Ronald David Laing

Lo sguardo sulla persona offre una visione psicologica delle relazioni umane attraverso la narrazione di storie, esperienze e vicende interiori, disposte in un’ottica umanistico-esistenziale.  Lo sguardo appassionato dell’autore irrompe nella condizione dell’uomo e si sofferma dapprima sulla fragilità umana piegata tra egoismo e altruismo. Quindi si volge al prendersi cura prospettando una relazione di aiuto autentica ed empatica, indispensabile quando lo sguardo diventa abusante e si degrada oppure quando diviene mistificatore e genera interazioni familiari confuse e distorte. Lo sguardo poi spazia tra Eros e Thanatos, insinuandosi tra l’amore profondo e l’angoscia esistenziale di morte. Quindi si proietta sulla solitudine umana, tentando di penetrarne la parete di vetro della incomunicabilità. Infine si concentra sulle emozioni, ripercorrendo le espressioni del cuore e le competenze affettive nei processi di crescita e in tutti i luoghi dell’intersoggettività. 
Questo libro, dedicato allo sguardo nelle sue diverse sfaccettature, può essere efficacemente condensato con le parole di E. Lévinas: “Il volto dell’altro mi guarda e mi ri-guarda”.

The Social Phenomenology of R.D. Laing:
A Re-Appraisal of R.D. Laing, His Relationship to J.-P. Sartre,
and the Psychotherapy of Schizophrenia

Vincenzo Di Nicola, MPhil, MD, PhD, DLFAPA, FCAHS
University of Montreal
Psychiatric Fellow, AAPDPP


American Academy of Psychodynamic Psychiatry and Psychoanalysis (AAPDPP)
2022-2023 Virtual Presentation Series

Brief Abstract

Scottish psychiatrist-psychoanalyst Ronald David Laing (1927-1989) is known for his pioneering studies in the tradition of psychodynamic psychiatry (cf. Ellenberger, 1970) of the alien and alienating experiences that are known under the rubric of schizophrenia (cf. Woods, 2011). Along the way, he explored the "divided self" (Laing, 1960) in the "politics of the family" (Laing, 1969) and the sources of "reason and violence" (Laing & Cooper, 1964) in modern society, creating a model of existential psychotherapy (Laing, 1987a) with his social phenomenology (Laing, 1987b).

.....the double bind as constituting an entirely new, non-material, principle of evolution, major conceptual revisions may need to be made in our general understanding of evolution as contained within the “modern evolutionary synthesis”.

KEYWORDS:
behavior, communication, context, contradiction, deutero-learning, double bind, epistemology, evolution, incompleteness theorum, kinesics, learning, logical type theory, metacommunication, metamessages, metatheory, mystification, paradox, relationships, schismogenesis, schizophrenia,  scientific elegance, symmathesy, teleology, temporality, transcontextual, transdisciplinary, trauma

Con la realizzazione della mia tesi di laurea ho voluto riportare alla luce il problema della malattia mentale e il rapporto tra lo psichiatra e il malato mentale, partendo dalla definizione della follia e il cambiamento che ha avuto nei secoli dall'antichità, fino alla nascita dei movimenti antipsichiatrici che hanno cercato di ridare la dignità al malato all'interno dell'ospedale psichiatrico. All'interno della mia tesi ho  anche esposto il cambiamento filosofico e psicologico all'analisi della malattia concentrandomi sugli autori della fenomenologia che hanno ispirato i vari componenti del movimento antipsichiatrico. Per ultimo ho descritto la storia del manicomio di Perugia con la sua evoluzione.

There are passages in Wittgenstein where he compares his method to psychotherapy and one or two where he seems to suggest that the ‘patient’ has the last word on his ‘illness’ and ‘cure’.  This paper tries to take these seriously, especially in connexion with the idea that victims of philosophical confusion talk nonsense.

Philosophical accusations of talking nonsense made in a polemical spirit are bound to fail, since the only way one can effectively criticise another’s utterance is by attaching some meaning to it.  But if the other acknowledges the possibility that his puzzlement arises from his having been taken in by nonsense, then perhaps a co-operative investigation of this suggestion might be fruitful.  Indeed self-diagnosis ought in principle to be possible.  Ought it not to have happened at least once in the history of philosophy if philosophical nonsense has ever been exposed? 

