By R. D. Laing
ISBN-10: 0141962089
ISBN-13: 9780141962085
Dr. Laing's first objective is to make insanity and the method of going mad understandable. during this, with case stories of schizophrenic sufferers, he succeeds brilliantly, yet he does extra: via a imaginative and prescient of sanity and insanity as 'degrees of conjunction and disjunction among people the place the single is sane via universal consent' he bargains a wealthy existential research of private alienation.
The outsider, estranged from himself and society, can't event both himself or others as 'real'. He invents a fake self and with it he confronts either the skin international and his personal depression. The disintegration of his actual self retains speed with the turning out to be unreality of his fake self till, within the extremes of schizophrenic breakdown, the complete character disintegrates.
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Extra resources for The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness
Sample text
The most serious objection to the technical vocabulary currently used to describe psychiatric patients is that it consists of words which split man up verbally in a way which is analogous to the existential splits we have to describe here. But we cannot give an adequate account of the existential splits unless we can begin from the concept of a unitary whole, and no such concept exists, nor can any such concept be expressed within the current language system of psychiatry or psycho-analysis. The words of the current technical vocabulary either refer to man in isolation from the other and the world, that is, as an entity not essentially ‘in relation to’ the other and in a world, or they refer to falsely substantialized aspects of this isolated entity.
R. D. LAINO Preface to the Pelican Edition One cannot say everything at once. I wrote this book when I was twenty-eight. I wanted to convey above all that it was far more possible than is generally supposed to understand people diagnosed as psychotic. Although this entailed understanding the social context, especially the power situation within the family, today I feel that, even in focusing upon and attempting to delineate a certain type of schizoid existence, I was already partially falling into the trap I was seeking to avoid.
Now it seems clear that this patient’s behaviour can be seen in at least two ways, analogous to the ways of seeing vase or face. One may see his behaviour as ‘signs’ of a ‘disease’; one may see his behaviour as expressive of his existence. The existential-phenomenological construction is an inference about the way the other is feeling and acting. What is the boy’s experience of Kraepelin? He seems to be tormented and desperate. What is he ‘about’ in speaking and acting in this way? He is objecting to being measured and tested.
The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness by R. D. Laing
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