Ronald D Laing
(1927-1989) Educated and trained in medicine and psychiatry in Britain, Dr.
Laing was instrumental in advocating non-intrusive techniques to assist people
in psychological distress. Influenced by the work of Harry Stack Sullivan,
Laing was a prolific writer and lecturer and, collaborating with Gregory
Bateson, Timothy Leary and Lama Govinda, employed phenomenological and
existential approaches such as advocating that patients be given space to work
through their societal-induced psychoses without resort to drugs, ECT or
surgery.
Index
Mystification, Confusion and
Conflict
Sanity,
Madness and The Family
Excerpts:
From The Politics of Experience (1967)
·
Given the
conditions of contemporary civilization, how can one claim that the “normal”
man is sane? The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being
unconscious, of being out of one’s mind, is the condition of the normal man.
Society highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves
and to become absurd, and thus to become normal. Normal men have killed perhaps
100,000,000 of their fellow men in the last fifty years…. We are not able even
to think adequately about the behaviour that is at the annihilating edge. But
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…
·
What
we call “normal” is a product of repression, denial, splitting, projection,
introjection and other forms of destructive action on experience. It is
radically estranged from the structure of being. Our behaviour is a function of
our experience. We act according to the way we see things. If our
experience is destroyed, our behaviour will be destructive. If
our experience is destroyed, we have lost our own selves.
·
People
can and do destroy the humanity of others, and the condition of this possibility
is that we are inter-dependent. We are not self-contained monads producing no
effects on each other except our reflections. We are both acted upon, and
changed for good or ill, by others; we are agents who act upon others to affect
them in different ways. Each of us is the other to the others. Man is
patient-agent, agent-patient, inter-experiencing and interacting with his
fellows.
·
The
negation of experience. There seems to be no agent more effective than another person in
bringing a world for oneself alive, or, by a glance, a gesture, or a remark,
shrivelling up the reality in which one is lodged.
·
In the
idiom of games theory, people have a repertoire of games based on
particular sets of learned interactions. Others may play games that mesh sufficiently
to allow a variety of more or less stereotyped dramas to be enacted. The games
have rules, some public, some secret. Some people play games that break the
rules of games that others play. Some play undeclared games, so rendering their
moves ambiguous or downright unintelligible, except to the expert in such
secret and unusual games. Some people, prospective neurotics or psychotics, may
have to undergo the ceremony of a psychiatric consultation, leading to
diagnosis, prognosis, prescription. Treatment would consist in pointing out to
them the unsatisfactory nature of the games they play and perhaps teaching new
games. A person reacts with despair more to loss of the game than to
sheer “object loss”, that is, to the loss of his partner or partners as real
persons. The maintenance of the game rather than the identity of players is
all-important.
·
Psychotherapy
must remain an obstinate attempt of two people to recover the wholeness of
being human through the relationship between them.
·
As a
whole, we are a generation of persons so estranged from the inner world
that many are arguing that it does not exist; and that even if it does exist,
it does not matter. Even if it has some significance, it is not the hard stuff
of science, and if it is not, then let’s make it hard. Let it be measured and
counted. Quantify the heart’s agony and ecstasy in a world in which, when the
inner world is first discovered, we are liable to find our selves bereft and
derelict. For without the inner world the outer loses its meaning, and
without the outer the inner loses its substance.
·
From
the moment of birth, when the Stone Age baby confronts the twentieth-century
mother, the baby is subjected to those forces of violence, called love, as its
mother and father, and their parents and their parents before them, have
been. These forces are mainly concerned with destroying most of its
potentialities, and on the whole this enterprise is successful. By the time the
new human being is fifteen or so, we are left with a being like ourselves, a
half-crazed creature more or less adjusted to a mad world. This is normality in
our present age.
·
The
double action of destroying ourselves with one hand, and calling this love with
the other, is a sleight of hand one can marvel at. Human beings seem to have an
almost unlimited capacity to deceive themselves, and to deceive themselves into
taking their own lies for truth. By such mystification, we achieve and sustain
our adjustment, adaptation, socialization. But the result of such adjustment to
our society is that, having been tricked and having tricked ourselves out of
our minds, that is to say, out of our own personal worlds of experience, out of
that unique meaning with which we may endow the external world, simultaneously
we have been conned into the illusion that we are separate “skin encapsulated
egos”. Having at one and the same time lost our selves and developed the
illusion that we are autonomous egos, we are expected to comply by inner
consent with external restraints, to an almost unbelievable extent.
·
A
group whose unification is achieved through the reciprocal interiorization by
each of each other, in which neither “a common object” nor organizational or
institutional structures, etc. have a primary function as a kind of group
“cement” is a nexus. … In the nexal family the unity of the group
is achieved through the experience by each of the group, and the danger to each
person (since the person is essential to the nexus, and the nexus is essential
to the person) is the dissolution or dispersal of “the family”. This can come about only by one person after
another dissolving it in themselves. A united “family” exists only as long as
each person acts in terms of its existence. Each person may then act on the
other person to coerce him (by sympathy, blackmail, indebtedness, guilt,
gratitude or naked violence) into maintaining his interiorization of the group
unchanged. The nexal family is then the “entity” which has to be preserved in
each person and served by each person, which one lives and dies for, and which
in turn offers life for loyalty and death for desertion. Any defection from the
nexus (betrayal, treason, heresy, etc.) is deservedly, by nexus ethics,
punishable; and the worst punishment devisable by the “group men” is exile or
excommunication: group death.
The
“protection” that the nexus family offers its members seems to be based on
several preconditions: (i) a fantasy of the external world as extraordinarily
dangerous; (ii) the generation of terror inside the nexus at this external danger.
The “work” of the nexus is the generation of this terror. This work is violence.
·
Studies
of the families of schizophrenics conducted at Palo Alto, Yale, the
Pennsylvania Psychiatric Institute and NIMH have all shown that the person who gets
diagnosed is part of a wider network of extremely disturbed and disturbing
patterns of communication. In all these places no schizophrenic
has been studied whose disturbed pattern of communication has not been shown to
be a reflection, and reaction to, the disturbed and disturbing pattern
characterizing his family of origin. In the cases studying the actual
circumstances around the social event when one person come to be regarded as
schizophrenic, without exception the experience and behaviour that gets
labelled schizophrenic is a special strategy that the person invents in
order to live in an unliveable situation. He cannot make a move, or make no
move, without being beset by contradictory and paradoxical pressures and
demands, pushes and pulls, both internally about himself, and externally from
those about him. He is in a position of checkmate. We know that the
biochemistry of the person is highly sensitive to social circumstance. That a
checkmate situation occasions a biochemical response which, in turn,
facilitates or inhibits certain types of experience and behaviour is plausible a
priori.
·
There
is no such “condition” as “schizophrenia”, but the label is a social fact and
the social fact a political event. This political event, occurring in
the civic order of society, imposes definitions and consequences on the
labelled person. It is a social prescription that rationalizes a set of social
actions whereby the labelled person is annexed by others who are legally
sanctioned, medically empowered and morally obliged to become responsible for
the person labelled. The person labelled is inaugurated not only into a role,
but into a career of patient, by the concerted action of a coalition (a
“conspiracy”) of family, GP, mental health officer, psychiatrists, nurses,
psychiatric social workers, and often fellow patients. The “committed” person
labelled as patient, and specifically as “schizophrenic”, is degraded from full
existential and legal status as human agent and responsible person to someone
no longer in possession of his own definition of himself, unable to retain his
own possessions, precluded from the exercise of his discretion as to who he
meets, what he does. His time is no longer his own and the space he occupies is
no longer of his choosing. After being subjected to a degradation ceremonial
known as psychiatric examination, he is bereft of his civil liberties in being
imprisoned in a total institution known as a “mental” hospital. More
completely, more radically than anywhere else in our society, he is invalidated
as a human being. In the mental hospital he must remain, until the label is
rescinded or qualified by such terms as “remitted” or “readjusted”. Once a
“schizophrenic”, there is a tendency to be regarded as always a
“schizophrenic”.
