Ronald D Laing

(1927-1989) Educated and trained in medicine and psychiatry in Britain, Dr. Laing was instrumental in advocating non-intrusive techniques to assist people in psychological distress. Influenced by the work of Harry Stack Sullivan, Laing was a prolific writer and lecturer and, collaborating with Gregory Bateson, Timothy Leary and Lama Govinda, employed phenomenological and existential approaches such as advocating that patients be given space to work through their societal-induced psychoses without resort to drugs, ECT or surgery.

Index

The Politics of Experience

The Politics of the Family

Mystification, Confusion and Conflict

Sanity, Madness and The Family

The Voice of Experience

The Divided Self

Self and Others

Knots

The Facts of Life

Excerpts:

From The Politics of Experience (1967)

· Given the conditions of contemporary civilization, how can one claim that the “normal” man is sane? 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 become normal. Normal men have killed perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow men in the last fifty years…. We are not able even to think adequately about the behaviour that is at the annihilating edge. But 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…

· 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. 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.

· People can and do destroy the humanity of others, and the condition of this possibility is that we are inter-dependent. We are not self-contained monads producing no effects on each other except our reflections. We are both acted upon, and changed for good or ill, by others; we are agents who act upon others to affect them in different ways. Each of us is the other to the others. Man is patient-agent, agent-patient, inter-experiencing and interacting with his fellows.

· The negation of experience. There seems to be no agent more effective than another person in bringing a world for oneself alive, or, by a glance, a gesture, or a remark, shrivelling up the reality in which one is lodged.

· In the idiom of games theory, people have a repertoire of games based on particular sets of learned interactions. Others may play games that mesh sufficiently to allow a variety of more or less stereotyped dramas to be enacted. The games have rules, some public, some secret. Some people play games that break the rules of games that others play. Some play undeclared games, so rendering their moves ambiguous or downright unintelligible, except to the expert in such secret and unusual games. Some people, prospective neurotics or psychotics, may have to undergo the ceremony of a psychiatric consultation, leading to diagnosis, prognosis, prescription. Treatment would consist in pointing out to them the unsatisfactory nature of the games they play and perhaps teaching new games. A person reacts with despair more to loss of the game than to sheer “object loss”, that is, to the loss of his partner or partners as real persons. The maintenance of the game rather than the identity of players is all-important.

· Psychotherapy must remain an obstinate attempt of two people to recover the wholeness of being human through the relationship between them.

· As a whole, we are a generation of persons so estranged from the inner world that many are arguing that it does not exist; and that even if it does exist, it does not matter. Even if it has some significance, it is not the hard stuff of science, and if it is not, then let’s make it hard. Let it be measured and counted. Quantify the heart’s agony and ecstasy in a world in which, when the inner world is first discovered, we are liable to find our selves bereft and derelict. For without the inner world the outer loses its meaning, and without the outer the inner loses its substance.

· From the moment of birth, when the Stone Age baby confronts the twentieth-century mother, the baby is subjected to those 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. By the time the new human being is fifteen or so, we are left with a being like ourselves, a half-crazed creature more or less adjusted to a mad world. This is normality in our present age.

· The double action of destroying ourselves with one hand, and calling this love with the other, is a sleight of hand one can marvel at. Human beings seem to have an almost unlimited capacity to deceive themselves, and to deceive themselves into taking their own lies for truth. By such mystification, we achieve and sustain our adjustment, adaptation, socialization. But the result of such adjustment to our society is that, having been tricked and having tricked ourselves out of our minds, that is to say, out of our own personal worlds of experience, out of that unique meaning with which we may endow the external world, simultaneously we have been conned into the illusion that we are separate “skin encapsulated egos”. Having at one and the same time lost our selves and developed the illusion that we are autonomous egos, we are expected to comply by inner consent with external restraints, to an almost unbelievable extent.

· A group whose unification is achieved through the reciprocal interiorization by each of each other, in which neither “a common object” nor organizational or institutional structures, etc. have a primary function as a kind of group “cement” is a nexus. … In the nexal family the unity of the group is achieved through the experience by each of the group, and the danger to each person (since the person is essential to the nexus, and the nexus is essential to the person) is the dissolution or dispersal of “the family”. This can come about only by one person after another dissolving it in themselves. A united “family” exists only as long as each person acts in terms of its existence. Each person may then act on the other person to coerce him (by sympathy, blackmail, indebtedness, guilt, gratitude or naked violence) into maintaining his interiorization of the group unchanged. The nexal family is then the “entity” which has to be preserved in each person and served by each person, which one lives and dies for, and which in turn offers life for loyalty and death for desertion. Any defection from the nexus (betrayal, treason, heresy, etc.) is deservedly, by nexus ethics, punishable; and the worst punishment devisable by the “group men” is exile or excommunication: group death.

The “protection” that the nexus family offers its members seems to be based on several preconditions: (i) a fantasy of the external world as extraordinarily dangerous; (ii) the generation of terror inside the nexus at this external danger. The “work” of the nexus is the generation of this terror. This work is violence.

