Quotes by R. D. Laing

About R. D. Laing:

Ronald David Laing was a Scottish psychiatrist who wrote extensively on mental illness – in particular, the experience of psychosis. Laing's views on the causes and treatment of serious mental dysfunction, greatly influenced by existential philosophy, ran counter to the psychiatric orthodoxy of the day by taking the expressed feelings of the individual patient or client as valid descriptions of lived experience rather than simply as symptoms of some separate or underlying disorder. Laing was associated with the anti-psychiatry movement, although he rejected the label. Politically, he was regarded as a thinker of the New Left.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

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.

R. D. Laing

Creative people who can't help but explore other mental territories are at greater risk, just as someone who climbs a mountain is more at risk than someone who just walks along a village lane.

R. D. Laing

We are all in a post-hypnotic trance induced in early infancy.

R. D. Laing

Insanity - a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world.

R. D. Laing

Rule A: Don't. Rule A1: Rule A doesn't exist. Rule A2: Do not discuss the existence or non-existence of Rules A, A1 or A2.

R. D. Laing

Alienation as our present destiny is achieved only by outrageous violence perpetrated by human beings on human beings.

R. D. Laing

If I don't know I don't know, I think I know. If I don't know I know, I think I don't know.

R. D. Laing

There is no such condition as 'schizophrenia', but the label is a social fact and the social fact a political event.

R. D. Laing

Schizophrenia cannot be understood without understanding despair.

R. D. Laing

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.

R. D. Laing

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.

R. D. Laing

You don't love me.. Believe me! You don't love anyone. How could you? And no one loves you. How could they? Except me, it's only because I love you that I'm telling you all this. I Love you.. R. D. Laing.

R. D. Laing

The experience and behavior that gets labeled schizophrenic is a special strategy that a person invents in order to live in an unlivable situation.

R. D. Laing

We live in a moment of history where change is so speeded up that we begin to see the present only when it is already disappearing.

R. D. Laing

The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice. And because we fail to notice that 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

There is a great deal of pain in life and perhaps the only pain that can be avoided is the pain that comes from trying to avoid pain.

R. D. Laing

Life is a sexually transmitted disease and the mortality rate is one hundred percent.

R. D. Laing

Whether life is worth living depends on whether there is love in life.

R. D. Laing

Children do not give up their innate imagination, curiosity, dreaminess easily. You have to love them to get them to do that.

R. D. Laing

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

Author Bio

  • NameR. D. Laing
  • DescriptionPsychiatrist and author
  • AliasesR. D. Laing
  • BornOctober 7, 1927
  • DiedAugust 23, 1989
  • CountryUnited Kingdom
  • ProfessionMilitary Physician; Psychiatrist; Author; Physician; Soldier