·
Instead
of the mental hospital, what is needed is a sort of re-servicing factory for
human breakdowns – a place where people who have travelled further and,
consequently, may be more lost than even psychiatrists and other “sane” people,
can find their way further into inner space and time, and back again.
Instead of the degradation ceremonial of psychiatric examination,
diagnosis and prognostication, we need, for those who are ready for it (in
psychiatric terminology, often those who are about to go into schizophrenic
breakdown) an initiation ceremonial, through which the person will be
guided with full social encouragement and sanction into inner space and time,
by people who have been there and back again. Psychiatrically, this would
appear as ex-patients helping future patients go mad.
From The Politics of the
Family (five radio broadcasts of the 1968 Massey Lectures, over CBC)
·
There
are usually great resistances against the process of mapping the past onto the
future coming to light, in any circumstances. If anyone in a family
begins to realize he is a shadow of a puppet, he will be wise to exercise the
greatest precautions as to whom he imparts this information. It is not
"normal" to realize such things. There are a number of psychiatric
names, and a variety of treatments, for such realizations.
I consider that the majority of adults
(including myself) are or have been, more or less, in a post-hypnotic trance,
induced in early infancy: we remain in this state until – when we dead awaken,
as Ibsen makes one of his characters say, we shall find that we have never
lived.
Any attempt to wake up before our time is
heavily 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. Anyone in
this transitional state is likely to be confused. To indicate that this
confusion is a sign of illness, rather than the possibly confused beginning of
true sanity, is the quickest and surest way to create psychosis. The person who
realizes that “this is all a nightmare”, is afraid he is going crazy. A
psychiatrist who professes to be a healer of souls, but who in fact keeps
people asleep, treats them for waking up, and helps them to go asleep again
(increasingly effective as this field of technology sharpens its weapons), will
both help to drive him really crazy, and confirm the patient’s worst fears.
·
History continues to repeat itself, with variations
[down through the succession of generations]… The play goes on. The actors come
and go. A death leaves a vacancy, to be filled sometimes by one yet to be
conceived, or who has to be conceived to keep the cast up to strength.
Who can better replace a grandfather, than a grandson?
The new member of the cast is induced to embody
a part in the ongoing drama. It is not precise, or enough, to say: David is
identified with his grandfather. I would rather say: David is given a part
comparable to the part his grandfather played. The players should be
distinguished from the parts they play, even though the two are often confused
by the players themselves.
It is often not difficult to construct an
approximate scenario for a two- or three-generational scrap of such plays.
Daughter sides with her easy-going, relatively
absent father against nagging mother; without adequate support from him,
succumbs to mother. Both rediscover loved and hated husband-father in
grandson-son... and so on.
Such scenarios are sets of instructions for a
play. But these scenarios, if they exist, are unwritten, and, if a part of a
scenario sometimes appears in the lines of the play itself, those who enunciate
it are usually deeply unaware that they are doing so.
In my own early life, I was often told that I
was going to take after my grandfather; not immediately, but when I grew up.
We are given such indications as we come out of the womb, on how to go into
our graves. They may be implanted before one is five years of age, with
instructions not to begin to act them out until 50 years
later.
Almost all of us live almost all of our lives in
families. First our family of origin; then, when we marry and have children,
our so-called nuclear family, the family of origin for our children.
Through this chain of family systems, the fundamental
rules that determine our culture are transmitted. We know practically nothing
about it.
·
The
more one studies families in detail, the more it becomes apparent that patterns
are spread over generations. They undergo transformations. No one, as far as I
know, has found out whether these patterns and their transformations can be expressed in terms that at
present we call mathematical. This is understandable. We ourselves, all of us,
are ourselves the elements of the pattern that we are trying to discern. Family
patterns are not laid out before us like the stars in the sky. [They are like
musical] notes endowed with such awareness that they are only just able to
glimpse the existence of the chord whose elements they are. Perhaps, from the
interpenetration of their vibrations they may even begin to infer something in
and beyond them, that requires both their life and their death. We call it
music: that disdains to be heard by the notes that comprise it.
We are acting parts in a play, that we have never
read and never seen, whose plot we don't know, whose existence we can glimpse,
but whose ending I do not dare to presume to imagine.
·
Our
adult experience is a very sophisticated product of many procedures.
These laws governing our experience are both natural and social. …The “deeper”
that the social laws are planted in us, the more “hard-programmed”, the more
“pickled” into us, then the more like “natural” laws they come to appear to us
to be. Indeed, if someone breaks such a “deeply” implanted social law, we are
inclined to say that he is “unnatural”. Some of the most seemingly “natural”
features of contemporary experience are acquired in families, when we are very
young.
We construe the given in terms of distinctions,
according to rules. We perform operations on our experience
in order to comply with the rules. By these operations, according to the rules,
in terms of the distinctions, a normal product is generated, if all goes
according to plan.
·
Given
our distinctions and our rules, we have to work to normalize our
experience. We could never succeed unless we were able to employ a further set
of operations on our experience. Most of these are described in psychoanalysis
as “defence mechanisms”:
Denial is one of the simplest.
“This is the case” is changed
to: “This is not the case”; e.g., “I feel jealous” is changed to: “I do not
feel jealous.”
Splitting. A set is partitioned into
two subsets.
In a complete split, no
traffic is allowed to occur between the two subsets.
Displacement.
e.g., I feel angry at Tom, instead
of Dick.
I come back and “take it out”
on the wife, for what I feel about the Boss.
Scotomatization.
I
do not see what I do not want to.
Replacement.
I
see something else instead.
Projection.
I
map inside onto outside.
Introjection.
I
map outside onto inside.
Rationalization.
I
give myself a cover-story.
Repression.
Forgetting
and forgetting one has forgotten.
Identification.
Two
separate subsets are taken to be one.
Mystification.
Misdefinition
of the issues.
Reversal.
I
hate him is reversed to: He hates me.
Many
more are described in psychoanalytic literature, including inversion,
reaction-formation, isolation, reduplication, turning against the self,
undoing, idealization, de-realization. Some of these "defences" are
simple, and others made up of two or three simple operations.
·
Operations
apply additional constraints on the product. They "cancel" and
substitute what is in accord with rules, and they do this according to rules
that govern the operations themselves. If experience (E) is permitted to be
pleasant or ought to be pleasant E will be operated upon to make it more
seemingly pleasant. But if the rules do not permit or demand this, if pleasure
is forbidden or despised, then "pleasure" will be sacrificed for other
values higher on the hierarchy.
Most
operations on E are themselves operated upon to render them as we say
"unconscious". Only as we manage to neutralize these operations on
operations can our operations on E become themselves elements of E, such that
we can examine them. Until we can do this, we have to infer them. Such
an inference as to their existence may itself be blocked by such operations as
denial, scotomatization.
The operations on experience that we are
discussing, are commonly not experienced themselves. So seldom does one ever
catch oneself in the act, that I would have been tempted to regard them as,
themselves, essentially not elements of experience, had I not
occasionally been able to catch a glimpse of them in action myself, and
had not others reported the same to me. It is comparatively easy to catch
someone else in the act. This leads me to propose that there is an operation,
or a class of operations, that operates on our experience of our operations,
to cancel them from our experience: operations of this latter class somehow
operate on our experience of themselves, whereby we neither experience
our first operations nor the operations that shut the former operations out of
our experience. This is particularly clear in the case of repression.