· Studies of the families of schizophrenics conducted at Palo Alto, Yale, the Pennsylvania Psychiatric Institute and NIMH have all shown that the person who gets diagnosed is part of a wider network of extremely disturbed and disturbing patterns of communication. In all these places no schizophrenic has been studied whose disturbed pattern of communication has not been shown to be a reflection, and reaction to, the disturbed and disturbing pattern characterizing his family of origin. In the cases studying the actual circumstances around the social event when one person come to be regarded as schizophrenic, without exception the experience and behaviour that gets labelled schizophrenic is a special strategy that the person invents in order to live in an unliveable situation. He cannot make a move, or make no move, without being beset by contradictory and paradoxical pressures and demands, pushes and pulls, both internally about himself, and externally from those about him. He is in a position of checkmate. We know that the biochemistry of the person is highly sensitive to social circumstance. That a checkmate situation occasions a biochemical response which, in turn, facilitates or inhibits certain types of experience and behaviour is plausible a priori.

· There is no such “condition” as “schizophrenia”, but the label is a social fact and the social fact a political event. This political event, occurring in the civic order of society, imposes definitions and consequences on the labelled person. It is a social prescription that rationalizes a set of social actions whereby the labelled person is annexed by others who are legally sanctioned, medically empowered and morally obliged to become responsible for the person labelled. The person labelled is inaugurated not only into a role, but into a career of patient, by the concerted action of a coalition (a “conspiracy”) of family, GP, mental health officer, psychiatrists, nurses, psychiatric social workers, and often fellow patients. The “committed” person labelled as patient, and specifically as “schizophrenic”, is degraded from full existential and legal status as human agent and responsible person to someone no longer in possession of his own definition of himself, unable to retain his own possessions, precluded from the exercise of his discretion as to who he meets, what he does. His time is no longer his own and the space he occupies is no longer of his choosing. After being subjected to a degradation ceremonial known as psychiatric examination, he is bereft of his civil liberties in being imprisoned in a total institution known as a “mental” hospital. More completely, more radically than anywhere else in our society, he is invalidated as a human being. In the mental hospital he must remain, until the label is rescinded or qualified by such terms as “remitted” or “readjusted”. Once a “schizophrenic”, there is a tendency to be regarded as always a “schizophrenic”.

· Instead of the mental hospital, what is needed is a sort of re-servicing factory for human breakdowns – a place where people who have travelled further and, consequently, may be more lost than even psychiatrists and other “sane” people, can find their way further into inner space and time, and back again. Instead of the degradation ceremonial of psychiatric examination, diagnosis and prognostication, we need, for those who are ready for it (in psychiatric terminology, often those who are about to go into schizophrenic breakdown) an initiation ceremonial, through which the person will be guided with full social encouragement and sanction into inner space and time, by people who have been there and back again. Psychiatrically, this would appear as ex-patients helping future patients go mad.

From The Politics of the Family (five radio broadcasts of the 1968 Massey Lectures, over CBC)

• There are usually great resistances against the process of mapping the past onto the future coming to light, in any circumstances. If anyone in a family begins to realize he is a shadow of a puppet, he will be wise to exercise the greatest precautions as to whom he imparts this information. It is not "normal" to realize such things. There are a number of psychiatric names, and a variety of treatments, for such realizations.

I consider that the majority of adults (including myself) are or have been, more or less, in a post-hypnotic trance, induced in early infancy: we remain in this state until – when we dead awaken, as Ibsen makes one of his characters say, we shall find that we have never lived.

Any attempt to wake up before our time is heavily 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. Anyone in this transitional state is likely to be confused. To indicate that this confusion is a sign of illness, rather than the possibly confused beginning of true sanity, is the quickest and surest way to create psychosis. The person who realizes that “this is all a nightmare”, is afraid he is going crazy. A psychiatrist who professes to be a healer of souls, but who in fact keeps people asleep, treats them for waking up, and helps them to go asleep again (increasingly effective as this field of technology sharpens its weapons), will both help to drive him really crazy, and confirm the patient’s worst fears.

• History continues to repeat itself, with variations [down through the succession of generations]… The play goes on. The actors come and go. A death leaves a vacancy, to be filled sometimes by one yet to be conceived, or who has to be conceived to keep the cast up to strength. Who can better replace a grandfather, than a grandson?

The new member of the cast is induced to embody a part in the ongoing drama. It is not precise, or enough, to say: David is identified with his grandfather. I would rather say: David is given a part comparable to the part his grandfather played. The players should be distinguished from the parts they play, even though the two are often confused by the players themselves.

It is often not difficult to construct an approximate scenario for a two- or three-generational scrap of such plays.

Daughter sides with her easy-going, relatively absent father against nagging mother; without adequate support from him, succumbs to mother. Both rediscover loved and hated husband-father in grandson-son... and so on.

Such scenarios are sets of instructions for a play. But these scenarios, if they exist, are unwritten, and, if a part of a scenario sometimes appears in the lines of the play itself, those who enunciate it are usually deeply unaware that they are doing so.

