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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

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R. D. Laing
Age: 61 †
Born: 1927
Born: October 7
Died: 1989
Died: August 23
Author
Existential Therapist
Military Personnel
Military Physician
Non-Fiction Writer
Physician Writer
Psychiatrist
Psychoanalyst
Psychologist
Glasgow
Scotland
Ronald Laing
R.D. Laing
Ronald D. Laing
Ronald David Laing
Owes
Felt
Assume
True
Obligation
Feel
Assuming
Feels
Guilt
People
False
Oneself
Ought

More quotes by R. D. Laing

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Schizophrenia is a successful attempt not to adapt to pseudo- social realities.
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Being embodied as such is no insurance against feelings of hopelessness or meaningslessness. Beyond his body, he still has to know who he is.
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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.
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Insanity - a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world.
R. D. Laing
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The universe was a vast machine yesterday, it is a hologram today. Who knows what intellectual rattle we'll be shaking tomorrow.
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There are good reasons for being obedient, but being unable to be disobedient is not one of the best reasons.
R. D. Laing
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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
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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
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Schizophrenia is the name for a condition that most psychiatrists ascribe to patients they call schizophrenic.
R. D. Laing
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There is no such condition as 'schizophrenia,' but the label is a social fact and the social fact a political event.
R. D. Laing
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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
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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
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Philosophy does not exist. It is nothing but an hypostatized abstraction.
R. D. Laing
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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
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No one has the answer: we are answer and question.
R. D. Laing
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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