·
So we are a happy family and we have no secrets from one another.
If we are unhappy/we have to keep it
a secret/
and we are unhappy that we have to
keep it a secret
and unhappy that we have to
keep secret/the fact/that
we have to keep it a secret
and that we are keeping all that secret.
But since we are a happy family you
can see this difficulty does not arise.
·
The product
arrived at is the outcome of many rules without which it could not be generated
or maintained, but to admit the rules would be to admit what the rules and
operations are attempting to render non-existent.
One is expected to be capable of passion, once married, but not to have
experienced too much passion (let alone acted upon it) too much before. If this
is too difficult, one has to pretend first not to feel the passion one really
feels, then, to pretend to passion one does not really feel, and to pretend that
certain passionate upsurges of resentment, hatred, envy, are unreal, or don't happen,
or are something else. This requires false realizations, false de-realizations,
and a cover-story (rationalization). After this almost complete holocaust of
one's experience on the altar of conformity, one is liable to feel somewhat
empty, but one can try to fill one's emptiness up with money, consumer goods,
position, respect, admiration, envy of one's fellows for one's business,
professional, social success. These together with a repertoire of distractions,
permitted or compulsory, serve to distract one from one's own distraction: and
if one finds oneself overworked, under too great a strain, there are perfectly
approved additional lines of defence, concoctions to taste of, narcotics,
stimulations, sedatives, tranquillizers to depress one further so that one does
not know how depressed one is and to help one to over-eat and over-sleep. And
there are lines of defence beyond that, to electro-shocks, to the (almost) final
solution of simply removing sections of the offending body, especially the central
nervous system. This last solution is necessary, however, only if the normal
social lobotomy
does not work, and chemical lobotomy has also failed.
I can think of no way of generating a “normal” product from the
stuff of our original selves except in some such way: once we arrive at our
matrix of distinctions, we have rules for combining and partitioning
them into sets and subsets. The “normal” product requires that these
operations are themselves denied. We like the food served up elegantly before
us: we do not want to know about the animal factories, the slaughter-houses and
what goes on in the kitchen. Our own cities are our own animal factories; our
families, schools, and churches are the slaughter-houses of our children; colleges
and other places are the kitchens. As adults in marriages and business, we eat
the product.
·
Once
one begins to break some of the rules against seeing the rules, one
realizes that much of one’s difficulty is not due to the intrinsic complexity
of the family situation, but to one’s inhibitions against seeing what may be
obvious, once the inhibition against seeing it is undone. There remain
inhibitions against putting into words, such real or imagined insights.
I have never come across a family that does not draw a line somewhere as
to: what may be put into words, and, what words may be put into.
·
As
long as we cannot up-level our "thinking" beyond Us and Them, the
goodies and baddies, it [the hidden induction process] will go on and on. The
only possible end will be when all the goodies have killed all the baddies, and
all the baddies all the goodies, which does not seem so difficult or unlikely
since to Us, we are the goodies and They are the baddies, while to Them, we are
the baddies and they are the goodies.
Millions of people have died this century and millions more are going
to, including, we have every reason to expect, many of Us and our children,
because we cannot break this knot.
It seems a comparatively simple knot, but it is tied very, very tight - round the throat, as it
were, of the whole human species.
But don't believe
me because I say so, look in the mirror and see for yourself.
From Mystification, Confusion and Conflict (full article is
indexed on remedy’s “From The Writings” page)
·
In order to recognize persons and not simply objects, one must realize
that the other human being is not only another object in space but another
center of orientation to the objective world.
·
The prime function of mystification appears to be to maintain the status
quo. It is brought into play, or it is intensified, when one or more members of
the family nexus threaten, or are felt to threaten, the status quo of the nexus
by the way they are experiencing, and acting in, the situation they share with
the other members of the family.
The theoretically ultimate extreme of mystification is
when the person (p) seeks to induce in the other (o) confusion (not
necessarily recognized by o) as to o's whole experience (memory, perceptions,
dreams, fantasy, imagination), processes, and actions. The mystified person is
one who is given to understand that he feels happy or sad regardless of how he
feels he feels, that he is responsible for this or not responsible for that
regardless of what responsibility he has or has not taken upon himself.
Capacities, or their lack, are attributed to him without reference to any
shared empirical criteria of what these may or may not be. His own motives and
intentions are discounted or minimized and replaced by others. His experience
and actions generally are construed without reference to his own point of view.
There is a radical failure to recognize his own self-perception and
self-identity. And, of course, when this is the case, not only his
self-perceptions and self-identity are confused but his perceptions of others,
of how they experience him and act toward him and of how he thinks they think
he thinks, etc., are necessarily subjected to multiple mystifications at one
and the same time.
The members of the families of the schizophrenic
patients so far studied use mystification frequently as the preferred means of
controlling the experience and action of the schizophrenic patient.
We have never yet seen a pre-schizophrenic who was not in a highly mystified
state before his or her manifest psychotic breakdown.
·
In most forms of psychotherapy the
therapist attributes motives and intentions to the patient which are not in
accord with those the patient attributes to his own actions. But the therapist
(one hopes) does not mystify the patient, in that he says implicitly or
explicitly: You see yourself as motivated by A and intending B. I see you,
however, as motivated by X and intending Y, and here is my evidence, drawn from
my personal encounter with you.
From Sanity, Madness and The Family (R.D. Laing and Aaron
Esterson).
A
difficulty facing the formal patient (under compulsory treatment order) is that
he may refuse to admit that he needs medication/therapy and incarceration. The
attending staff may behave both in a benevolent manner ("We are here to
help you") and in an essentially adversarial manner ("We will force
treatment upon you, in your best interests") thus demanding that the
patient show overt signs of appreciation or face further incarceration. Here, a
very difficult situation can occur for both patient and attending staff. The patient becomes aware of this paradox
and informs the staff about it. He adopts a meta-position to the game-play and
thus may become labelled in a different way - i.e. "Manipulative."
The attending staff member is no more able to escape the paradox than the
patient, but he who holds the keys and needles, holds the power.
A
child who cannot escape the fact that he is just a child, in respect to his
parents, may find a similar situation occurring:
Her
parents appear to have consistently regarded with alarm all expressions of
developing autonomy on Maya's part necessarily involving efforts to separate herself
from them and to do things on her own initiative. Her parents' alarm remains
unabated in the present. For example, her mother objected to her ironing
without supervision, although for the past year she had been working in a
laundry without mishap. Mr. and Mrs. Abbott regarded their daughter's use of
her own 'mind' independently of them, as synonymous with 'illness', and as a
rejection of them. Her mother said:
"I think I am so absolutely centred on one thing - it's well, to
get her well - I mean as a child, and as a - teenager I could always sort out
whatever was wrong or - do something about it but it - but this illness has
been so completely er - our relations have been different - you see Maya is er
- instead of accepting everything - as if I said to her, er, 'black is black',
she would have probably believed it, but since she's ill, she's never accepted
anything any more. She's had to reason it out for herself, then she didn't seem
to take my word for it - which of course is quite different to me."
[re
the temptation to try to explain the synchronistic elements of life’s story] We
cannot expect to grasp that which holds us in its grasp . . . . The most
ordinary events of the ordinary human world are beyond us. We can see that our
single destinies intertwine and interpenetrate, that others figure in our
dreams and dramas as we play our unrecognizable parts in the dreams and dramas
of those with whom our lives intermingle.
