Top 123 Quotes & Sayings by R. D. Laing
Explore popular quotes and sayings by a Scottish psychologist R. D. Laing.
Last updated on November 3, 2024.
We are effectively destroying ourselves by violence masquerading as love.
Alienation as our present destiny is achieved only by outrageous violence perpetrated by human beings on human beings.
There is a great deal of pain in life and perhaps the only pain that can be avoided is the pain that comes from trying to avoid pain.
We live in a moment of history where change is so speeded up that we begin to see the present only when it is already disappearing.
Madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be break-through. It is potential liberation and renewal as well as enslavement and existential death.
Freud was a hero. He descended to the Underworld and met there stark terrors. He carried with him his theory as a Medusa's head which turned these terrors to stone.
Rule A: Don't. Rule A1: Rule A doesn't exist. Rule A2: Do not discuss the existence or non-existence of Rules A, A1 or A2.
Creative people who can't help but explore other mental territories are at greater risk, just as someone who climbs a mountain is more at risk than someone who just walks along a village lane.
The experience and behavior that gets labeled schizophrenic is a special strategy that a person invents in order to live in an unlivable situation.
If I don't know I don't know, I think I know. If I don't know I know, I think I don't know.
Children do not give up their innate imagination, curiosity, dreaminess easily. You have to love them to get them to do that.
True guilt is guilt at the obligation one owes to oneself to be oneself. False guilt is guilt felt at not being what other people feel one ought to be or assume that one is.
Schizophrenia cannot be understood without understanding despair.
Insanity - a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world.
Life is a sexually transmitted disease and the mortality rate is one hundred percent.
Whether life is worth living depends on whether there is love in life.
We are all in a post-hypnotic trance induced in early infancy.
The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice. And because we fail to notice that we fail to notice, there is little we can do to change; until we notice how failing to notice shapes our thoughts and deeds.
There is no such condition as 'schizophrenia', but the label is a social fact and the social fact a political event.
We are all murderers and prostitutes - no matter to what culture, society, class, nation one belongs, no matter how normal, moral, or mature, one takes oneself to be.
The human mind has to ask "Who, what, whence, whither, why am I?" And it is very doubtful if the human mind can answer any of these questions.
Our 'normal' 'adjusted' state is too often the abdication of ecstasy, the betrayal of our true potentialities.
The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice.
I cannot experience your experience. You cannot experience my experience. We are both invisible men.
No one has the answer: we are answer and question.
A child born today in the United Kingdom stands a ten times greater chance of being admitted to a mental hospital than to a university ... This can be taken as an indication that we are driving our children mad more effectively than we are genuinely educating them. Perhaps it is our way of educating them that is driving them mad.
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 father and mother and their parents and their parents before them, have been. These forces are mainly concerned with destroying most of its potential.
What we call "normal" is a product of repression, denial, splitting, projection, introjection, and other forms of destructive actions on experience...It is radically estranged from the structure of being.
Our capacity to think, except in the service of what we are dangerously deluded in supposing is our self-interest and in conformity with common sense, is pitifully limited: our capacity even to see, hear, touch, taste and smell is so shrouded in veils of mystification that an intensive discipline of unlearning is necessary for anyone before one can begin to experience the world afresh, with innocence, truth and love.
If I do not know that I do not know, I think I know.
If I do not know that I know, I think I do not know.
In our society many of the old rituals have lost much of their power. New ones have not arisen.
A psychiatrist who professes to be a healer of souls, but who keeps people asleep, treats them for waking up, and drugs them asleep again (increasingly effectively as this field of technology sharpens its weapons), helps to drive them crazy.
In the context of our present pervasive madness that we call normality, sanity, freedom, all our frames of reference are ambiguous and equivocal.
True sanity entails in one way or another the dissolution of the normal ego, that false self competently adjusted to our alienated social reality... and through this death a rebirth and the eventual re-establishment of a new kind of ego-functioning, the ego now being the servant of the divine, no longer its betrayer.
There are good reasons for being obedient, but being unable to be disobedient is not one of the best reasons.
The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice. And because we fail to notice there is little we can do to change until we notice how failing to notice shapes our thoughts and deeds.
If you have passion for what you do, the company you keep, the life you live, it will be reflected in whatever you create. Passion is like that; it springs out, jumps, unpredictable and unplanned, into everything we touch. If it doesn't, others know. Passion can't be faked and it can't be manufactured. Which is why it is so priceless.
Pain in this life is not avoidable, but the pain we create avoiding pain is avoidable.
Human beings seem to have an almost unlimited capacity to deceive themselves, and to deceive themselves into taking their own lies for truth.
Schizophrenia is the name for a condition that most psychiatrists ascribe to patients they call schizophrenic.
Insanity is a perfectly natural adjustment to a totally unnatural and negative environment.
We all live under the constant threat of our own annihilation. Only by the most outrageous violation of ourselves have we achieved our capacity to live in relative adjustment to a civilization apparently driven to its own destruction.
Madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be break-through.
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.
Attempts to wake before our time are often punished, especially by those who love us most. Because they, bless them, are asleep. They think anyone who wakes up, or who, still asleep, realizes that what is taken to be real is a ‘dream’ is going crazy.
The way out is through the door you came in.
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?
Our civilization represses not only "the instincts", not only sexuality, but any form of transcendence. Among one-dimensional men, it is not surprising that someone with an insistent experience of other dimensions, that he cannot entirely deny or forget, will run the risk either of being destroyed by the others, or of betraying what he knows.
Our behavior is a function of our experience. We act according to the way we see things. If our experience is destroyed, our behavior will be destructive. If our experience is destroyed, we have lost our own selves.
Do not adjust your mind, the fault is in reality.
They are playing a game. They are playing at not playing a game. If I show them I see they are, I shall break the rules and they will punish me. I must play their game, of not seeing I see the game.
We have to realize that we are as deeply afraid to live and to love as we are to die.
What we think is less than what we know; What we know is less than what we love; What we love is so much less than what there is. And to that precise extent we are so much less than what we are.
Psychological breakdowns are actually breakthroughs to enlightenment.
The psychiatrist must become a fellow traveler with his patient.
The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one's mind, is the condition of the normal man.
If we can revert to the truth, then a great deal of one's suffering can be erased, because a great deal of one's suffering is based on sheer lies.
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.
Life is a sexually transmitted disease.
Where can you scream? It's a serious question: where can you go in society and scream?
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