But there are difficulties.  For example:
a) We must ask whether or not philosophical nonsense, when exposed as such, is supposed to lose all appearance of meaningfulness.  Either answer is problematic.
b) The acknowledged similarity of the methodology under investigation to that of psychoanalysis exposes it to many of the familiar objections to the methodology of psychoanalysis, especially those that draw attention to the misleading influence of suggestion by an authority-figure.
c) The proposal that relentless cross-questioning of a suspected nonsense-talker will eventually lead her to ‘dry up’ (if she really is talking nonsense) seems to involve a version of the so-called Socratic Fallacy.

ESTA HISTORIA FUE UN HOMENAJE, QUE LE HICE A LA PSIQUIATRA ANTIOQUEÑA LUZMILA ACOSTA DE OCHOA, AL RECOGER HISTORIAS, QUE ELLA ME HABÍA CONTADO EN EL HOSPITAL MENTAL DE ANTIOQUIA, CUANDO YO ERA EL JEFE DEL PABELLÓN A MUJERES Y ELLA IBA A VER A LOS PACIENTES DEL SEGURO SOCIAL, HISTORIAS QUE ANTICIPABAN UNA VISIÓN DE UNA PSIQUIATRÍA MÁS HUMANA, QUE EMPEZABA A CRITICAR AL MANICOMIO DESDE ADENTRO.

How Non-being Haunts Being reveals how the human world is not reducible to “what is.” Human life is an open expanse of “what was” and “what will be,” “what might be” and “what should be.” It is a world of desires, dreams, fictions, historical figures, planned events, spatial and temporal distances, in a word, absent presences and present absences.

Corey Anton draws upon and integrates thinkers such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Henri Bergson, Kenneth Burke, Terrence Deacon, Lynn Margulis, R. D. Laing, Gregory Bateson, Douglas Harding, and E. M. Cioran. He discloses the moral possibilities liberated through death acceptance by showing how living beings, who are of space not merely in it, are fundamentally on loan to themselves.

A heady multidisciplinary work, How Non-being Haunts Being explores how absence, incompleteness, and negation saturate life, language, thought, and culture. It details how meaning and moral agency depend upon forms of non-being, and it argues that death acceptance in no way inevitably slides into nihilism. Thoroughgoing death acceptance, in fact, opens opportunities for deeper levels of self-understanding and for greater compassion regarding our common fate. Sure to provoke thought and to stimulate much conversation, it offers countless insights into the human condition.

https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781683932840/How-Non-being-Haunts-Being-On-Possibilities-Morality-and-Death-Acceptance

The present short study plans to tackle the ontological question of the Ultimate from the perspective of an interpretation of Whitehead’s reformed subjectivism coming to terms with psychosis. The conundrum is the following: understanding the process subjectivism Whitehead is arguing for constitutes a royal path to grasp his overall intuition; what happens if we seek to apply it to psychosis?

This article reviews orders of intensionality and demonstrates how intersubjective confusions can emerge whenever we try to imagine what others think we think they think. By offering an adaptation and reconfiguration of the Interpersonal Perception Method (IPM), a couples therapy questionnaire developed by Laing, Phillipson, and Lee, the article clarifies how and why interpretation troubles can recur within interpersonal relationships. It also provides a highly practical and teachable method for systematically managing multiple orders of intensionality, and, hopefully, for minimizing some of life's interpersonal discord.

I seek in this work to present theoretical reflections on the concept of madness through a look of contemporary social theory, especially as regards the references of a critical theory of society. Through an interdisciplinary analysis I propose the hypothesis of apprehension of madness, especially of schizophrenia, as a form of social experience, in opposition to the hegemonic definitions in the field of psychiatry, which name schizophrenia as mental illness. I associate modern psychiatry with the field of what Max Horkheimer called the Traditional Theory. In an attempt to take a critical look at the so-called psychoses, I recover the works of Michel Foucault and Ronald Laing as critics of the psychiatric paradigm, while at the same time pondering the contributions of Axel Honneth to think of madness in the dimension of recognition theory. The proposal is about postulating different epistemological possibilities of a critical theory of madness and abnormality.
(Ecos, ISSN 2237-941X)

Zone of the Interior is a satirical novel by an American, Clancy Sigal, about 1960s British anti-psychiatry, in particular, R. D. Laing, the radical Scottish psychiatrist and his idea (shared most notably by David Cooper, another existential therapist working in England) that schizophrenic breakdown might be a natural, healing process. Sigal's little-known novel can help us think about the nature of anti-psychiatry and contribute to the resurgence of interest in it as we approach the 25th anniversary of Laing's death. While Sigal, who was a patient and collaborator of Laing and worked in a democratized hospital unit set up by Cooper, lampoons anti-psychiatric doctors, the novel is a fundamentally sympathetic critique of anti-psychiatry: patients and nurses are the heroes, ordinariness wins out over madness as self-discovery, and anti-psychiatry is skillfully linked to issues of class, gender and New Left politics.