·
Freud insisted
that our civilization is a repressive one. There is a conflict between the
demands of conformity and the demands of our instinctive energies, explicitly
sexual. Freud could see no easy resolution of this antagonism, and he came to
believe that in our time the possibility of simple natural love between human
beings had already been abolished.
Our civilization represses not only 'the
instincts', not only sexuality, but any form of transcendence. Among
one-dimensional men, it is not surprising that someone with an insistent
experience of other dimensions, that he cannot entirely deny or forget, will
run the risk either of being destroyed by the others, or of betraying what he
knows.
In the context of our present pervasive madness that we call normality,
sanity, freedom, all our frames of reference are ambiguous and equivocal.
Psychiatry could be, and some psychiatrists are,
on the side of transcendence, of genuine freedom, and of true human growth. But
psychiatry can so easily be a technique of brainwashing, of inducing behaviour
that is adjusted, by (preferably) non-injurious torture. In the best places,
where straitjackets are abolished, doors are unlocked, leucotomies largely
forgone, these can be replaced by more subtle lobotomies and tranquillizers
that place the bars of Bedlam and the locked doors inside the
patient. Thus I would wish to emphasize that our 'normal' 'adjusted' state is
too often the abdication of ecstasy, the betrayal of our true potentialities,
that many of us are only too successful in acquiring a false self to adapt to
false realities.
·
"What about the boy's experience...? He seems to be tormented and
desperate. What is he 'about' in speaking and acting this way? He is objecting
to being measured and tested. He wants to be heard". ………..It is just possible to
have a thorough knowledge of what has been discovered about the hereditary or
familial incidence of manic-depressive psychosis or schizophrenia, to have a
facility in recognizing schizoid "ego distortion" and schizophrenic
ego defects, plus the various "disorders" of thought, memory,
perceptions, etc., to know, in fact, just about everything that can be known
about the psychopathology of schizophrenia or schizophrenia as a disease
without being able to understand one single schizophrenic. Such data are all
ways of not understanding him.
·
The
"unreal man" learnt to cry when he was amused, and to smile when he
was sad. He frowned his approval, and applauded his displeasure. "All that
you can see is not me," he says to himself. But only in and through all
that we do see can he be anyone (in reality). If these actions are not his real
self, he is irreal; wholly symbolical and imaginary; a purely virtual,
potential, imaginary person, a "mythical" man, nothing "really."
The individual in the ordinary circumstances of living may feel more unreal
than real; in a literal sense, more dead than alive; precariously
differentiated from the rest of the world, so that his identity and autonomy
are always in question . . . He may feel more insubstantial than substantial,
and unable to assume that the stuff he is made of is genuine, good, valuable.
And he may feel his self as partially divorced from his body.
·
In an
insecure, "schizoid" individual, there is an attempt to create
relationships to persons and things within the individual without recourse to
the outer world of persons and things at all. The individual is developing a
micro-cosmos within himself; but, of course, this autistic, private,
intra-individual "world" is not a feasible substitute for the only
world there really is, the shared world.
·
The self, as long as it is "uncommitted to the objective
element," is free to dream and imagine anything. Without reference to the
objective element it can be all things to itself – it has unconditioned
freedom, power, creativity. But its freedom and its omnipotence are exercised
in a vacuum and its creativity is only the capacity to produce phantoms.
·
Three forms of anxiety encountered by the
ontologically insecure person: engulfment, implosion, petrification (and
depersonalization).
Herein is
a person whose threshold of basic security is so low that practically any
relationship with another person, however tenuous or however apparently
‘harmless’, threatens to overwhelm him. Ordinarily, a firm sense of one's own
autonomous identity is required in order that one may be related as one human
being to another. Otherwise, any and every relationship threatens the individual
with loss of identity. One form this takes can be called engulfment. In this
the individual dreads relatedness as such, with anyone or anything or, indeed,
even with himself, because his uncertainty about the stability of his autonomy
lays him open to the dread lest in any relationship he will lose his autonomy
and identity. Engulfment is felt as a risk in being understood (thus grasped,
comprehended), in being loved, or even simply in being seen. To be hated may be
feared for other reasons, but to be hated as such is often less disturbing than
to be destroyed, as it is felt, through being engulfed by love.
The main manoeuvre used to preserve identity
under pressure from the dread of engulfment is isolation. …To be understood correctly
is to be engulfed, to be enclosed, swallowed up, drowned, eaten up, smothered,
stifled in or by another person's supposed all-embracing comprehension. It is
lonely and painful to be always misunderstood, but there is at least from this
point of view a measure of safety in isolation.
The other's love is therefore feared more than
his hatred, or rather all love is sensed as a version of hatred. By being loved
one is placed under an unsolicited obligation. In therapy with such a person,
the last thing there is any point in is to pretend to more 'love' or 'concern'
than one has. The more the therapist's own necessarily very complex motives for
trying to 'help' a person of this kind genuinely converge on a concern for him
which is prepared to 'let him be' and is not in fact engulfing
or merely indifference, the more hope there will be in the horizon.
This is the strongest word I can find for the extreme form of the impingement
of reality.
Impingement does not convey, however, the full terror of the experience of the
world as liable at any moment to crash in and obliterate all identity as a gas
will rush in and obliterate a vacuum. The individual feels that, like the
vacuum, he is empty. … Any ‘contact’ with reality is then in itself experienced
as a dreadful threat because reality, as experienced from this position, is
necessarily implosive and thus, as was relatedness in engulfment, in itself a
threat to what
identity the individual is able to suppose himself to have.
Reality, as such, threatening
engulfment or implosion, is the persecutor.
In fact, we are all only two or three degrees Fahrenheit from experiences of this order. Even a slight fever, and the whole world can begin to take on a persecutory, impinging aspect.
Petrification and depersonalization
In using the term ‘petrification’,
one can exploit a number of the meanings embedded in this word:
1. A particular form of terror, whereby one is
petrified, i.e. turned to stone.
2. The dread of this happening: the dread,
that is, of the possibility of turning, or being turned, from a live person
into a dead thing, into a stone, into a robot, an automaton, without personal
autonomy of action, an it without
subjectivity.
3. The 'magical' act whereby one may attempt to turn someone else into stone, by 'petrifying' him; and, by extension, the act whereby one negates the other person's autonomy, ignores his feelings, regards him as a thing, kills the life in him. In this sense one may perhaps better say that one depersonalizes him, or reifies him. One treats him not as a person, as a free agent, but as an it.
Depersonalization is a
technique that is universally used as a means of dealing with the other when he
becomes too tiresome or disturbing. One no longer allows oneself to be responsive
to his feelings and may be prepared to regard him and treat him as though he
had no feelings. The people in focus here both tend to feel themselves as more
or less depersonalized and tend to depersonalize others; they are constantly
afraid of being depersonalized by others. The act of turning him into a thing
is, for him, actually petrifying. In the face of being treated as
an 'it', his own subjectivity drains away from him like blood from the face.
Basically he requires constant confirmation from others of his own existence as
a person.
·
The schizoid state can be understood as an attempt to
preserve a being that is precariously structured. We shall suggest later that
the initial structuralization of being into its basic elements occurs in early
infancy. In normal circumstances, this occurs in such a way as to be so
conclusively stable in its basic elements (for instance, the continuity of
time, the distinction between the self and not-self, phantasy and reality),
that it can henceforth be taken for granted: on this stable base, a
considerable amount of plasticity can exist in what we call a person's
'character'. In the schizoid character structure, on the other hand, there is
an insecurity in the laying down of the foundations and a compensatory rigidity
in the superstructure.
