Home About Contact. The Politics Of Experience — R. Laing Posted on June 3, by s: Days of Rage. Bookmark the permalink. Leave a Reply Cancel reply Enter your comment here Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:. Email required Address never made public. Name required. Search for:. Newton Hunter S. McNamara Religion Rob. Blog at WordPress. Laing will be long remembered for his insight into the relational rather than genetic dimensions of schizophrenia, for his understanding that madness can be the inevitable expression of an existential impasse created by relation binds and familial collusions.
This is a difficult notion that is more easily dismissed than carefully examined. Laing will also be remembered for articulating the notion that madness may also represent a transient mental state that can, with sensitive guidance and support, be resolved and transformed into a deeper understanding of ones place in the world. VDS, Kallista Revised, Our alienation goes to the roots. The realization of this is the essential springboard for any serious reflection on any aspect of present inter-human life.
Viewed from different perspectives, construed in different ways and expressed in different idioms, this realization unites men as diverse as Marx, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger, Tillich and Sartre.
We are bemused and crazed creatures, strangers to our true selves, to one another, and to the spiritual and material world - mad, even, from an ideal standpoint we can glimpse but not adopt.
We are born into a world where alienation awaits us. We are potentially men, but are in an alienated state, and this state is not simply a natural system. Alienation as our present destiny is achieved only by outrageous violence perpetrated by human beings on human beings.
We can see other peoples behaviour, but not their experience. This has led some people to insist that psychology has nothing to do with the other persons experience, but only with his behaviour. The other persons behaviour is an experience of mine. My behaviour is an experience of the other. The task of social phenomenology is to relate my experience of the others behaviour to the others experience of my behaviour.
Its study is the relation between experience and experience: its true field is inter-experience. It is concerned withn the relation between my experience of you and your experience of me. That is, with inter-experience, It is concerned with your behaviour and my behaviour as I experience it, and your behaviour and my behaviour as you experience it.
Without it the whole structure of our theory and practice must collapse. My experience is not inside my head. My experience of this room is out there in the room.
To say that my experience is intra-psychic is to presuppose that there is a psyche that my experience is in. My psyche is my experience, my experience is my psyche. We can derive the main determinants of our individual and social behaviour from external exigencies.
All these views are partial vistas and partial concepts. Theoretically one needs a spiral of expanding and contracting schemata that enable us to move freely and without discontinuity from varying degrees of abstraction to greater or lesser degrees of concreteness. Who are we to decide that it is hopeless?
Personal action is either predominantly validating, confirming, encouraging, supportive, enhancing, or it is invalidating, disconfirming, discouraging, undermining and constricting. It can be creative or destructive. In a world where the normal condition is one of alienation, most personal action must be destructive both of ones own experience and of that of the other. The element of negation is in every relationship and every experience of relationship.
The distinction between the absence of relationships, and the experience of every relationship as an absence, is the division between loneliness and a perpetual solitude, between provisional hope or hopelessness and a permanent despair. The part I feel I play in generating this state of affairs determines what I feel I can or should do about it. These words are not harmless and innocent verbal arabesques, except in the professional philosophism of decadence.
We are afraid to approach the fathomless and bottomless groundlessness of everything. There's nothing to be afraid of. The ultimate reassurance, and the ultimate terror. I cannot say what cannot be said, but sounds can make us listen to the silence. Within the confines of language it is possible to indicate when the dots must begin. But in using a word, a letter, a sound, OM, one cannot put a sound to soundlessness, or name the unnameable. The silence of the preformation expressed in and through language, cannot be expressed by language.
But language can be used to convey what it cannot say - by its interstices, by its emptiness and lapses, by the latticework of words, syntax, sound and meanings. The modulations of pitch and volume delineate the form precisely by not filling in the spaces between the lines. But it is a grave mistake to mistake the lines for the pattern, or the pattern for that which it is patterning. Nevertheless, it is very easy to lose ones way at any stage, and especially when one is nearest.
They are bridgeheads into alien territory. They are acts of insurrection. Their source is from the Silence at the centre of each of us. Wherever and whenever such a whorl of patterned sound or space is established in the external world, the power that it contains generates new lines of forces whose effects are felt for centuries. Psychotherapy consists in the paring away of all that stands between us, the props, masks, roles, lies, defences, anxieties, projections and introjections, in short, all the carry-overs from the past, transference and counter-transference, that we use by habit and collusion, wittingly or unwittingly, as our currency for relationships.