In my own early life, I was often told that I was going to take after my grandfather; not immediately, but when I grew up. We are given such indications as we come out of the womb, on how to go into our graves. They may be implanted before one is five years of age, with instructions not to begin to act them out until 50 years later.

Almost all of us live almost all of our lives in families. First our family of origin; then, when we marry and have children, our so-called nuclear family, the family of origin for our children.

Through this chain of family systems, the fundamental rules that determine our culture are transmitted. We know practically nothing about it.

• The more one studies families in detail, the more it becomes apparent that patterns are spread over generations. They undergo transformations. No one, as far as I know, has found out whether these patterns and their transformations can be expressed in terms that at present we call mathematical. This is understandable. We ourselves, all of us, are ourselves the elements of the pattern that we are trying to discern. Family patterns are not laid out before us like the stars in the sky. [They are like musical] notes endowed with such awareness that they are only just able to glimpse the existence of the chord whose elements they are. Perhaps, from the interpenetration of their vibrations they may even begin to infer something in and beyond them, that requires both their life and their death. We call it music: that disdains to be heard by the notes that comprise it.

We are acting parts in a play, that we have never read and never seen, whose plot we don't know, whose existence we can glimpse, but whose ending I do not dare to presume to imagine.

· Our adult experience is a very sophisticated product of many procedures. These laws governing our experience are both natural and social. …The “deeper” that the social laws are planted in us, the more “hard-programmed”, the more “pickled” into us, then the more like “natural” laws they come to appear to us to be. Indeed, if someone breaks such a “deeply” implanted social law, we are inclined to say that he is “unnatural”. Some of the most seemingly “natural” features of contemporary experience are acquired in families, when we are very young.

We construe the given in terms of distinctions, according to rules. We perform operations on our experience in order to comply with the rules. By these operations, according to the rules, in terms of the distinctions, a normal product is generated, if all goes according to plan.

· Given our distinctions and our rules, we have to work to normalize our experience. We could never succeed unless we were able to employ a further set of operations on our experience. Most of these are described in psychoanalysis as “defence mechanisms”:

Denial is one of the simplest.

“This is the case” is changed to: “This is not the case”; e.g., “I feel jealous” is changed to: “I do not feel jealous.”

Splitting. A set is partitioned into two subsets.

In a complete split, no traffic is allowed to occur between the two subsets.

Displacement.

e.g., I feel angry at Tom, instead of Dick.

I come back and “take it out” on the wife, for what I feel about the Boss.

Scotomatization.

I do not see what I do not want to.

Replacement.

I see something else instead.

Projection.

I map inside onto outside.

Introjection.

I map outside onto inside.

Rationalization.

I give myself a cover-story.

Repression.

Forgetting and forgetting one has forgotten.

Identification.

Two separate subsets are taken to be one.

Mystification.

Misdefinition of the issues.

Reversal.

I hate him is reversed to: He hates me.

Many more are described in psychoanalytic literature, including inversion, reaction-formation, isolation, reduplication, turning against the self, undoing, idealization, de-realization. Some of these "defences" are simple, and others made up of two or three simple operations.

· Operations apply additional constraints on the product. They "cancel" and substitute what is in accord with rules, and they do this according to rules that govern the operations themselves. If experience (E) is permitted to be pleasant or ought to be pleasant E will be operated upon to make it more seemingly pleasant. But if the rules do not permit or demand this, if pleasure is forbidden or despised, then "pleasure" will be sacrificed for other values higher on the hierarchy.

Most operations on E are themselves operated upon to render them as we say "unconscious". Only as we manage to neutralize these operations on operations can our operations on E become themselves elements of E, such that we can examine them. Until we can do this, we have to infer them. Such an inference as to their existence may itself be blocked by such operations as denial, scotomatization.

The operations on experience that we are discussing, are commonly not experienced themselves. So seldom does one ever catch oneself in the act, that I would have been tempted to regard them as, themselves, essentially not elements of experience, had I not occasionally been able to catch a glimpse of them in action myself, and had not others reported the same to me. It is comparatively easy to catch someone else in the act. This leads me to propose that there is an operation, or a class of operations, that operates on our experience of our operations, to cancel them from our experience: operations of this latter class somehow operate on our experience of themselves, whereby we neither experience our first operations nor the operations that shut the former operations out of our experience. This is particularly clear in the case of repression.

· So we are a happy family and we have no secrets from one another.

If we are unhappy/we have to keep it a secret/

and we are unhappy that we have to keep it a secret

and unhappy that we have to keep secret/the fact/that

we have to keep it a secret and that we are keeping all that secret.

But since we are a happy family you can see this difficulty does not arise.

• The product arrived at is the outcome of many rules without which it could not be generated or maintained, but to admit the rules would be to admit what the rules and operations are attempting to render non-existent.