·
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.
·
I saw Rose when she was twenty-three years of age. When
I saw her she said that she was frightened she was going insane, as in fact she
was. She said that horrible memories had been coming back to her, which she
could not forget no matter how hard she tried. But now she had discovered the
answer to this. She was now trying, she said, to forget these memories by
forgetting herself. She tried to do this by looking all the time at other
people and hence never noticing herself. At first it was something of a relief
for her to feel that she was going down and down and that she didn't want to
fight. But something in her fought against this. She was depressed and
continued to try to do things, but this became a greater and greater effort,
until every thought or movement felt as though it had to be initiated by a deliberate
act of will. But then she began to feel that she had no more will-power - she
had used it all up…
·
The divorce of the self from the body is both
something which is painful to be borne, and which the sufferer desperately
longs for someone to help mend, but it is also utilized as the basic means of
defence. This in fact defines the essential dilemma. The self wishes to be
wedded to and embedded in the body, yet is constantly afraid to lodge in the
body for fear of there being subject to attacks and dangers which it cannot
escape. Yet the self finds that though it is outside the body it cannot sustain
the advantages that it might hope for in this position. What happens then:
1.
The self’s orientation is a primitive oral one,
concerned with the dilemma of sustaining its aliveness, while being terrified
to ‘take in anything’. It becomes parched with thirst, and desolate.
2.
It becomes charged with hatred of all that is there. The only
way of destroying and of not destroying what is there may be felt to be to destroy
itself.
3.
The attempt to kill the self may be undertaken
intentionally. It is partly defensive ('if I'm dead, I can't be killed');
partly an attempt to endorse the crushing sense of guilt that oppresses the
individual (no sense of a right to be alive).
4.
The 'inner' self becomes itself split, and loses its
own identity and integrity.
5.
It loses its own realness and direct access to
realness outside itself.
6.
(a) The place of safety of the self becomes a prison.
Its would-be haven becomes a hell.
(b) It ceases even to have
the safety of a solitary cell. Its own enclave becomes a torture chamber. The
inner self is persecuted within this chamber by split concretized parts of
itself or by its own phantoms which have become uncontrollable.
·
In many schizophrenics, the self-body split remains
the basic one. However, when the 'centre' fails to hold, neither self-experience
nor body-experience can retain identity, integrity, cohesiveness, or vitality,
and the individual becomes precipitated into a condition the end result of
which we suggested could best be described as a state of 'chaotic nonentity '. The best
description of any such condition I have been able to find in literature is in
the Prophetic Books of William Blake. In the Greek descriptions of Hell,
and in Dante, the shades or ghosts, although estranged from life, still
retain their inner cohesiveness. In Blake, this is not so. The figures of his
Books undergo division in themselves. These books require prolonged study, not
to elucidate Blake's psychopathology, but in order to learn from him what,
somehow, he knew about in a most intimate fashion, while remaining sane.
·
A good deal of schizophrenia is simply nonsense,
red-herring speech, prolonged filibustering to throw dangerous people off the
scent, to create boredom and futility in others. The schizophrenic is often
making a fool of himself and the doctor. He is playing at being mad to avoid at
all costs the possibility of being held responsible for a
single coherent idea, or intention.
·
It is the thesis of this study that schizophrenia is a
possible outcome of a more than usual difficulty in being a whole person with
the other, and with not sharing the common-sense (i.e. the community sense) way
of experiencing oneself in the world. The world of the child, as of the adult,
is 'a unity of the given and the constructed' (Hegel), a unity for
the child of what is mediated to it by the parents, the mother in the first
instance, and of what he makes of this. The mother and father greatly simplify
the world for the young child, and as his capacity grows to make sense, to
inform chaos with pattern, to grasp distinctions and connections of greater and
greater complexity, so – as Buber puts it – he is led out into 'a feasible
world'.
But what can happen if
the mother's or the family's scheme of things does not match what the child can
live and breathe in? The child then has to develop its own piercing vision and
to be able to live by that - as William Blake succeeded in doing, as Rimbaud
succeeded in stating, but not in living - or else become mad. It is out of the
earliest loving bonds with the mother that the infant develops the beginnings
of a being-for-itself. It is in and through these bonds that the mother
'mediates' the world to the infant in the first place. The world he is given
may be one he can manage to be in; it is possible, on the contrary, that what
he is given is just not feasible for him at the time. Yet, despite the importance
of the first year of life, the nature of the milieu in which the child has to
exist throughout its infancy, childhood, and adolescence may still have great
effect one way or the other. It is at these subsequent stages that the father
or other significant adults may play a decisive role in the child's life,
either in direct relation with the child or, indirectly, through effects on the
mother.
These considerations suggest that one might do
better to think of schizophrenogenic families, rather than too exclusively of
schizophrenogenic mothers. At least, doing so might encourage more reports of
the dynamics of the family constellation as a whole, instead of studies of
mothers, or fathers, or siblings, without sufficient reference to the whole
family dynamics.
[In the following excerpts, there is frequent
reference to “phantasy” (English spelling). Phantasy is essentially the mental
corollary – the psychic representation – of instinct. Laing notes the
work of Susan Isaacs, entitled “The Nature and Function of Phantasy” (summarized in our ‘From
The Writings’ section, under Laing) observing that ‘unconscious phantasy is a
way of experiencing our desires which plays a part in our personal relations
throughout life’.]
·
If I
want to get to know you, it is unlikely that I shall if I proceed as though I
were studying nebulae or rats. You will not be inclined to disclose yourself to
me. Whatever else I may be studying, I shall not be studying you if I do
not know you. If you are adept at self-concealment, you may be justifiably
confident that I shall not learn much about you by scrutinizing your behaviour
alone. If one says that all one is interested in is the study of behaviour
'pure and simple', then one is not studying persons.
·
Phantasy may or may not be experienced, by
either the one person or the other, as inner or outer, private or public,
shareable or unshareable, real or unreal. It is ironical that often what I take
to be most public reality turns out to be what others take to be my most
private phantasy. And that which I suppose is my most private ‘inner’ world
turns out to be what I have most in common with other human beings.
A psychoanalyst describes his experience at certain moments in a group
when he feels he is being manipulated so as to be playing a part, no matter how
difficult to recognize, in somebody else’s phantasy – or he would do if
it were not for what in recollection I can only call a temporary loss of
insight, a sense of experiencing strong feelings, and at the same time a belief
that their existence is quite adequately justified by the objective situation
without recourse to recondite explanation of their causation.
This alienation effect is insidious. We are all prone to be drawn into social
phantasy systems, with loss of one’s 'own' identity in the process, and
only in retrospect become aware that this has happened. I believe the ability
to shake one's self out of the numbing feeling of reality that is a
concomitant of this state is the prime requisite of the analyst in the group.
To shake one's self out of the false sense of reality entails a de-realization
of what one falsely takes to be unreality. Only then is one able to
apperceive the social phantasy system in which one is. The normal state
of affairs is to be so immersed in one's immersion in social phantasy systems
that one takes them to be real.
·
All
groups operate by means of phantasy. The type of experience a group gives
us is one of the main reasons, if not for some people the only reason,
for being in a group. What do people want to get from the experience of being in
a particular set of human collectivities?
The close-knit groups that occur in some families and other groupings are bound together by the need to find pseudo-real experience that can be found only through the modality of phantasy. This means that the family is not experienced as the modality of phantasy but as 'reality'. However, 'reality' in this sense is not a modality, but a quality attachable to any modality.
