Existential Ragpicker

...His concept of "ontological insecurity" produced a shock of recognition, as did his analysis of the schizoid strategies for avoiding nonbeing through "engulfment, implosion, and petrification...

...Yet what is extraordinary about Laing's accomplishment is not just that he has mastered the vocabulary of existential phenomenology (reification, mystification, be-ing-in-the-world, and the rest of it), but that he uses this most abstruse yet poetic tool to explicate sanity and madness-Subjects notoriously encumbered by technical jargon-and makes them suddenly and marvelously intelligible...

...Laing illustrates his approach with case histories presented from both the psychiatric and the ontological standpoint, displaying thorough mastery of the standard jargon while in the very act of demolishing it...

...Although he has been on the scene for a long while, only a couple of years ago did interest in his work grow sufficiently to prompt the publication here of a collection of his essays, entitled The Politics of Experience...

...Laing's work is an eye opener to anyone who has flirted with the existentialists but retired in confusion before the seemingly impenetrable thickets of their specialist terminology...

...Using the tools of existential phenomenology to analyze "the most extreme inter-experiential disjunction in our culture-psychiatrists, sane: patients, psychotic," Laing shows how the very language of psychiatry ("schizophrenese") mimics and perpetuates the fragmentation of experience it is supposed to help overcome...

...As Laing notes, there is no "I-thou" relation in Freudian psychology...

...He shows, for instance, that a person's fear of being alone is not necessarily "a defense against incestuous libidinal phantasies" or some such...

...No one has schizophrenia, like having a cold," Laing explains, ". . . the experience and behavior that gets labeled schizophrenic is a special strategy that a person invents in order to live in an unlivable situation...

...Behavior," however, "is a function of experience...

...The objective approach discounts the fact that men not only behave, which can be observed, but also experience, which can only be inferred...

...Such statements instantly open a grand canyon between Laing and the regular-guy psychiatrists who want people to stop their ears to the clamor of history and "adjust," who mind their own business and expect their patients to do likewise...

...It was they, too, who pointed the way to an interpersonal understanding of the human predicament...

...Normal men have killed perhaps 100 million of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years...

...The notion that "normality" is a state of pitiable impoverishment, that madness can be a "trip" which-If not aborted by the wrong sort of psychiatric intervention-heals the sufferer of ills that afflict us all and even opens the door to transcendental experience, has made him a natural ally of the acid cultists...

...Once the patient is depersonalized, the way is open for interpretation of his behavior as signs of disease rather than expressions of his existence, as pathological process rather than experiential praxis...

...The Church, for all its traditional collusion with the State in the preservaton of the status quo, has shown itself far readier than the "mental health" Establishment to engage in public self-examination...

...An Englishman-what's more, a mere Anglo-Saxon-to whom the intricacies of Daseins-analyse and the mystic dance of en-soi and pour-soi might have been expected to remain as obscure as German syntax or the politics of the Third Republic...

...This is clearly self-defeating, if "the task in psychotherapy [is] to make, using [Karl] Jaspers' expression, an appeal to the freedom of the patient...

...It is no accident that Laing makes frequent reference to such existentialist theologians as Karl Barth and Paul Tillieh, for they are much more at home in this terrain than the analysts...

...Laing's radical stance has naturally endeared him to the under-30s...

...It is rather likely to be a lack of ontological autonomy-the inability to know who one is without constant reference to others-that gives rise to the feeling, and the phantasies are a means of covering the emptiness...

...Our society itself may have become biologically dysfunctional," he suggests, "and forms of schizophrenic alienation from the alienation of society may have a sociobiological function that we have not recognized"?a possibility much explored in science fiction, and notably by Doris Lessing in her recent novel, The Four-Gated City...

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

...someone who has read all the way through L'etre et le neant and lived to tell the tale...

...With the appearance of The Divided Self and Self and Others (Random House, 229 pp...

...Best of all, he somehow captures what was always the most untranslatable feature of Sartre's prose, at once charming and exasperating-the lyricism of philosophic discourse, the virtuoso juggling with the paradoxes of being and nonbeing that can almost become an art form in its own right...

...oNE IS STRONGLY TEMPTED to go On and On quoting, for Laing writes so well and handles a difficult technical language with clarity and grace...

...One such is R. D. Laing, the English philosopher-psychiatrist who has broken new ground in the treatment of schizophrenics and helped to pioneer the "existential" approach to psychoanalysis...

...This, more than overpopulation, the destruction of the environment, or any of the other technical crises already upon us, is a matter to tax the collective ingenuity of the race...

...But Laing is no ordinary analyst...

...Here, obviously, is a man who has successfully negotiated those ponderous Teutons, those elegant and subtilizing Gauls...

...All psychology so far has sought to base itself on natural science, "an inadequate model for a science of persons" because people are not, or not merely, objects...

...respectively, both $5.95), the full range of Laing's thought is open for transatlantic inspection...

...Add the apocalyptic note that runs through Laing's work, plus his particular philosophical affiliations, and it is easy to see why he has been enthusiastically espoused by today's counterculture -along with Herbert Marcuse, Frantz Fanon, Norman O. Brown, and others in the New Left pantheon...

...The discussion of experience, "normal" or "abnormal," in terms of ontology made more sense to me than a library full of standard psychoanalytic literature...

...and 169 pp...

...Very briefly, what Laing has been trying to do for the past decade is draw up the ground rules for a "science of persons" that does not yet exist but that we desperately need...

...For example, Laing quotes with approval Tillich's remark: "Neurosis is the way of avoiding nonbeing by avoiding being...

...If the human race survives, people may look back and see that "what we call 'schizophrenia' was one of the forms in which, often through quite ordinary people, the light began to break through the cracks in our all-too-closed minds...

...Laing admirably avoids the unspoken "of course" that often pervades such stuff: the collusive assumption that of course we all know about reification and praxis and immanence and mystification...

...But that is another story...

...It is less easy to guess what he makes of such company...

...His use of the existential idiom is in marked contrast with much New Left literature of recent years, where the Sartrean vocabulary has too often been wielded with a patronizing, elitist nonchalance that contributes little to genuine understanding...

...Your behavior is part of my experience, my behavior is part of your experience, and it is on this "inter-experiential" relation that a science of persons must rest...

...Laing explores the social phenomenology of "the untenable position, the 'can't-win' double bind, the situation of checkmate" in the family, where it all begins, but the significance of his findings goes far beyond this sphere...

...A list of the authors he draws on to illustrate his theses (often greatly illuminating them in the process) sounds like a hip sophomore's personal reading list: Samuel Beckett, Hermann Hesse, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Dostoevsky, Genet, Blake...

...Politically, too, the whole thrust of Laing's inquiry is clearly subversive: If madness is an act of creative maladjustment in a "biologically dysfunctional" society, can revolution be far behind...

...What is needed to help us sort through the rubbish pit of broken meanings on which we miserably squat is a very special kind of ragpicker: a man promiscuously philosophical, intimate with all the -ologies but committed to none-a latter-day Renaissance thinker with the soul of a vagrant...

...I shall not soon forget my excitement when I first came across The Divided Self some years ago and read Laing's electrifying account of the schizoid personality...

...The psychiatric profession is the last place one would expect to find a man willing to attack the very foundations of his own specialty...