One is expected to be capable of passion, once married, but not to have experienced too much passion (let alone acted upon it) too much before. If this is too difficult, one has to pretend first not to feel the passion one really feels, then, to pretend to passion one does not really feel, and to pretend that certain passionate upsurges of resentment, hatred, envy, are unreal, or don't happen, or are something else. This requires false realizations, false de-realizations, and a cover-story (rationalization). After this almost complete holocaust of one's experience on the altar of conformity, one is liable to feel somewhat empty, but one can try to fill one's emptiness up with money, consumer goods, position, respect, admiration, envy of one's fellows for one's business, professional, social success. These together with a repertoire of distractions, permitted or compulsory, serve to distract one from one's own distraction: and if one finds oneself overworked, under too great a strain, there are perfectly approved additional lines of defence, concoctions to taste of, narcotics, stimulations, sedatives, tranquillizers to depress one further so that one does not know how depressed one is and to help one to over-eat and over-sleep. And there are lines of defence beyond that, to electro-shocks, to the (almost) final solution of simply removing sections of the offending body, especially the central nervous system. This last solution is necessary, however, only if the normal social lobotomy does not work, and chemical lobotomy has also failed.

I can think of no way of generating a “normal” product from the stuff of our original selves except in some such way: once we arrive at our matrix of distinctions, we have rules for combining and partitioning them into sets and subsets. The “normal” product requires that these operations are themselves denied. We like the food served up elegantly before us: we do not want to know about the animal factories, the slaughter-houses and what goes on in the kitchen. Our own cities are our own animal factories; our families, schools, and churches are the slaughter-houses of our children; colleges and other places are the kitchens. As adults in marriages and business, we eat the product.

• Once one begins to break some of the rules against seeing the rules, one realizes that much of one’s difficulty is not due to the intrinsic complexity of the family situation, but to one’s inhibitions against seeing what may be obvious, once the inhibition against seeing it is undone. There remain inhibitions against putting into words, such real or imagined insights.

I have never come across a family that does not draw a line somewhere as to: what may be put into words, and, what words may be put into.

• As long as we cannot up-level our "thinking" beyond Us and Them, the goodies and baddies, it [the hidden induction process] will go on and on. The only possible end will be when all the goodies have killed all the baddies, and all the baddies all the goodies, which does not seem so difficult or unlikely since to Us, we are the goodies and They are the baddies, while to Them, we are the baddies and they are the goodies.

Millions of people have died this century and millions more are going to, including, we have every reason to expect, many of Us and our children, because we cannot break this knot.

It seems a comparatively simple knot, but it is tied very, very tight - round the throat, as it were, of the whole human species.

But don't believe me because I say so, look in the mirror and see for yourself.

From Mystification, Confusion and Conflict (full article is indexed on remedy’s “From The Writings” page)

· In order to recognize persons and not simply objects, one must realize that the other human being is not only another object in space but another center of orientation to the objective world.

· The prime function of mystification appears to be to maintain the status quo. It is brought into play, or it is intensified, when one or more members of the family nexus threaten, or are felt to threaten, the status quo of the nexus by the way they are experiencing, and acting in, the situation they share with the other members of the family.

The theoretically ultimate extreme of mystification is when the person (p) seeks to induce in the other (o) confusion (not necessarily recognized by o) as to o's whole experience (memory, perceptions, dreams, fantasy, imagination), processes, and actions. The mystified person is one who is given to understand that he feels happy or sad regardless of how he feels he feels, that he is responsible for this or not responsible for that regardless of what responsibility he has or has not taken upon himself. Capacities, or their lack, are attributed to him without reference to any shared empirical criteria of what these may or may not be. His own motives and intentions are discounted or minimized and replaced by others. His experience and actions generally are construed without reference to his own point of view. There is a radical failure to recognize his own self-perception and self-identity. And, of course, when this is the case, not only his self-perceptions and self-identity are confused but his perceptions of others, of how they experience him and act toward him and of how he thinks they think he thinks, etc., are necessarily subjected to multiple mystifications at one and the same time.

The members of the families of the schizophrenic patients so far studied use mystification frequently as the preferred means of controlling the experience and action of the schizophrenic patient.
We have never yet seen a pre-schizophrenic who was not in a highly mystified state before his or her manifest psychotic breakdown.

· In most forms of psychotherapy the therapist attributes motives and intentions to the patient which are not in accord with those the patient attributes to his own actions. But the therapist (one hopes) does not mystify the patient, in that he says implicitly or explicitly: You see yourself as motivated by A and intending B. I see you, however, as motivated by X and intending Y, and here is my evidence, drawn from my personal encounter with you.

From Sanity, Madness and The Family (R.D. Laing and Aaron Esterson).

A difficulty facing the formal patient (under compulsory treatment order) is that he may refuse to admit that he needs medication/therapy and incarceration. The attending staff may behave both in a benevolent manner ("We are here to help you") and in an essentially adversarial manner ("We will force treatment upon you, in your best interests") thus demanding that the patient show overt signs of appreciation or face further incarceration. Here, a very difficult situation can occur for both patient and attending staff. The patient becomes aware of this paradox and informs the staff about it. He adopts a meta-position to the game-play and thus may become labelled in a different way - i.e. "Manipulative." The attending staff member is no more able to escape the paradox than the patient, but he who holds the keys and needles, holds the power.

