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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

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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
Well
Madness
Need
Diversity
Needs
Potential
Break
Enslavement
Death
Breakdown
Also
Renewal
May
Existential
Wells
Liberation

More quotes by 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.
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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.
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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 father and mother and their parents and their parents before them, have been. These forces are mainly concerned with destroying most of its potential.
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Schizophrenia is a successful attempt not to adapt to pseudo- social realities.
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Alienation as our present destiny is achieved only by outrageous violence perpetrated by human beings on human beings.
R. D. Laing
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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
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Where can you scream? It's a serious question: where can you go in society and scream?
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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.
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When family relations are no longer harmonious, we have filial children and devoted parents.
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The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice. And because 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
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I cannot experience your experience. You cannot experience my experience. We are both invisible men.
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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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
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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
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Perhaps God is not dead perhaps God himself is mad.
R. D. Laing
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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
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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
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Schizophrenia is the name for a condition that most psychiatrists ascribe to patients they call schizophrenic.
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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.
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Few books today are forgivable. Black on canvas, silence on the screen, an empty white sheet of paper are perhaps feasible.
R. D. Laing