powerful prompter to make 'contact' with reality. The soul or self thus desolate and arid longs to be refreshed and fertilized, but longs not simply for a relationship between separable beings, but to be completely drenched and suffused by the other.
[ā¦]
The abundance there is longed for, in contrast to the emptiness here; yet participation without loss of being is felt to be impossible, and also is not enough, and so the individual must cling to his isolationāhis separateness without spontaneous, direct relatednessābecause in doing so he is clinging to his identity. His longing is for complete union. But of this very longing he is terrified, because it will be the end of his self. He does not wish for a relationship of mutual enrichment and exchange of give-and-take between two beings 'congenial' to each other. He does not conceive of a dialectical relationship.
āThe Divided Self, ch 5, R. D. Laing
The unembodied self: In this position the individual experiences his self as being more or less divorced or detached from his body. The body is felt more as one object among other objects in the world than as the core of the individual's own being. Instead of being the core of his true self, the body is felt as the core of a false self, which a detached, disembodied, 'inner, true' self looks on at with tenderness, amusement, or hatred as the case may be.
Such a divorce of self from body deprives the unembodied self from direct participation in any aspect of the life of the world, which is mediated exclusively through the body's perceptions, feelings and movements (expressions, gestures, words, actions, etc.). The unembodied self, as onlooker at all the body does, engages in nothing directly. Its functions come to be observation, control, and criticism vis-Ć -vis what the body is experiencing and doing, and those operations which are usually spoken of as purely 'mental.
The unembodied self becomes hyper-conscious.
It attempts to posit its own imagos.
It develops a relationship with itself and with the body which can become very complex.