A child who cannot escape the fact that he is just a child, in respect to his parents, may find a similar situation occurring:

Her parents appear to have consistently regarded with alarm all expressions of developing autonomy on Maya's part necessarily involving efforts to separate herself from them and to do things on her own initiative. Her parents' alarm remains unabated in the present. For example, her mother objected to her ironing without supervision, although for the past year she had been working in a laundry without mishap. Mr. and Mrs. Abbott regarded their daughter's use of her own 'mind' independently of them, as synonymous with 'illness', and as a rejection of them. Her mother said:

"I think I am so absolutely centred on one thing - it's well, to get her well - I mean as a child, and as a - teenager I could always sort out whatever was wrong or - do something about it but it - but this illness has been so completely er - our relations have been different - you see Maya is er - instead of accepting everything - as if I said to her, er, 'black is black', she would have probably believed it, but since she's ill, she's never accepted anything any more. She's had to reason it out for herself, then she didn't seem to take my word for it - which of course is quite different to me."

From The Voice of Experience

[re the temptation to try to explain the synchronistic elements of life’s story] We cannot expect to grasp that which holds us in its grasp . . . . The most ordinary events of the ordinary human world are beyond us. We can see that our single destinies intertwine and interpenetrate, that others figure in our dreams and dramas as we play our unrecognizable parts in the dreams and dramas of those with whom our lives intermingle.

From The Divided Self (1959)

• Freud insisted that our civilization is a repressive one. There is a conflict between the demands of conformity and the demands of our instinctive energies, explicitly sexual. Freud could see no easy resolution of this antagonism, and he came to believe that in our time the possibility of simple natural love between human beings had already been abolished.

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.

In the context of our present pervasive madness that we call normality, sanity, freedom, all our frames of reference are ambiguous and equivocal.

Psychiatry could be, and some psychiatrists are, on the side of transcendence, of genuine freedom, and of true human growth. But psychiatry can so easily be a technique of brainwashing, of inducing behaviour that is adjusted, by (preferably) non-injurious torture. In the best places, where straitjackets are abolished, doors are unlocked, leucotomies largely forgone, these can be replaced by more subtle lobotomies and tranquillizers that place the bars of Bedlam and the locked doors inside the patient. Thus I would wish to emphasize that our 'normal' 'adjusted' state is too often the abdication of ecstasy, the betrayal of our true potentialities, that many of us are only too successful in acquiring a false self to adapt to false realities.

· "What about the boy's experience...? He seems to be tormented and desperate. What is he 'about' in speaking and acting this way? He is objecting to being measured and tested. He wants to be heard". ………..It is just possible to have a thorough knowledge of what has been discovered about the hereditary or familial incidence of manic-depressive psychosis or schizophrenia, to have a facility in recognizing schizoid "ego distortion" and schizophrenic ego defects, plus the various "disorders" of thought, memory, perceptions, etc., to know, in fact, just about everything that can be known about the psychopathology of schizophrenia or schizophrenia as a disease without being able to understand one single schizophrenic. Such data are all ways of not understanding him.

· The "unreal man" learnt to cry when he was amused, and to smile when he was sad. He frowned his approval, and applauded his displeasure. "All that you can see is not me," he says to himself. But only in and through all that we do see can he be anyone (in reality). If these actions are not his real self, he is irreal; wholly symbolical and imaginary; a purely virtual, potential, imaginary person, a "mythical" man, nothing "really." The individual in the ordinary circumstances of living 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 . . . He may feel more insubstantial than substantial, and unable to assume that the stuff he is made of is genuine, good, valuable. And he may feel his self as partially divorced from his body.

· In an insecure, "schizoid" individual, there is an attempt to create relationships to persons and things within the individual without recourse to the outer world of persons and things at all. The individual is developing a micro-cosmos within himself; but, of course, this autistic, private, intra-individual "world" is not a feasible substitute for the only world there really is, the shared world.

• The self, as long as it is "uncommitted to the objective element," is free to dream and imagine anything. Without reference to the objective element it can be all things to itself – it has unconditioned freedom, power, creativity. But its freedom and its omnipotence are exercised in a vacuum and its creativity is only the capacity to produce phantoms.

• Three forms of anxiety encountered by the ontologically insecure person: engulfment, implosion, petrification (and depersonalization).

Engulfment

Herein is a person whose threshold of basic security is so low that practically any relationship with another person, however tenuous or however apparently ‘harmless’, threatens to overwhelm him. Ordinarily, a firm sense of one's own autonomous identity is required in order that one may be related as one human being to another. Otherwise, any and every relationship threatens the individual with loss of identity. One form this takes can be called engulfment. In this the individual dreads relatedness as such, with anyone or anything or, indeed, even with himself, because his uncertainty about the stability of his autonomy lays him open to the dread lest in any relationship he will lose his autonomy and identity. Engulfment is felt as a risk in being understood (thus grasped, comprehended), in being loved, or even simply in being seen. To be hated may be feared for other reasons, but to be hated as such is often less disturbing than to be destroyed, as it is felt, through being engulfed by love.