If a family member has a tenable position within the family phantasy
system, his call to leave the system in any sense is likely only to come from
outside the phantasy system. We vary in readiness, and in desire, to emerge
from the unconscious phantasy systems we take to be our realities. As long as
we are in apparently tenable positions, we find every reason not to
suppose that we are in a false sense of reality or unreality, security or
insecurity, identity or lack of identity.
A false social sense of reality entails, among other things, phantasy
unrecognized as such. If Paul begins to wake up from the family phantasy
system, he can only be classified as mad or bad by the family since to them
their phantasy is reality, and what is not their phantasy is not real.
If he testifies to any experience outside what they take to be real and true,
he can only be involved in a regrettable tissue of phantasy and falsehood,
in telling them that what they know to be real and true is a regrettable tissue
of phantasy and falsehood, in telling him that what he knows to be real and true, is a regrettable tissue of
phantasy and falsehood, for which he needs therapy.
·
The
usual state of affairs is to be in a tenable position in phantasy systems of a
nexus. This is usually called having an ‘identity’ or 'personality'. We never
realize we are in it. We never even dream of extricating ourselves. We
tolerate, punish, or treat as harmless, bad, or mad those who try to extricate
themselves, and tell us that we should also.
A person may be placed in an untenable position comprising a
non-compossible set of positions. When his position, or positions in the social
phantasy system become such that he can neither stay in nor leave his own
phantasy, his position is untenable.
·
'Reality'
moves from relative to absolute. The more the man we think is absolutely wrong
thinks he is absolutely right and we are absolutely wrong, the sooner that man
has to be destroyed before he destroys himself or us. We do not (of course)
mean that we want to destroy him. We want to save him from his terrible delusion that we
want to destroy him. Can't he see that all we want to do is to destroy his
delusion? His delusion that we want to destroy him. His delusion is the belief
that we are trying to stick pins in his eyes. Someone who thinks that people
are sticking pins in his eyes may go along to a psychiatrist to have himself
leucotomized by pins being stuck in his eyes, because he would rather even
believe he was mad than that it might be real.
·
Some
'psychotics' look on psychoanalysis as a relatively safe place to tell someone
what they really think. They are prepared to play at being a patient and even
to keep up the charade by paying the analyst, providing he does not
‘cure’ them. They are even prepared to pretend to be cured if it will look bad
for him if he is having a run of people who don't seem to be getting better.
Not an unreasonable contract.
·
Most
three-year-olds, helped on by their parents, helped on by authorities such as
Anna Freud, are well on the way to successfully pretending to be just little
boys and girls. Just about this time the child abdicates his ecstasy and
forgets that he is pretending to be just a little boy. He becomes just a little
boy. But he is no more simply himself, because he is now just a little boy,
than the man is simply himself because he is a waiter in a cafe. 'Just a
little boy' is just what many authorities on children think a
three-year-old human being is.
Sixty years later that man, having come to believe he was 'just a little
boy' who had to learn all those things in order to become a 'big man', and
having stuffed his mind with all the other things that big men tell little
boys, having become a big man, begins to become an old man. But suddenly he
begins to remember that it had all been a game. He had played at being a little
boy, and at being a big man, and is now well into playing at being an ‘old
man’. His wife and children begin to get very worried. A psychoanalyst friend
of the family explains that a hypomanic denial of death (he had been influenced
by existentialism), is not uncommon in certain particularly 'successful'
people; it is a reversion to infantile omnipotence. Probably it can be
'contained' if he is socialized into a religious group. It might be a good
idea if the minister was asked round for dinner. We'd better watch out that the
investments are quite safe, just in case ...
He tries to pretend that he is 'simply himself, just a little
boy'. But he cannot quite do so. A three-year-old who tries and fails to pretend
he is 'just a little boy' is in for trouble. He is likely to be sent for
psychoanalysis if his parents can afford it. Woe betide the
sixty-three-year-old man if he is unable to pretend that he is 'just an
old man'.
·
To
live in the past or in the future may be less satisfying than to live in the
present, but it can never be as disillusioning. The present will never be what
has been or what could be…. In the search for something outside time, there is
an enervating sense of pointlessness and hopelessness.
Time is empty. It is as futile as it is
inescapable. A false eternity, made out of all the time on one's hands which
drags on eternally. It is an attempt to live outside time by living in a part
of time, to live timelessly in the past, or in the future. The present is never
realized.
·
One's
self-identity is the story one tells one's self of who one is. One's need to
believe this story often seems to be one's desire to discount another story,
that is more primitive and more terrible. The need to pivot one's life around a
complementary identity (i.e. I am my father's son, husband's wife) betokens a
dread of phantasy and hatred of what is.
·
The
others tell one who one is. Later one endorses, or tries to discard, the ways
the others have defined one. It is difficult not to accept their story. One may
try not to be what one 'knows' one is, in one's heart of hearts. One may try to
tear out from oneself this 'alien' identity one has been endowed with or
condemned to, and create by one's own actions an identity for oneself, which
one tries to force others to confirm. Whatever its particular subsequent
vicissitudes, however, one's first social identity is conferred on one. We
learn to be whom we are told we are.
·
The 'family
romance' is a dream of changing the others who define the self, so that the
identity of the self can be self-defined by a re-definition of the others.
It is an attempt to feel pride rather than shame at being the son or daughter
of this father and this mother.
·
Collusion is a ‘game’ played by two or more people
whereby they deceive themselves in mutual self-deception. Each plays the other's game,
though he may not necessarily be fully aware of doing so. An essential feature
of this game is not admitting that it is a game. Two people in relation may
confirm each other or genuinely complement each other. Still, to disclose
oneself to the other is hard without confidence in oneself and trust in the
other. Desire for confirmation from each is present in both, but each is caught
between trust and mistrust, confidence and despair; and both settle for
counterfeit acts of confirmation on the basis of pretence. To do so both
must play the game of collusion.
Collusion is always clinched when self finds in other that other who
will confirm self in the false self that one is trying to make real, and vice
versa. The ground is then set for prolonged mutual evasion of truth and true
fulfillment. Each has found an other to endorse his own false notion of himself
and to give this appearance a semblance of reality.
A third party is always a danger to a two-person collusion.
·
A
large part of the art of therapy is in the tact and lucidity with which the
analyst points out the ways in which collusion maintains illusions or disguises
delusions. The dominant phantasy in a group may be that the therapist has 'the
answer', and that if they had 'the answer' they would not suffer. The
therapist's task is then like that of the Zen Master, to point out that
suffering is not due to not getting 'the answer', but is the
very state of desire that assumes the existence of that kind of answer, and
the frustration of never getting it. Therapy without collusion cannot help but
frustrate desires generated by phantasy.
·
To be
'authentic' is to be true to oneself, to be what one is, to be 'genuine'. To be
'inauthentic' is to not be oneself, to be false to oneself: to be not as one
appears to be, to be counterfeit…. We tend to link the categories of truth and
reality by saying that a genuine act is real, but that a person who habitually
uses action as a masquerade is not real.
The intensification of the being of the agent
through self-disclosure, through making patent the latent self, is the meaning
of Nietzsche's 'will to power'.
·
Truth
is literally that which is without secrecy, what discloses itself without a
veil. This concept has practical interpersonal implications in terms of telling
the truth, lying, pretending, equivocating, by speech or deed: one constantly
seeks to gauge the person's ‘position’ in relation to his own speech and deeds.
When one sees actions of the other in the light
of this latter form of truth or falsehood, one says a man is truthful or 'true
to himself' if one 'feels' he means what he says or says what he means. His
words, or his other ways of expressing himself, are 'true' expressions of his
'real' experience or intentions. Between such 'truth' and a lie there is room
for the most curious and subtle ambiguities and complexities in the person's
disclosure or concealment of himself.
