Ronald David Laing Quotes

Ch. 1 : Experience as evidence http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/en/laing.htm <br class="br">The Politics of Experience (1967) <br class="br">Context: Even facts become fictions without adequate ways of seeing &quot;the facts&quot;. We do not need theories so much as the experience that is the source of the theory. We are not satisfied with faith, in the sense of an implausible hypothesis irrationally held: we demand to experience the &quot;evidence&quot;.<br>We can see other people&#x27;s behaviour, but not their experience. This has led some people to insist that psychology has nothing to do with the other person&#x27;s experience, but only with his behaviour.<br>The other person&#x27;s behaviour is an experience of mine. My behaviour is an experience of the other. The task of social phenomenology is to relate my experience of the other&#x27;s behaviour to the other&#x27;s experience of my behaviour. Its study is the relation between experience and experience: its true field is inter-experience.

Source: The Divided Self (1960), Ch. 1 : The existential-phenomenological foundations for a science of persons
Context: Existential phenomenology attempts to characterize the nature of a person's experience of his world and himself. It is not so much an attempt to describe particular objects of his experience as to set all particular experiences within the context of his whole being-in-his-world. The mad things said and done by the schizophrenic will remain essentially a closed book if one does not understand their existential context. In describing one way of going mad, I shall try to show that there is a comprehensible transition from the sane schizoid way of being-in-the-world to a psychotic way of being-in-the-world. Although retaining the terms schizoid and schizophrenic for the sane and psychotic positions respectively, I shall not, of course, be using these terms in their usual clinical psychiatric frame of reference, but phenomenologically and existentially.

Source: The Politics of Experience (1967), p. 1 of Introduction
Context: Few books today are forgivable. Black on canvas, silence on the screen, an empty white sheet of paper are perhaps feasible. There is little conjunction of truth and social "reality". Around us are pseudo-events, to which we adjust with a false consciousness adapted to see these events as true and real, and even as beautiful. In the society of men the truth resides now less in what things are than in what they are not. 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. What is to be done? We who are still half alive, living in the often fibrillating heartland of a senescent capitalism — can we do more than reflect the decay around and within us? Can we do more than sing our sad and bitter songs of disillusion and defeat? The requirement of the present, the failure of the past, is the same: to provide a thoroughly self-conscious and self-critical human account of man.

As quoted in Wisdom for the Soul : Five Millennia of Prescriptions for Spiritual Healing (2006) by Larry Chang, p. 412; this might be a paraphrase, as the earliest occurrence of this phrase thus far located is in the form: "Ronald David Laing has shocked many people when he suggested in 1972 that insanity can be a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world." in Studii de literatură română și comparată (1984), by The Faculty of Philology-History at Universitatea din Timișoara. A clear citation to Laing's own work has not yet been found.
Disputed

Source: The Politics of Experience (1967), p. 121

Ch. 1 : Experience as evidence http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/en/laing.htm <br class="br">The Politics of Experience (1967) <br class="br">Context: Even facts become fictions without adequate ways of seeing &quot;the facts&quot;. We do not need theories so much as the experience that is the source of the theory. We are not satisfied with faith, in the sense of an implausible hypothesis irrationally held: we demand to experience the &quot;evidence&quot;.<br>We can see other people&#x27;s behaviour, but not their experience. This has led some people to insist that psychology has nothing to do with the other person&#x27;s experience, but only with his behaviour.<br>The other person&#x27;s behaviour is an experience of mine. My behaviour is an experience of the other. The task of social phenomenology is to relate my experience of the other&#x27;s behaviour to the other&#x27;s experience of my behaviour. Its study is the relation between experience and experience: its true field is inter-experience.

The Divided Self (1960)

Source: The Politics of Experience (1967), Ch. 1 : Experience as evidence
Context: I cannot experience your experience. You cannot experience my experience. We are both invisible men. All men are invisible to one another. Experience used to be called The Soul. Experience as invisibility of man to man is at the same time more evident than anything. Only experience is evident. Experience is the only evidence. Psychology is the logos of experience. Psychology is the structure of the evidence, and hence psychology is the science of sciences.

Source: The Politics of Experience (1967), p. 58
Context: Long before a thermonuclear war can come about, we have had to lay waste our own sanity. We begin with the children. It is imperative to catch them in time. Without the most thorough and rapid brainwashing their dirty minds would see through our dirty tricks. Children are not yet fools, but we shall turn them into imbeciles like ourselves, with high I. Q. s if possible.
From the moment of birth, when the Stone Age baby confronts the twentieth-century mother, the baby is subjected to these forces of violence, called love, as its mother and father, and their parents and their parents before them, have been. These forces are mainly concerned with destroying most of its potentialities, and on the whole this enterprise is successful.

Source: The Divided Self (1960), Ch. 1 : The existential-phenomenological foundations for a science of persons
Context: Existential phenomenology attempts to characterize the nature of a person's experience of his world and himself. It is not so much an attempt to describe particular objects of his experience as to set all particular experiences within the context of his whole being-in-his-world. The mad things said and done by the schizophrenic will remain essentially a closed book if one does not understand their existential context. In describing one way of going mad, I shall try to show that there is a comprehensible transition from the sane schizoid way of being-in-the-world to a psychotic way of being-in-the-world. Although retaining the terms schizoid and schizophrenic for the sane and psychotic positions respectively, I shall not, of course, be using these terms in their usual clinical psychiatric frame of reference, but phenomenologically and existentially.