The main manoeuvre used to preserve identity under pressure from the dread of engulfment is isolation. …To be understood correctly is to be engulfed, to be enclosed, swallowed up, drowned, eaten up, smothered, stifled in or by another person's supposed all-embracing comprehension. It is lonely and painful to be always misunderstood, but there is at least from this point of view a measure of safety in isolation.

The other's love is therefore feared more than his hatred, or rather all love is sensed as a version of hatred. By being loved one is placed under an unsolicited obligation. In therapy with such a person, the last thing there is any point in is to pretend to more 'love' or 'concern' than one has. The more the therapist's own necessarily very complex motives for trying to 'help' a person of this kind genuinely converge on a concern for him which is prepared to 'let him be' and is not in fact engulfing or merely indifference, the more hope there will be in the horizon.

Implosion

This is the strongest word I can find for the extreme form of the impingement of reality. Impingement does not convey, however, the full terror of the experience of the world as liable at any moment to crash in and obliterate all identity as a gas will rush in and obliterate a vacuum. The individual feels that, like the vacuum, he is empty. … Any ‘contact’ with reality is then in itself experienced as a dreadful threat because reality, as experienced from this position, is necessarily implosive and thus, as was relatedness in engulfment, in itself a threat to what identity the individual is able to suppose himself to have.

Reality, as such, threatening engulfment or implosion, is the persecutor.

In fact, we are all only two or three degrees Fahrenheit from experiences of this order. Even a slight fever, and the whole world can begin to take on a persecutory, impinging aspect.

Petrification and depersonalization

In using the term ‘petrification’, one can exploit a number of the meanings embedded in this word:

1. A particular form of terror, whereby one is petrified, i.e. turned to stone.

2. The dread of this happening: the dread, that is, of the possibility of turning, or being turned, from a live person into a dead thing, into a stone, into a robot, an automaton, without personal autonomy of action, an it without subjectivity.

3. The 'magical' act whereby one may attempt to turn someone else into stone, by 'petrifying' him; and, by extension, the act whereby one negates the other person's autonomy, ignores his feelings, regards him as a thing, kills the life in him. In this sense one may perhaps better say that one depersonalizes him, or reifies him. One treats him not as a person, as a free agent, but as an it.

Depersonalization is a technique that is universally used as a means of dealing with the other when he becomes too tiresome or disturbing. One no longer allows oneself to be responsive to his feelings and may be prepared to regard him and treat him as though he had no feelings. The people in focus here both tend to feel themselves as more or less depersonalized and tend to depersonalize others; they are constantly afraid of being depersonalized by others. The act of turning him into a thing is, for him, actually petrifying. In the face of being treated as an 'it', his own subjectivity drains away from him like blood from the face. Basically he requires constant confirmation from others of his own existence as a person.

• The schizoid state can be understood as an attempt to preserve a being that is precariously structured. We shall suggest later that the initial structuralization of being into its basic elements occurs in early infancy. In normal circumstances, this occurs in such a way as to be so conclusively stable in its basic elements (for instance, the continuity of time, the distinction between the self and not-self, phantasy and reality), that it can henceforth be taken for granted: on this stable base, a considerable amount of plasticity can exist in what we call a person's 'character'. In the schizoid character structure, on the other hand, there is an insecurity in the laying down of the foundations and a compensatory rigidity in the superstructure.

• I am quite sure that a good number of ‘cures’ of psychotics consist in the fact that the patient has decided, for one reason or other, once more to play at being sane.

• I saw Rose when she was twenty-three years of age. When I saw her she said that she was frightened she was going insane, as in fact she was. She said that horrible memories had been coming back to her, which she could not forget no matter how hard she tried. But now she had discovered the answer to this. She was now trying, she said, to forget these memories by forgetting herself. She tried to do this by looking all the time at other people and hence never noticing herself. At first it was something of a relief for her to feel that she was going down and down and that she didn't want to fight. But something in her fought against this. She was depressed and continued to try to do things, but this became a greater and greater effort, until every thought or movement felt as though it had to be initiated by a deliberate act of will. But then she began to feel that she had no more will-power - she had used it all up…

• The divorce of the self from the body is both something which is painful to be borne, and which the sufferer desperately longs for someone to help mend, but it is also utilized as the basic means of defence. This in fact defines the essential dilemma. The self wishes to be wedded to and embedded in the body, yet is constantly afraid to lodge in the body for fear of there being subject to attacks and dangers which it cannot escape. Yet the self finds that though it is outside the body it cannot sustain the advantages that it might hope for in this position. What happens then:

1. The self’s orientation is a primitive oral one, concerned with the dilemma of sustaining its aliveness, while being terrified to ‘take in anything’. It becomes parched with thirst, and desolate.

2. It becomes charged with hatred of all that is there. The only way of destroying and of not destroying what is there may be felt to be to destroy itself.

