#r.d. laing

[nobrashfestivity]

 R.D. Laing Diagram from KNOTS, 1970

[nunhauntology]

USED BOOK FIND OF THE YEAR

[gatheringbones]

[“Szasz offered no political imaginary or social future for individuals who could not afford to purchase their cure of choice, and he saw little difference between healthcare and a contract of sale or a promissory note. Austrian-born philosopher and critic Ivan Illich also produced work that is of mixed value. He most usefully theorized mental illness under capitalism as stemming from an “iatrogenic” process—one in which the system of psychiatric care “creates” more distress than it “cures.” To Illich, the healthcare system itself was the seed of illness, leading him to disavow treatment of all kinds.

Many anti-psychiatrists who did not have left politics offered droves of unhelpful critique (like Szasz’s theory that mental illnesses do not exist) while still couching their ideas within broader conceptual frames that are in fact helpful for left political projects (like Szasz’s theory that the psychiatric treatment system is used improperly by the state as an extension of the legal system). This has unfortunately led to widespread uncritical citation of some of the more reactionary anti-psychiatrists, creating the potential issue of reproducing the harmful political philosophy of Szasz and others through their sociological observations on mental healthcare.

Others, like UK-based R. D. Laing, theorized that mental illnesses were the product of social relations and not of biological destiny. To Laing, targeting the root of distress required direct intervention in the dynamics of the individual’s abusive relationships, not sedation or techniques for adaptation to help the individual “cope” with the productive social forces of their symptoms. Laing argued for the therapeutic abolition of the family, citing it as the germ of many abusive personal and oppressive political relationships. Laing also pioneered the notion that “psychotic” and “schizoid” patients were capable of being reasoned with, pushing back on the widespread idea that the nature of mental illness was a lack or inability to reason, necessitating removal from the community. Laing argued that rather than the mad posing a threat to “the normal”—the ontologically insecure person menacing the ontologically secure society—everyday life posed a threat to mad existence.

Erving Goffman and Murray Edelman, both social scientists based in the US, hypothesized that pathologization, including legal and diagnostic categories, was leveraged by the state as a pretense for population control, and that psychiatric power was granted to the physician class by the ruling class as a means of socially enforcing compliance with laws or norms.12 David Cooper, on the other hand, argued that the capitalist political economy was directly responsible for “mental breakdowns” in the working class, and leveraged pathologization to this end. Cooper theorized a superstructural cause of psychiatry’s corruption that he thought undergirded all other dynamics identified by his colleagues: the political economy of madness under capitalism. Left anti-psychiatry, in this vein, offered a solution: simply end the cause of “mental breakdown.” More specifically, end capitalism and the economic valuation of life dictated by the capitalist political economy of health, which many have unfortunately misinterpreted as the inverted coda of “abolishing capitalism will ‘cure’ all mental illness.”]

health communism, by beatrice adler-bolton and artie vierkant, 2022

[funeral]

Laing's important concepts of "ontological security" and "ontological insecurity" in The Divided Self are about our "at-homeness" in the world. The ontologically secure person feels his or her life as "real, alive, whole[,] as differentiated from the rest of the world in ordinary circumstances so clearly this his identity and autonomy are never in question". This is not the case for the ontologically insecure person who in ordinary circumstances "may feel more unreal than real; in a literal sense, more dead than alive; precariously differentiated from the rest of the world, so that his identity and autonomy are always in question.

M. Guy Thompson (ed.), The Legacy of R.D. Laing

[s0distracted]

“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. The more one sees this, the more senseless it is to continue with generalized descriptions of supposedly specifically schizoid, schizophrenic, hysterical ‘mechanisms.’ There are forms of alienation that are relatively strange to statistically ‘normal’ forms of alienation. 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 labeled by the ‘formal’ majority as bad or mad.”

R.D. Laing

[basicallyanotherwitchesthing]

Arthur Balaskas - Bodylife - Grosset & Dunlap - 1977

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Jean Dubuffet : 1901-1985 : Les Grandes Artères, 1961 : Oil on canvas 44 ¾ x 57 ½ in. | 113.7 x 146 cm.

* * * *

“The condition of alienation, of being asleep, 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.”

— R.D. Laing, The Politics of Experience/The Bird of Paradise                 (via modernshxmxn)

[alive on all channels]

[koinottsumi]

"We are afraid to approach the fathomless and bottomless groundlessness of everything. "There"s nothing to be afraid of." The ultimate reassurance, and the ultimate terror."

— R.D. Laing, Politics Of Experience And Bird Of Paradise (1967)