·
When a
man's words, gestures, acts, disclose his real intentions, one says they are
genuine and not counterfeit as coin is genuine and not counterfeit. His frown
of disapproval, his word of encouragement, his smile of pleasure, are the true
and genuine currency of himself.
Actions may be attributed, by self to self or
self to other, as revealing or concealing, 'strong' or 'weak', 'fulfilling' or
'emptying'; making 'real' the being of the doer, making him more 'unreal', more
creative, or more destructive.
·
If the
psychiatrist or psychopathologist under the illusion that he sees the other
person in a purely 'objective' way, fails to subject his diagnosis by 'signs'
and 'symptoms' to a critical examination, he is condemned by these 'clinical'
categories to an impoverished and twisted view of the other. Such 'clinical'
categories as schizoid, autistic, impoverished affect, withdrawal, all
presuppose that there are reliable, valid impersonal criteria for making
attributions about the other person's relation to his actions. There are no
such reliable or valid criteria.
·
One
can put oneself into a false position, ultimately into an untenable position.
One can be put into a false position also, ultimately into an untenable
position, by the actions of others….The amount of 'room' to move a person feels
that he has is related both to the room that he gives himself and the room
he is given by others.
·
Every
human being, whether child or adult, seems to require significance, that is, place in another
person’s world. Adults and children seek 'position' in the eyes of
others, a position that offers room to move. It is difficult to imagine many
who would choose unlimited freedom within a nexus of personal relations, if
anything they did had no significance for anyone else.
·
Therapy
often entails coming to look at the assumptions made on the basis of shared
phantasy systems. The disjunction must be seen. Once seen, and faced for the first
time, confusion is converted to conflict. This involves
emergence from a shared phantasy dread of
separation. The act of leaving is felt as suicide or murder, or both. In disentangling
the parent's phantasy from the patient's experience, the patient gets clear of
this particular possibility of psychosis. True conflict is clarifying. False
conflict is muddling. When the 'issue' is false and confused, the 'real' or
'true' conflict cannot come into focus, 'true' choices are not available, and
the person is in danger of psychosis.
·
In an untenable
position, no matter how one feels or how he acts, or what meaning the situation
has, his feelings are denuded of validity, his acts are stripped of their
motives, intentions, and consequences, the situation is robbed of its meaning.
This may be done unintentionally, as a by-product of each person's
self-deception. Those who deceive themselves are obliged to deceive others. It
is impossible for me to maintain a false picture of myself unless I falsify
your picture of yourself and of me. I must disparage you if you are genuine,
accuse you of being a phoney when you comply with what I want, say you are
selfish if you go your own way, ridicule you for being immature if you try to
be unselfish, and so on. The person caught within such a muddle does not know
whether he is coming or going. In these circumstances, what we call psychosis
may be a desperate effort to hold on to something. It is not surprising that
the something may be what we call ‘delusions’.
·
The attributes
one ascribes to a person define him and put him in a particular position. By
assigning him to a particular position, attributions 'put him in his place' and
thus have in effect the force of injunctions….What others attribute to one
implicitly or explicitly necessarily plays a decisive part in forming one’s
sense of his own agency, perceptions, motives, intentions: his identity.
· In the area of disjunction between the person's 'own' intentions and those attributed to him by others, issues of secrecy, deception of the other or deception of oneself, equivocation, lying, or telling the truth come into play. Much guilt and shame have to be understood in terms of such discrepancies, over such matters as being a fake, being a phony. True guilt is guilt at the obligation one owes to oneself to be oneself, to actualize oneself. False guilt is guilt felt at not being what others feel one ought to be or assume that one is.
·
Some
people undoubtedly have a remarkable aptitude for keeping the other tied in
knots. There are those who excel in tying knots and those who excel in being
tied in knots. Tyer and tied are often both unconscious of how it is done, or
even that it is being done at all. It is striking how difficult it is for the
parties concerned to see what is happening. We must remember that part of the
knot is not to see that it is a knot.
·
For
there to be healing through interpersonal relations the respective individuals
must obstinately attempt to recover the wholeness of being human through the
relationship between them. Any technique concerned with the other without the
self, with behavior to the exclusion of experience, with the relationship to
the neglect of the persons in relation, with the individuals to the exclusion
of their relationship, and most of all, with an object-to-be-changed rather
than a person-to-be-accepted, simply perpetuates the disease it purports to
cure.
·
[Beginning
from the assumption that both parties are in the same existential fix, each
alienated from his self, Laing concludes that]: “The therapeutic relationship
is therefore a re-search. A search, constantly reasserted and reconstituted,
for what we have all lost and whose loss some can perhaps endure a little more
easily than others, as some people can stand lack of oxygen better than others,
and this re-search is validated by the shared experience of experience
regained in and through the therapeutic relationship in the here and now.”
[In a string of remarkable insights into
the ways that human beings behave to each other, R.D. Laing works out the
deadly duologues that silently mar relationships. Love and hate, good and bad,
hoping and fearing, wanting and getting… here are the first elements of the
torturous cat’s cradles and the sad little patterns our minds are compelled to
repeat.]
·
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.
·
It is our duty to bring up our children to
love,
honour
and obey us.
If
they don't, they must be punished,
otherwise we would not be doing our duty.
If
they grow up to love, honour and obey us
we
have been blessed for bringing them up properly.
If
they grow up not to love, honour and obey us
either
we have brought them up properly
or
we have not:
if
we have
there
must be something the matter with them;
if
we have not
there
is something the matter with us.
·
A son should respect his father
He should not have to
be taught to respect his father
It is something that
is natural
That's how I've
brought up my son anyway.
Of course a father
must be worthy of respect
He can forfeit a
son's respect
But I hope at least
that my son will respect me, if
only for leaving him
free to respect me or not.
·
There must be something the matter with him
because
he would not be acting as he does
unless there was something
the matter with him
therefore
he is acting as he is
because
there is something the matter with him
He does not think
there is anything the matter with him because
one of the things
that is
the matter with him
is that he does not
think that there is anything
the matter with him
therefore
we have to help him
realize that,
the fact that he does
not think there is anything
the matter with him
is one of the things
that is
the matter with him
·
there is something the matter with him
because
he thinks
there
must be something the matter with us
for
trying to help him to see
that
there must be something the matter with him
to
think that there is something the matter with us
for
trying to help him to see that
we
are helping him
to
see that
we
are not persecuting him
by helping him
to see we are not
persecuting him
by helping him
to see that
he is refusing to see
that there is
something the matter
with him
for not seeing there
is something the matter with him
·
It is the duty of children to respect their
parents
And it is the duty of
parents to teach their children
to respect them,
by setting them a
good example.
Parents who do not
set their children a good example
don't deserve
respect.
If we do set them a
good example
we believe they will
grow up to be grateful to us
when they become
parents themselves.
If he is cheeky
he doesn't respect
you
for not punishing him
for not respecting
you
You shouldn't spoil a
child.
It's the easy way, to
do what they want
but they won't
respect you for letting them get away
with it when they
grow up.
He won't respect you
if
you don't punish him
for
not respecting you.
·
Once upon a time, when Jack was little,
he wanted to be with his
mummy all the time
and was frightened
she would go away
later, when he was a
little bigger,
he wanted to be away
from his mummy
and was frightened
that
she wanted him to be
with her all the time
when he grew up he
fell in love with Jill
and he wanted to be
with her all the time
and was frightened
she would go away
when he was a little
older,
he did not want to be
with Jill all the time
he was frightened
that she wanted to be
with him all the time, and
that she was
frightened
that he did not want
to be with her all the time
Jack frightens Jill
he will leave her
because he is
frightened she will leave him.