3. The attempt to kill the self may be undertaken intentionally. It is partly defensive ('if I'm dead, I can't be killed'); partly an attempt to endorse the crushing sense of guilt that oppresses the individual (no sense of a right to be alive).

4. The 'inner' self becomes itself split, and loses its own identity and integrity.

5. It loses its own realness and direct access to realness outside itself.

6. (a) The place of safety of the self becomes a prison. Its would-be haven becomes a hell.

(b) It ceases even to have the safety of a solitary cell. Its own enclave becomes a torture chamber. The inner self is persecuted within this chamber by split concretized parts of itself or by its own phantoms which have become uncontrollable.

· In many schizophrenics, the self-body split remains the basic one. However, when the 'centre' fails to hold, neither self-experience nor body-experience can retain identity, integrity, cohesiveness, or vitality, and the individual becomes precipitated into a condition the end result of which we suggested could best be described as a state of 'chaotic nonentity '. The best description of any such condition I have been able to find in literature is in the Prophetic Books of William Blake. In the Greek descriptions of Hell, and in Dante, the shades or ghosts, although estranged from life, still retain their inner cohesiveness. In Blake, this is not so. The figures of his Books undergo division in themselves. These books require prolonged study, not to elucidate Blake's psychopathology, but in order to learn from him what, somehow, he knew about in a most intimate fashion, while remaining sane.

· A good deal of schizophrenia is simply nonsense, red-herring speech, prolonged filibustering to throw dangerous people off the scent, to create boredom and futility in others. The schizophrenic is often making a fool of himself and the doctor. He is playing at being mad to avoid at all costs the possibility of being held responsible for a single coherent idea, or intention.

· It is the thesis of this study that schizophrenia is a possible outcome of a more than usual difficulty in being a whole person with the other, and with not sharing the common-sense (i.e. the community sense) way of experiencing oneself in the world. The world of the child, as of the adult, is 'a unity of the given and the constructed' (Hegel), a unity for the child of what is mediated to it by the parents, the mother in the first instance, and of what he makes of this. The mother and father greatly simplify the world for the young child, and as his capacity grows to make sense, to inform chaos with pattern, to grasp distinctions and connections of greater and greater complexity, so – as Buber puts it – he is led out into 'a feasible world'.

But what can happen if the mother's or the family's scheme of things does not match what the child can live and breathe in? The child then has to develop its own piercing vision and to be able to live by that - as William Blake succeeded in doing, as Rimbaud succeeded in stating, but not in living - or else become mad. It is out of the earliest loving bonds with the mother that the infant develops the beginnings of a being-for-itself. It is in and through these bonds that the mother 'mediates' the world to the infant in the first place. The world he is given may be one he can manage to be in; it is possible, on the contrary, that what he is given is just not feasible for him at the time. Yet, despite the importance of the first year of life, the nature of the milieu in which the child has to exist throughout its infancy, childhood, and adolescence may still have great effect one way or the other. It is at these subsequent stages that the father or other significant adults may play a decisive role in the child's life, either in direct relation with the child or, indirectly, through effects on the mother.

These considerations suggest that one might do better to think of schizophrenogenic families, rather than too exclusively of schizophrenogenic mothers. At least, doing so might encourage more reports of the dynamics of the family constellation as a whole, instead of studies of mothers, or fathers, or siblings, without sufficient reference to the whole family dynamics.

From Self and Others (1961)

[In the following excerpts, there is frequent reference to “phantasy” (English spelling). Phantasy is essentially the mental corollary – the psychic representation – of instinct. Laing notes the work of Susan Isaacs, entitled “The Nature and Function of Phantasy” (summarized in our ‘From The Writings’ section, under Laing) observing that ‘unconscious phantasy is a way of experiencing our desires which plays a part in our personal relations throughout life’.]

• If I want to get to know you, it is unlikely that I shall if I proceed as though I were studying nebulae or rats. You will not be inclined to disclose yourself to me. Whatever else I may be studying, I shall not be studying you if I do not know you. If you are adept at self-concealment, you may be justifiably confident that I shall not learn much about you by scrutinizing your behaviour alone. If one says that all one is interested in is the study of behaviour 'pure and simple', then one is not studying persons.

• Phantasy may or may not be experienced, by either the one person or the other, as inner or outer, private or public, shareable or unshareable, real or unreal. It is ironical that often what I take to be most public reality turns out to be what others take to be my most private phantasy. And that which I suppose is my most private ‘inner’ world turns out to be what I have most in common with other human beings.

A psychoanalyst describes his experience at certain moments in a group when he feels he is being manipulated so as to be playing a part, no matter how difficult to recognize, in somebody else’s phantasy – or he would do if it were not for what in recollection I can only call a temporary loss of insight, a sense of experiencing strong feelings, and at the same time a belief that their existence is quite adequately justified by the objective situation without recourse to recondite explanation of their causation.

This alienation effect is insidious. We are all prone to be drawn into social phantasy systems, with loss of one’s 'own' identity in the process, and only in retrospect become aware that this has happened. I believe the ability to shake one's self out of the numbing feeling of reality that is a concomitant of this state is the prime requisite of the analyst in the group.

