Quote

Psychological breakdowns are actually breakthroughs to enlightenment.

R. D. Laing

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Breakdown
Breakthrough
Psychological
Enlightenment
Actually
Breakdowns
Breakthroughs

More quotes by R. D. Laing

Image
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
Image
Schizophrenia is the name for a condition that most psychiatrists ascribe to patients they call schizophrenic.
R. D. Laing
Image
A psychiatrist who professes to be a healer of souls, but who keeps people asleep, treats them for waking up, and drugs them asleep again (increasingly effectively as this field of technology sharpens its weapons), helps to drive them crazy.
R. D. Laing
Image
Children are not yet fools, but we shall turn them into imbeciles like ourselves, with high I.Q.'s if possible.
R. D. Laing
Image
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
Image
Schizophrenia is a successful attempt not to adapt to pseudo- social realities.
R. D. Laing
Image
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
Image
In the society of men the truth resides now less in what things are than in what they are not. Our social realities are so ugly if seen in the light of exiled truth, and beauty is no longer possible if it is not a lie.
R. D. Laing
Image
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
Image
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.
R. D. Laing
Image
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
Image
Madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be break-through.
R. D. Laing
Image
There are good reasons for being obedient, but being unable to be disobedient is not one of the best reasons.
R. D. Laing
Image
No one has the answer: we are answer and question.
R. D. Laing
Image
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
Image
There is no such condition as 'schizophrenia,' but the label is a social fact and the social fact a political event.
R. D. Laing
Image
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.
R. D. Laing
Image
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.
R. D. Laing
Image
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
Image
We are bemused and crazed creatures, strangers to our true selves, to one another, and to the spiritual and material world - mad, even, from an ideal standpoint we can glimpse but not adopt.
R. D. Laing