110+ R. D. Laing Quotes On Friendship, Education And Road

R. D. Laing was a Scottish psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who, in the 1950s and 1960s, challenged the then-dominant psychiatric view of schizophrenia and other mental illnesses. He argued that mental illness was not the result of a physical disorder, but rather of emotional distress, and that it could be treated through psychotherapy. Laing's ideas were controversial, and his work had a major influence on the anti-psychiatry movement. Following is our collection on famous quotes by R. D. Laing on friendship, education, love.

Top 10 R. D. Laing Quotes

1. We are all in a post-hypnotic trance induced in early infancy.
2. Whether life is worth living depends on whether there is love in life.
3. Pain in this life is not avoidable, but the pain we create avoiding pain is avoidable.
4. We have to realize that we are as deeply afraid to live and to love as we are to die.
5. 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.
6. Madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be break-through.
7. Our 'normal' 'adjusted' state is too often the abdication of ecstasy, the betrayal of our true potentialities.
8. Insanity is a perfectly natural adjustment to a totally unnatural and negative environment.
9. Where can you scream? It's a serious question: where can you go in society and scream?
10. Life is a sexually transmitted disease and the mortality rate is one hundred percent.

R. D. Laing Short Quotes

• 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.
• Psychological breakdowns are actually breakthroughs to enlightenment.
• The psychiatrist must become a fellow traveler with his patient.
• Schizophrenia cannot be understood without understanding despair.
• 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.
• Schizophrenia is a successful attempt not to adapt to pseudo- social realities.
• The square root of nothing.

R. D. Laing Quotes About Love

We are effectively destroying ourselves by violence masquerading as love. — R. D. Laing

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. — R. D. Laing

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. — R. D. Laing

Children do not give up their innate imagination, curiosity, dreaminess easily. You have to love them to get them to do that. — R. D. Laing

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. — R. D. Laing

R. D. Laing Quotes About Society

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. — R. D. Laing

Society highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal. — R. D. Laing

The dynamics and structures found in those groups called families in our society may not be evident in those groups called families in other places and times. — R. D. Laing

In the society of men the truth resides now less in what things are than in what they are not. Our social realities are so ugly if seen in the light of exiled truth, and beauty is no longer possible if it is not a lie. — R. D. Laing

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. — R. D. Laing

In the society of men the truth resides now less in what things are than in what they are not. — R. D. Laing

In our society many of the old rituals have lost much of their power. New ones have not arisen. — R. D. Laing

R. D. Laing Quotes About Normal

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. — R. D. Laing

Normal men have killed perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years. — R. D. Laing

The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one's mind, is the condition of the normal man. — R. D. Laing

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

Normality 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 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years. — R. D. Laing

R. D. Laing Famous Quotes And Sayings

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. — R. D. Laing

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

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. — R. D. Laing

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. — R. D. Laing

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. — R. D. Laing

Schizophrenia is the name for a condition that most psychiatrists ascribe to patients they call schizophrenic. — R. D. Laing

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. — R. D. Laing

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 — R. D. Laing

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. — R. D. Laing

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. — R. D. Laing

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. — R. D. Laing

Children are not yet fools, but we shall turn them into imbeciles like ourselves, with high I.Q.'s if possible. — R. D. Laing

Alienation as our present destiny is achieved only by outrageous violence perpetrated by human beings on human beings. — R. D. Laing

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. — R. D. Laing

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. — R. D. Laing

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? — R. D. Laing

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. — R. D. Laing

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. — R. D. Laing

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. — R. D. Laing

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. — R. D. Laing

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. — R. D. Laing

We are bemused and crazed creatures, strangers to our true selves, to one another, and to the spiritual and material world -- mad, even, from an ideal standpoint we can glimpse but not adopt. — R. D. Laing

The experience and behavior that gets labeled schizophrenic is a special strategy that a person invents in order to live in an unlivable situation. — R. D. Laing

The brotherhood of man is evoked by particular men according to their circumstances. But it seldom extends to all men. In the name of our freedom and our brotherhood we are prepared to blow up the other half of mankind and to be blown up in our turn. — R. D. Laing

Here we have the paradox, the potentially tragic paradox, that our relatedness to others is an essential aspect of our being, as is our separateness, but any particular person is not a necessary part of our being. — R. D. Laing

A lot of the time I'm in the present, and I'm thinking about the past or scheming about the future and missing every present moment, instead of actually partaking of the sacrament of every present moment. — R. D. Laing

There is no such condition as schizophrenia, but the label is a social fact and the social fact a political event. — R. D. Laing

In describing one way of going mad, I shall try to show that there is a comprehensible transition from the sane schizoid way of being-in-the-world to a psychotic way of being-in-the-world. — R. D. Laing

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. — R. D. Laing

We must remember that we are living in an age in which the ground is shifting and the foundations are shaking. I cannot answer for other times and places. Perhaps it has always been so. We know it is true today. — R. D. Laing

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. — R. D. Laing

No one has the answer: we are answer and question. — R. D. Laing

The way out is through the door you came in. — R. D. Laing

No one acts or experiences in a vacuum. — R. D. Laing

I cannot experience your experience. You cannot experience my experience. We are both invisible men. — R. D. Laing

