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.
— R. D. Laing
The most helpful R. D. Laing quotes that are simple and will have a huge impact on you
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.
We are all in a post-hypnotic trance induced in early infancy.
Whether life is worth living depends on whether there is love in life.
Pain in this life is not avoidable, but the pain we create avoiding pain is avoidable.
We have to realize that we are as deeply afraid to live and to love as we are to die.
Madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be break-through.
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.
Our 'normal' 'adjusted' state is too often the abdication of ecstasy, the betrayal of our true potentialities.
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.
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.
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.
Where can you scream? It's a serious question: where can you go in society and scream?
Life is a sexually transmitted disease and the mortality rate is one hundred percent.
The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice.
When family relations are no longer harmonious, we have filial children and devoted parents.
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.
The psychiatrist must become a fellow traveler with his patient.
Psychological breakdowns are actually breakthroughs to enlightenment.
Normal men have killed perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years.
We are effectively destroying ourselves by violence masquerading as love.
Schizophrenia cannot be understood without understanding despair.
Schizophrenia is the name for a condition that most psychiatrists ascribe to patients they call schizophrenic.
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.
Perfection is something we should all strive for.
It's a duty and a joy to perfect one's nature... The most difficult thing is love. A loveless, driving person that just competes in the rat race is far from perfection in my book.
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.
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.
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.
The statesmen of the world who boast and threaten that they have Doomsday weapons are far more dangerous, and far more estranged from 'reality',than many of the people on whom the label 'psychotic' is affixed
Alienation as our present destiny is achieved only by outrageous violence perpetrated by human beings on human beings.
We are born into a world where alienation awaits us.
We are potentially men, but are in an alienated state, and this state is not simply a natural system. Alienation as our present destiny is achieved only by outrageous violence perpetrated by human beings on human beings.
Doctors have throughout time made fortunes on killing their patients with their cures. The difference in psychiatry is that it is the death of the soul.
Children are not yet fools, but we shall turn them into imbeciles like ourselves, with high I.Q.'s if possible.
The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one's mind, is the condition of the normal man.
The schizophrenic may indeed be mad. He is mad. He is not ill. I have been told by people who have been through the mad experience how what was then revealed to them was veritable manna from Heaven. The person's whole life may be changed, but it is difficult not to doubt the validity of such vision. Also, not everyone comes back to us again.
The truth brings with it a great measure of absolution, always.
Any experience of reality is indescribable!
Perhaps God is not dead; perhaps God himself is mad.
From the alienated starting point of our pseudo-sanity, everything is equivocal.
Our sanity is not "true" sanity. Their madness is not "true" madness. The madness of our patients is an artifact of the destruction wreaked on them by us, and by them on themselves.
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?
Children do not give up their innate imagination, curiosity, dreaminess easily.
You have to love them to get them to do that.
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.
If I hazard a guess as to the most endemic, prevalent anxiety among human beings-including fear of death, abandonment, loneliness-nothing is more prevalent than the fear of one another.
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.
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.
In the context of our present pervasive madness that we call normality, sanity, freedom, all our frames of reference are ambiguous and equivocal.
In a world full of danger, to be a potentially seeable object is to be constantly exposed to danger. Self-consciousness, then, may be the apprehensive awareness of oneself as potentially exposed to danger by the simple fact of being visible to others. The obvious defence against such a danger is to make oneself invisible in one way or another.
Society highly values its normal man.
It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal.
