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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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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
Unable
Reasons
Best
Reason
Good
Disobedient
Obedient

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We are effectively destroying ourselves by violence masquerading as love.
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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?
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One cannot say everything at once.
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Alienation as our present destiny is achieved only by outrageous violence perpetrated by human beings on human beings.
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I cannot experience your experience. You cannot experience my experience. We are both invisible men.
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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.
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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.
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Perhaps God is not dead perhaps God himself is mad.
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Insanity - a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world.
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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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Few books today are forgivable. Black on canvas, silence on the screen, an empty white sheet of paper are perhaps feasible.
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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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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.
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Children do not give up their innate imagination, curiosity, dreaminess easily. You have to love them to get them to do that.
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Schizophrenia is a successful attempt not to adapt to pseudo- social realities.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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