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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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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
Invisible
Experience
Cannot
Men

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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.
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No one has schizophrenia, like having a cold. The patient has not got schizophrenia. He is schizophrenic.
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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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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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Society highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal.
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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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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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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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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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Schizophrenia is the name for a condition that most psychiatrists ascribe to patients they call schizophrenic.
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Psychological breakdowns are actually breakthroughs to enlightenment.
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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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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The psychiatrist must become a fellow traveler with his patient.
R. D. Laing
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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.
R. D. Laing
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We are effectively destroying ourselves by violence masquerading as love.
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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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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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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Children are not yet fools, but we shall turn them into imbeciles like ourselves, with high I.Q.'s if possible.
R. D. Laing