·
How clever has one to be to he stupid?
The others told her
she was stupid. So she made
herself stupid in
order not to see how stupid
they were to think
she was stupid,
because it was bad to
think they were stupid.
She preferred to be
stupid and good,
rather than bad and
clever.
It is bad to be
stupid: she needs to be clever
to be so good and
stupid.
It is bad to be
clever, because this shows
how stupid they were
to tell her how
stupid she was.
·
She has started to drink
as a way to cope
that makes her less
able to cope
the more she drinks
the more frightened
she is of becoming a drunkard
the more drunk
the less frightened
of being drunk
the more frightened
of being drunk when not drunk
the more not
frightened drunk
the more frightened
not drunk
the more she destroys
herself
the more frightened
of being destroyed by him
the more frightened
of destroying him
the more she destroys
herself
·
There is something I don't know
that
I am supposed to know.
I
don't know what it is I don't know
and
yet am supposed to know,
and
I feel I look stupid
if I
seem both not to know it
and
not know what it is I don't know.
Therefore
I pretend I know it.
This is nerve-racking
since I don't know
what I must pretend to know.
Therefore
I pretend to know everything.
I feel you know what
I am supposed to know
but you can't tell me
what it is
because you don't
know that I don't know what it is.
You may know what I
don't know, but not
that I don't know it,
and
I can't tell you. So you will have to tell me everything.
·
Although innumerable beings have
been led to Nirvana
no being has been led to Nirvana
Before one goes through
the gate
one may not be aware
there is a gate
One may think there
is a gate to go through
and look a long time
for it
without finding it
One may find it and
it may not open
If it opens one may
be through it
As one goes through
it
one sees that the gate
one went through
was the self that
went through it
no one went through a
gate
there was no gate to
go through
no one ever found a
gate
no one ever realized
there was never a gate.
·
By those who know the discourse on
dharmas
as like unto a raft
dharmas should be forsaken,still more so
no-dharmas
Hearing that dharmas,
and still more so, no-dharmas
should be forsaken
some are of the
opinion that there is no gate
that is their opinion
there is no way of
knowing except to go
through it
·
a finger points to the moon
Put the expression
a
finger points to the moon, in brackets
(a
finger points to the moon)
The statement:
'A
finger points to the moon is in brackets'
is an attempt to say
that all that is in the bracket
( )
is, as to that which
is not in the bracket,
what a finger is to
the moon
Put all possible
expressions in brackets
Put all possible
forms in brackets
and put the brackets
in brackets
Every expression, and
every form,
is to what is expressionless
and formless
what a finger is to
the moon
all expressions and
all forms
point to the
expressionless and formless
the proposition
'All
forms point to the formless'
is itself a formal
proposition
·
In
this book I've tried to portray some facts of my life and world. What is here
is sketches of my childhood, first questions, speculations, observations,
reflections on conception, intra-uterine life, being born and giving birth:
allusions to behavior and experience of adults which seem to belong to the same
class as traumatic neuroses. They make us wonder: the adult content of the
adult misery seems to have the form or mold of intra-uterine and birth
catastrophes – can this be possible?
Still I continue to muse over the ways in which structural configurations
emerge into two sets of elements, mythological and embryological.
·
The
unborn, mothers and babies in childbirth, people deemed to have lost their
minds, have this much in common: they are often entirely at the mercy of, in
the complete power of, others. Then we get a glimpse into how we treat each
other when we have carte blanche, more or less.
·
The
main fact of life for me is love or its absence. This is a generalization for
which I can think of no exception. Whether life is worth living depends for me
on whether there is love in life. Without a sense of it, or even the memory of
an hallucination of it, I think I would lose heart completely. If I study human
biology, the science of human life, I don't suppose I will ever come across the
term or the concept and very little evidence of it. Here is a contradiction.
·
I detest much of the theory and practice of natural
science and biology. There is a frustrated natural scientist in me, who has
little else than scorn and contempt for embryologizing/ mythology, for
softheadedness posing as tenderheartedness; for ungrateful and ungracious
attacks on research to which millions of people, including the assailant, owe
their health and lives; for the threadbare cliques of obscurantist and obstructionist
organicism. Nevertheless feelings are facts too.
·
What is done to unborn children, mothers and babies in
childbirth, to people who lose their minds, amazes me. I know I'm not
the only one and that this only goes to show how many savage, primitive,
atavistic, archaic, wild, deviant, psychopathological, undisciplined, stupid,
untamed, unacculturated minds still remain to be weeded out by natural
selection, facilitated by human and genetic engineering.
·
What is one's original face before one is born? This
face that we take to be our face is far from our original face, and if we
identify ourselves with that face, then we're already in a sense deracinated,
uprooted, and captured by this magic spell of reflected images reflecting each
other, wherein we can become lost by identifying ourselves with any part of it.
There's no way to describe one's original face. One can only allude. Some
people go so far as to try to characterize their original face, but that is
felt to be going too far by those who have gone further.
·
If I felt shaky, scattered, unaccountably frightened,
or in any state of bewilderment or consternation or disarray or perplexity or
confusion, and if I went to many a mental hospital looking for help, then I
would be like the Aztecs rushing into the mouths of the Spanish cannon in hope
of finding deliverance. If I really wanted to put myself in the position of
being driven crazy, then the best way I can think of going about it is to go
into one of those psychiatric institutions, mental hospitals, where
psychiatric psychosis is in full swing, uncontested. In such places there is
complete local power to chop and cut people up, physically as well as
theoretically, in the name of the exact opposite of what is said is being done.
The error in psychiatry is not just a casual one. It's an error of one hundred
and eighty degrees in the opposite direction without insight.
I don't use psychiatric terms in my own theory
and practice. I find psychiatry in such entangled confusion that personally I
can do perfectly well without it. Many of its severest critics have themselves
been psychiatrists. If it deals largely in fictions, these fictions are
powerful social facts. Concepts used as mandates to do things to people are
facts, like so many of the other facts of our social life: you could call them
factoids or pseudo-facts, like these other systems that grab a sufficient
number of people to become endemic and then are accepted by perhaps the majority,
for a time.
I do not assume that anyone who is diagnosed as
psychotic or anything else is, per se, ipso facto, more or less crazy than the
person – or computer – doing the diagnosing.
·
I am
very interested in words, and what we have words for and what we haven't got
words for. For instance, the word "paranoia." It always seems very
strange to me that we have this word which means, in effect, that someone feels
that he is being persecuted when the people who are persecuting him don't think
that he is. But we haven't got a word for the condition in which you are
persecuting someone without realizing it, which I would have thought is as
serious a condition as the other, and certainly no less common.
·
There's nothing that affects our chemistry more
immediately than other people. When one walks into a room where one feels
welcome and comfortable and so on, if one had a little trepidation before going
in, that settles down, one's heart is not in a flurry, one's breathing is calm,
one's palms are not sweating, one's throat isn't dry, one doesn't have
butterflies in one's stomach. All these experiential affairs are inextricably
part of the same tapestry as that of our chemistry. There's nothing more
intimately attuned to how we feel in other people’s company than our body
chemistry. And I’m sure that just as there is a chemistry of acute fear, so
there is a chemistry of chronic despair.
Posted 10-10-04
Keith and Marnie Elliott’s “REMEDY” Site
Home
|
Our
Stories
|
The Sublime
|
Our World and
Times
|
Book
Reviews
|
Marnie's
Images
|
The Journal
|
Gleanings
|
From The Writings
Of. . .
|
Allegories
|