Sass, like R. D. Laing before him, wants to make sense of schizophrenic discourse.  In 'Paradoxes of delusion – Wittgenstein, Schreber and the schizophrenic mind' he uses Wittgenstein’s later work, particularly the Blue Book, to this end.  Read criticises Sass for not taking Wittgenstein’s nonsensicalism seriously enough and suggests that some schizophrenic utterances cannot be understood at all.  I argue that Sass’s position is more consistent than Read’s, though it is probably true that Sass is the less thoroughgoing Wittgensteinian.  Read’s way of arguing his case exhibits all the difficulties that those who employ the notion of philosophical nonsense are apt to get themselves into.  The denigratory vocabulary he uses to characterise schizophrenic discourse – ‘confused’, ‘inchoate’, ‘incoherent’, ‘empty’, ‘without content’ – is itself confused and confusing, but, more importantly, his talk of ‘transitional remarks’ and his admission that he is himself ‘trafficking in nonsense’ suggest that he is falling into the very error of which he accuses Sass.

This blog post, taking a London exhibition on the nature of the asylum as its starting point, considers R. D. Laing's radical approach to asylum, his experimental community at Kingsley Hall, East London (1965-70), and the cultural significance of Laing's ideas.

Is There Such A Thing As Philosophical Nonsense?

For the best part of a century now philosophers have been accusing each other of talking nonsense.  This practice presupposes that people can be wrong in thinking they mean anything by what they say, that there can be an illusion of meaning.  But the assumption that illusions of meaning are possible has not, I believe, been seriously examined; nor has the problem of how such illusions could be diagnosed been seriously addressed.

This book extends the work of a number of recent writers on Wittgenstein who have advocated an'austere' view of nonsense, but in a more sceptical direction than they have taken.  It argues that nonsensicalism (the theory and practice of accusing your opponents of talking nonsense) is radically misguided and should be abandoned.

The possibility that illusions of meaning occur outside philosophy - in dreams, in certain hoaxes, in madness or under the influence of drugs - is also examined.

Psychiatry and rock music are unlikely bedfellows. It is also strange to think that a psychiatrist's ideas might relate closely to a countercultural movement and feature in its publications. Yet music, psychiatry and the underground press were bound up together in the 1960s and early 1970s, when a Scottish psychiatrist called R D Laing (1927-89) was the most famous therapist in the world. This article considers tracks by The Beatles, The Deviants, Quintessence, Syd Barrett, and Pink Floyd.

Отрывок из статьи Уиллема Мартенса, опубликованной в «Журнале феноменологической психологии» (2010, стр. 216–233). Фрагмент про позитивную функцию психоза как сложнейшего внутреннего путешествия человека. Рассматривает психоз с перспективы трансперсональной психологии, включая Станислава и Кристины Гроф, идей Антона Бойзена и Рональда Лэйнга и др.

A review of Clancy Sigal's posthumous memoir, The London Lover, in which the left-wing US author and journalist recalls the UK capital in the 1950s and 1960s (and later), looks back on his relationship with Doris Lessing, remembers R. D. Laing, and discusses life as a jobbing writer.

Is There Such A Thing As Philosophical Nonsense?

For the best part of a century now philosophers have been accusing each other of talking nonsense.  This practice presupposes that people can be wrong in thinking they mean anything by what they say, that there can be an illusion of meaning.  But the assumption that illusions of meaning are possible has not, I believe, been seriously examined; nor has the problem of how such illusions could be diagnosed been seriously addressed.

This book extends the work of a number of recent writers on Wittgenstein who have advocated an'austere' view of nonsense, but in a more sceptical direction than they have taken.  It argues that nonsensicalism (the theory and practice of accusing your opponents of talking nonsense) is radically misguided and should be abandoned.

The possibility that illusions of meaning occur outside philosophy - in dreams, in certain hoaxes, in madness or under the influence of drugs - is also examined.