To shake one's self out of the false sense of reality entails a de-realization of what one falsely takes to be unreality. Only then is one able to apperceive the social phantasy system in which one is. The normal state of affairs is to be so immersed in one's immersion in social phantasy systems that one takes them to be real.

• All groups operate by means of phantasy. The type of experience a group gives us is one of the main reasons, if not for some people the only reason, for being in a group. What do people want to get from the experience of being in a particular set of human collectivities?

The close-knit groups that occur in some families and other groupings are bound together by the need to find pseudo-real experience that can be found only through the modality of phantasy. This means that the family is not experienced as the modality of phantasy but as 'reality'. However, 'reality' in this sense is not a modality, but a quality attachable to any modality.

If a family member has a tenable position within the family phantasy system, his call to leave the system in any sense is likely only to come from outside the phantasy system. We vary in readiness, and in desire, to emerge from the unconscious phantasy systems we take to be our realities. As long as we are in apparently tenable positions, we find every reason not to suppose that we are in a false sense of reality or unreality, security or insecurity, identity or lack of identity.

A false social sense of reality entails, among other things, phantasy unrecognized as such. If Paul begins to wake up from the family phantasy system, he can only be classified as mad or bad by the family since to them their phantasy is reality, and what is not their phantasy is not real. If he testifies to any experience outside what they take to be real and true, he can only be involved in a regrettable tissue of phantasy and falsehood, in telling them that what they know to be real and true is a regrettable tissue of phantasy and falsehood, in telling him that what he knows to be real and true, is a regrettable tissue of phantasy and falsehood, for which he needs therapy.

• The usual state of affairs is to be in a tenable position in phantasy systems of a nexus. This is usually called having an ‘identity’ or 'personality'. We never realize we are in it. We never even dream of extricating ourselves. We tolerate, punish, or treat as harmless, bad, or mad those who try to extricate themselves, and tell us that we should also.

A person may be placed in an untenable position comprising a non-compossible set of positions. When his position, or positions in the social phantasy system become such that he can neither stay in nor leave his own phantasy, his position is untenable.

• 'Reality' moves from relative to absolute. The more the man we think is absolutely wrong thinks he is absolutely right and we are absolutely wrong, the sooner that man has to be destroyed before he destroys himself or us. We do not (of course) mean that we want to destroy him. We want to save him from his terrible delusion that we want to destroy him. Can't he see that all we want to do is to destroy his delusion? His delusion that we want to destroy him. His delusion is the belief that we are trying to stick pins in his eyes. Someone who thinks that people are sticking pins in his eyes may go along to a psychiatrist to have himself leucotomized by pins being stuck in his eyes, because he would rather even believe he was mad than that it might be real.

• Some 'psychotics' look on psychoanalysis as a relatively safe place to tell someone what they really think. They are prepared to play at being a patient and even to keep up the charade by paying the analyst, providing he does not ‘cure’ them. They are even prepared to pretend to be cured if it will look bad for him if he is having a run of people who don't seem to be getting better.

Not an unreasonable contract.

• Most three-year-olds, helped on by their parents, helped on by authorities such as Anna Freud, are well on the way to successfully pretending to be just little boys and girls. Just about this time the child abdicates his ecstasy and forgets that he is pretending to be just a little boy. He becomes just a little boy. But he is no more simply himself, because he is now just a little boy, than the man is simply himself because he is a waiter in a cafe. 'Just a little boy' is just what many authorities on children think a three-year-old human being is.

Sixty years later that man, having come to believe he was 'just a little boy' who had to learn all those things in order to become a 'big man', and having stuffed his mind with all the other things that big men tell little boys, having become a big man, begins to become an old man. But suddenly he begins to remember that it had all been a game. He had played at being a little boy, and at being a big man, and is now well into playing at being an ‘old man’. His wife and children begin to get very worried. A psychoanalyst friend of the family explains that a hypomanic denial of death (he had been influenced by existentialism), is not uncommon in certain particularly 'successful' people; it is a reversion to infantile omnipotence. Probably it can be 'contained' if he is socialized into a religious group. It might be a good idea if the minister was asked round for dinner. We'd better watch out that the investments are quite safe, just in case ...

He tries to pretend that he is 'simply himself, just a little boy'. But he cannot quite do so. A three-year-old who tries and fails to pretend he is 'just a little boy' is in for trouble. He is likely to be sent for psychoanalysis if his parents can afford it. Woe betide the sixty-three-year-old man if he is unable to pretend that he is 'just an old man'.

• To live in the past or in the future may be less satisfying than to live in the present, but it can never be as disillusioning. The present will never be what has been or what could be…. In the search for something outside time, there is an enervating sense of pointlessness and hopelessness.

Time is empty. It is as futile as it is inescapable. A false eternity, made out of all the time on one's hands which drags on eternally. It is an attempt to live outside time by living in a part of time, to live timelessly in the past, or in the future. The present is never realized.