Knots

Product Information

Laing would disappear for months on end, forgetting birthdays before turning up in a blizzard of misdirected anger. In a 1994 biography he wrote of his father, Adrian recounts one of Laing's rare visits to their new home in Glasgow when, having argued with Jutta, he took out his anger by beating his daughter, Karen.

We can see other people's behaviour, but not their experience. This has led some people to insist that psychology has nothing to do with the other person's experience, but only with his behaviour. 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. You HAD to read Laing in those years. The awakening that invigorated young people around the world in the late sixties was now bearing fruit in the staid adult world of traditional disciplines. Laing and to pigeon hole him as a product of his time, another sixties rent-a-guru, a ‘jig man’ whose star flared briefly before spluttering into oblivion. This is to overlook the fact that Laing’sFinally, let me leave you with a clip from Did You Used to be R D Laing where Laing talks about his mother and, if what he’s relating is accurate (you can never be too sure with him) then it’s clear to see where his first knots originated:

I see you, and you see me. I experience you, and you experience me. I see your behaviour. You see my behaviour. But I do not and never have and never will see your experience of me. Just as you cannot "see" my experience of you. My experience of you is not "inside" me. It is simply you, as I experience you. And I do not experience you as inside me. Similarly, I take it that you do not experience me as inside you.

Create account

He liked to drink but he could take it. I saw him a few days before his body was found, and we went on drinking into the night. He seemed all right at the end.' Now is that not what Laing’s poem is saying but far more eloquently? But who is the ‘I’ in the poem? As far as Bobby Matherne’s concerned it’s the therapist who “must join them in their game to keep them as clients, or else they will leave therapy. In addition, the therapist must break up the game for the couple to move from a disjunctive conjunction to a copulative conjunction from now on.” [15] I didn’t read it that way when I was nineteen (which is probably how old I was at the time): I saw the ‘I’ in the book as me and the ‘they’ were my parents. I have sat in on sessions with my father while he was working with clients and experienced his genius as a man who could relate to another human’s pain and suffering. There seems to me to be a huge void and contradiction between RD Laing the psychiatrist and Ronnie Laing the father. There was something he was constantly searching for within himself and it tortured him. Nour, Matthew M.; Barrera, Alvaro (November 2015). "Schizophrenia, Subjectivity, and Mindreading". Schizophrenia Bulletin. 41 (6): 1214–1219. doi: 10.1093/schbul/sbv035. ISSN 0586-7614. PMC 4601706. PMID 25848120.

Ron Roberts, ‘Madness, Myth and Medicine—The Continuing Relevance of Thomas Szasz, Now in his 91st Year’, The Psychologist, 2 nd August 2010I started off talking about formulae and so let me finish there. Some people object to poems being viewed as problems to be solved. Formulae are not problems – they’re the answer to problems and that’s what many poems are, a working example. In Knots R D Laing presents us with scenarios but he’s not asking us to solve these so much as to see if we can relate to them. And isn’t that something we do with all poetry, look for ourselves in the lines and in between them? 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. Burston, Daniel (1998), The Wing of Madness: The Life and Work of R. D. Laing, Harvard University Press, p.145, ISBN 0-674-95359-2 Elizabeth Day and Graham Keeley, 'Dad solved other people's problems - but not his own', The Guardian, 1st June 2008 Ronald Laing was five when his parents told him Santa Claus did not exist. He never forgave them, claiming in later years that the realisation they had been lying to him triggered his first existential crisis. For the rest of his life, his childhood memories were bleak. He told interviewers of an emotionally deprived upbringing in the Govanhill area of Glasgow, with a disciplinarian mother who broke his favourite toys when he became too attached to them.

Laing, R.D. (1960) The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Laing never denied the existence of mental illness, but viewed it in a radically different light from his contemporaries. For Laing, mental illness could be a transformative episode whereby the process of undergoing mental distress was compared to a shamanic journey. The traveler could return from the journey with important insights, and may have become (in the views of Laing and his followers) a wiser and more grounded person as a result (Louis, B., 2006, Moving Beyond Prozac, DSM, and the New Psychiatry).For all his inconsistencies, there is little doubt that Laing loved his children, in spite of the flawed manner in which he expressed it. In one of his later works, The Facts of Life, Laing wrote: 'Whether life is worth living depends for me on whether there is love in life.' L]ike a contemporary pop star Laing was, in some respects, a product of the publics who read and celebrated him; a point which is nicely captured in the distinction that Adrian Laing draws between ‘Ronnie’, the father he knew, and ‘R.D. Laing’, the public celebrity. … I do not mean that he was a mere representation in radical culture. R.D. was one of Ronnie’s roles and had to be played to exist. [16] [italics mine] I’ve never had a great deal of interest in the big three sciences – biology, chemistry and physics – but I do like formulae. I think it’s simply amazing that you can reduce things to a stream (and often a very short stream) of letters, symbols and numbers. The one I remember from school is something called the coefficient of friction– µ. (µ is the twelfth letter of the Greek alphabet which we pronounce ‘mu’.) It tells you how slippery things are. Ice on steel has a low coefficient of friction, while rubber on pavement has a high coefficient of friction. Under good conditions, a tire on concrete may have a coefficient of friction of about 1.7 where a value of 0 means no friction whatsoever. The coefficient of friction is, however, an empirical measurement – it has to be measured experimentally, and cannot be found through calculations. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have a formula, and here it is: Laing saw psychopathology as being seated not in biological or psychic organs — whereby environment is relegated to playing at most only an accidental role as immediate trigger of disease (the "stress diathesis model" of the nature and causes of psychopathology) — but rather in the social cradle, the urban home, which cultivates it, the very crucible in which selves are forged. This re-evaluation of the locus of the disease process — and consequent shift in forms of treatment — was in stark contrast to psychiatric orthodoxy (in the broadest sense we have of ourselves as psychological subjects and pathological selves). Laing was revolutionary in valuing the content of psychotic behaviour and speech as a valid expression of distress, albeit wrapped in an enigmatic language of personal symbolism which is meaningful only from within their situation. 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.