Source: The Politics of Experience (1967), p. 1 of Introduction
Context: Few books today are forgivable. Black on canvas, silence on the screen, an empty white sheet of paper are perhaps feasible. There is little conjunction of truth and social "reality". Around us are pseudo-events, to which we adjust with a false consciousness adapted to see these events as true and real, and even as beautiful. In the society of men the truth resides now less in what things are than in what they are not. 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. What is to be done? We who are still half alive, living in the often fibrillating heartland of a senescent capitalism — can we do more than reflect the decay around and within us? Can we do more than sing our sad and bitter songs of disillusion and defeat? The requirement of the present, the failure of the past, is the same: to provide a thoroughly self-conscious and self-critical human account of man.

Source: The Politics of Experience (1967), p. 58
Context: Long before a thermonuclear war can come about, we have had to lay waste our own sanity. We begin with the children. It is imperative to catch them in time. Without the most thorough and rapid brainwashing their dirty minds would see through our dirty tricks. Children are not yet fools, but we shall turn them into imbeciles like ourselves, with high I. Q. s if possible.
From the moment of birth, when the Stone Age baby confronts the twentieth-century mother, the baby is subjected to these forces of violence, called love, as its mother and father, and their parents and their parents before them, have been. These forces are mainly concerned with destroying most of its potentialities, and on the whole this enterprise is successful.

Source: The Politics of Experience (1967), Ch. 1 : Experience as evidence
Context: Social phenomenology is the science of my own and of others' experience. It is concerned with the relation between my experience of you and your experience of me. That is, with inter-experience. It is concerned with your behaviour and my behaviour as I experience it, and your and my behaviour as you experience it.

Source: The Politics of Experience (1967), p. 58
Context: We are effectively destroying ourselves by violence masquerading as love. I am a specialist, God help me, in events in inner space and time, in experiences called thoughts, images, reveries, dreams, visions, hallucinations, dreams of memories, memories of dreams, memories of visions, dreams of hallucinations, refractions of refractions of refractions of that original Alpha and Omega of experience and reality, that Reality on whose repression, denial, splitting, projection, falsification, and general desecration and profanation our civilisation as much as anything is based.

Source: The Politics of Experience (1967), p. 1 of Introduction
Context: Few books today are forgivable. Black on canvas, silence on the screen, an empty white sheet of paper are perhaps feasible. There is little conjunction of truth and social "reality". Around us are pseudo-events, to which we adjust with a false consciousness adapted to see these events as true and real, and even as beautiful. In the society of men the truth resides now less in what things are than in what they are not. 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. What is to be done? We who are still half alive, living in the often fibrillating heartland of a senescent capitalism — can we do more than reflect the decay around and within us? Can we do more than sing our sad and bitter songs of disillusion and defeat? The requirement of the present, the failure of the past, is the same: to provide a thoroughly self-conscious and self-critical human account of man.

Source: The Politics of Experience (1967), Ch. 1 : Experience as evidence
Context: I cannot experience your experience. You cannot experience my experience. We are both invisible men. All men are invisible to one another. Experience used to be called The Soul. Experience as invisibility of man to man is at the same time more evident than anything. Only experience is evident. Experience is the only evidence. Psychology is the logos of experience. Psychology is the structure of the evidence, and hence psychology is the science of sciences.

Ch. 1 : Experience as evidence http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/en/laing.htm <br class="br">The Politics of Experience (1967) <br class="br">Context: Even facts become fictions without adequate ways of seeing &quot;the facts&quot;. We do not need theories so much as the experience that is the source of the theory. We are not satisfied with faith, in the sense of an implausible hypothesis irrationally held: we demand to experience the &quot;evidence&quot;.<br>We can see other people&#x27;s behaviour, but not their experience. This has led some people to insist that psychology has nothing to do with the other person&#x27;s experience, but only with his behaviour.<br>The other person&#x27;s behaviour is an experience of mine. My behaviour is an experience of the other. The task of social phenomenology is to relate my experience of the other&#x27;s behaviour to the other&#x27;s experience of my behaviour. Its study is the relation between experience and experience: its true field is inter-experience.

Source: The Politics of Experience (1967), Ch. 1 : Experience as evidence
Context: I cannot experience your experience. You cannot experience my experience. We are both invisible men. All men are invisible to one another. Experience used to be called The Soul. Experience as invisibility of man to man is at the same time more evident than anything. Only experience is evident. Experience is the only evidence. Psychology is the logos of experience. Psychology is the structure of the evidence, and hence psychology is the science of sciences.

Source: The Politics of Experience (1967), p. 1 of Introduction

§3, p. 55
Knots (1970)

Source: The Politics of Experience (1967), p. 28

§2, p. 22
Knots (1970)

Source: The Politics of Experience (1967), p. 3 of Introduction

Attributed to R.D. Lang in: Jack Lee Seymour, Margaret Ann Crain, Joseph V. Crockett (1993) Educating Christians. p. 53

§5, p. 84
Knots (1970)

Source: The Politics of Experience (1967), p.82 (of original version see Google Books link here https://books.google.com/books?id=ZGTUlU5E5rAC&amp;dq=politics+of+experience&amp;focus=searchwithinvolume&amp;q=%22positivist+mistake%22)