What do you do when you don't know what to do? No wonder there are more suicides among psychiatrists than in any other profession. — R. D. Laing

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. — R. D. Laing

When I go beyond a certain range it's outside of my direct horizon therefore I've got to rely on the writings and personal communications given to me by other people that I know.... I've got to try to piece together some tentative information picture of what the whole thing is like, but I'm aware that it becomes more and more speculative as it becomes more and more second, third, fourth hand. And this applies to absolutely everyone. — R. D. Laing

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 mother and father have been, and their parents and their parents before them. These forces are mainly concerned with destroying most of its potentialities. This enterprise is on the whole successful. — R. D. Laing

No one has schizophrenia, like having a cold. The patient has not "got" schizophrenia. He is schizophrenic. — R. D. Laing

One cannot say everything at once. — R. D. Laing

Human beings seem to have an almost unlimited capacity to deceive themselves, and to deceive themselves into taking their own lies for truth. — R. D. Laing

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. — R. D. Laing

Few books today are forgivable. — R. D. Laing

Experience is mad when it steps beyond the horizons of our common, that is, our communal sense. — R. D. Laing

Man as seen as an organism or man as seen as a person discloses different aspects of the human reality to the investigator. Both are quite possible methodologically but one must be alert to the possible occasion for confusion. (...) Seen as an organism, man cannot be anything else but a complex of things, of its, and the processes that ultimately comprise an organism are it-processes. — R. D. Laing

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. — R. D. Laing

Even facts become fictions without adequate ways of seeing "the facts". We do not need theories so much as the experience that is the source of the theory. We are not satisfied with faith, in the sense of an implausible hypothesis irrationally held: we demand to experience the "evidence". — R. D. Laing

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. — R. D. Laing

A mental healer may be a psychiatrist. A psychiatrist may or may not be a mental healer. — R. D. Laing

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. We who follow Freud have the benefit of the knowledge he brought back with him and conveyed to us. He survived. We must see of we now can survive without using a theory that is in some measure an instrument of defence. — R. D. Laing

Beauty is almost no longer possible if it is not a lie. — R. D. Laing

The fountain has not played itself out, the Flame still shines, the River still flows, the Spring still bubbles forth, the Light has not faded. But between us and It, there is a veil which is more like fifty feet of solid concrete. Deus absconditus. Or we have absconded. — R. D. Laing

In certain cases, a man blind from birth may have an operation performed which gives him his sight. The result: frequently misery, confusion, disorientation. The light that illumines the madman is an unearthly light, but I do not believe it is a projection, an emanation from his mundane ego. He is irradiated by a light that is more than he. It may burn him out. — R. D. Laing

We live equally out of our bodies and out of our minds. — R. D. Laing

Life is a sexually transmitted disease. — R. D. Laing

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. — R. D. Laing

Do not adjust your mind, the fault is in reality. — R. D. Laing

A man who says that men are machines may be a great scientist. A man who says he is a machine is 'depersonalized' in psychiatric jargon. — R. D. Laing

There are good reasons for being obedient, but being unable to be disobedient is not one of the best reasons. — R. D. Laing

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. — R. D. Laing

Conventions are convenient. It is inconvenient to say people are dead when they are alive, or alive when they have been buried, or that the world is crumbling when it is, as everyone can see, there as usual. If all A that does not fit B is ipso facto disqualified, we have to tailor A to shape and size to avoid serious trouble, and not all are equally gifted in this art. — R. D. Laing

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. — R. D. Laing

Philosophy does not exist. It is nothing but an hypostatized abstraction. — R. D. Laing

If I don't know I don't know, I think I know. If I don't know I know I know, I think I don't know. — R. D. Laing

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. — R. D. Laing

I, for instance, regard any particular man as finite, as one who has had a beginning and who will have an end. He has been born, and he is going to die. In the meantime, he has a body that roots him to this time and this place. — R. D. Laing

Being embodied as such is no insurance against feelings of hopelessness or meaningslessness. Beyond his body, he still has to know who he is. — R. D. Laing

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. — R. D. Laing

The universe was a vast machine yesterday, it is a hologram today. Who knows what intellectual rattle we'll be shaking tomorrow. — R. D. Laing

Few books today are forgivable. Black on canvas, silence on the screen, an empty white sheet of paper are perhaps feasible. — R. D. Laing

How do we define, how do we describe, how do we explain and/or understand ourselves? What sort of creatures do we take ourselves to be? What are we? Who are we? Why are we? How do we come to be what or who we are or take ourselves to be? How do we give an account of ourselves? How do we account for ourselves, our actions, interactions, transactions (praxis), our biologic processes? Our specific human existence? — R. D. Laing

The 'data' (given) of research are not so much given as taken out of a constantly elusive matrix of happenings. We should speak of capta rather than data. — R. D. Laing

Life Lessons by R. D. Laing

1. R. D. Laing taught that understanding the inner world of an individual is key to understanding their behavior, and that it is important to look beyond the surface to find the root cause of mental health issues.
2. He also argued that the traditional approach to mental health was often too focused on diagnosis and treatment, and that it was important to recognize the unique experience of each individual.
3. Finally, he emphasized the importance of empathy and compassion in the process of helping people with mental health issues.