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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
Disobedient
Obedient
Unable
Reasons
Best
Reason
Good

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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.
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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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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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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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Schizophrenia is the name for a condition that most psychiatrists ascribe to patients they call schizophrenic.
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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.
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We are effectively destroying ourselves by violence masquerading as love.
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Few books today are forgivable.
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Psychological breakdowns are actually breakthroughs to enlightenment.
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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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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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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.
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Each time a new baby is born there is a possibility of reprieve. Each child is a new being, a potential prophet, a new spiritual prince, a new spark of light precipitated into the outer darkness.
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The psychiatrist must become a fellow traveler with his patient.
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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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Human beings seem to have an almost unlimited capacity to deceive themselves, and to deceive themselves into taking their own lies for truth.
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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