He may set out actively to disrupt old patterns of experience and behaviour. He may actively reinforce new ones. One hears now of therapists giving orders, laughing, shouting, crying, even getting up from that sacred chair.
Zen, with its emphasis on illumination achieved through the sudden and unexpected, is a growing influence. Of course such techniques in the hands of a man who has not unremitting concern and respect for the patient can be disastrous.
Within its own framework it has no concepts of social collectivities of experience shared or unshared between persons. This theory has no category of you, as there is in the work of Feuerbach, Buber, Parsons. It has no way of expressing the meeting of I with an other, and of the impact of one person on another.
It has no concept of me except as objectified as the ego. The ego is one part of a mental apparatus. Internal objects are other parts of this system. Another ego is part of a different system or structure. How two mental apparatuses or psychic structures or systems, each with its own constellation of internal objects, can relate to each other remains unexamined.
Within the constructs the theory offers, it is possibly inconceivable. Projection and introjection do not in themselves bridge the gap between persons. We are left with, thehealingproject. We are not concerned with the interaction of two objects, nor with their transactions within a dyadic system; we are not concerned with the communication patterns within a system comprising two computer-like sub-systems that receive and process input, and emit outgoing signals.
Our concern is with two origins of experience in relation. That is only the beginning. As a whole generation of men, we are so estranged from the inner world that there are many 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 lets make it hard. Let it be measured and counted. Quantify the hearts agony and ecstasy in a world which, when the inner world is first discovered, we are liable to find ourselves bereft and derelict.
For without the inner the outer loses its meaning and without the outer the inner loses its substance. We must know about relations and communications. But these disturbed and disturbing patterns of communication reflect the disarray of personal worlds of experience whose repression, denial, splitting, introjection, projection, etc.
From the moment of birth, when the stone-age baby confronts the twentieth-century mother, the baby is subjected to these forces of violence, called love, as its mother and father have been, and their parents and their parents before them. These forces are mainly concerned with destroying most of its potentialities.
This enterprise is on the whole 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. Persons are distinguished from things in that persons experience the world, whereas things behave in the world. Thing-events do not experience. Personal events are experiential. Natural scientism is the error of turning persons into things by a process of reification that is not itself part of the true.
Results derived in this way have to be dequantified and dereified before they can be reassimilated into the realm of human discourse. The error fundamentally is the failure to realize that there is an ontological discontinuity between human beings and it-beings. Perhaps to a limited extent we can undo what has been done to us, and what we have done to ourselves.
Perhaps men and women were born to love one another, simply and genuinely, rather than to this travesty that we can call love. If we can stop destroying ourselves we may stop destroying others. We have to begin by admitting and even accepting our violence, rather than blindly destroying ourselves with it, and therewith we have to realize that we are as deeply afraid to live and to love as we are to die.
Only when something has become problematic do we start to ask questions. Disagreement shakes us out of our slumbers, and forces us to see our own point of view through contrast with another person who does not share it. But we resist confrontations. The history of heresies of all kinds testifies to more than the tendency to break off communication excommunication with those who hold different dogmas or opinions; it bears witness to our intolerance of different fundamental structures of experience.
We seem to need to share a communal meaning to human existence, to give with others a common sense to the world, to maintain a consensus. 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 that 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. The members of the family live in a family ghetto, as it were. This is one basis for so-called maternal over-protection. It is not over-protection from the mothers point of view, nor, indeed, often from the point of view of other members of the family. The protection that such a family offers its members seems to be based on several preconditions: i a phantasy of the external world as extraordinarily dangerous; ii the generation of terror inside the nexus at this external danger.
The group, whether We, or You or Them, is not a new individual or organism or hyperorganism on the social scene; it has no agency of its own, it has no consciousness of its own. Yet we may shed our own blood and the blood of others for this bloodless presence. The group is a reality of some kind or other. But what sort of reality? The We is a form of unification of a plurality composed by those who share the common experience of its ubiquitous invention among them.
From outside, a group of Them may come into view in another way. It is still a type of unification imposed on a multiplicity, but this time those who invent the unification expressly do not themselves compose it. Here, I am of course not referring to the outsiders perception of a We already constituted from within itself.
The Them comes into view as a sort of social mirage. The Reds, the Whites, the Blacks, the Jews. In the human scene, however, such mirages can be self-actualizing. My brother, as dear to me as I am to myself, my twin, my double, my flesh and blood, may be a fellow lyncher as well as a fellow martyr, and in either case is liable to meet his death at my hand if he chooses to take a different view of the situation.
The brotherhood of man is evoked by particular men according to their circumstances. But it seldom extends to all men. In the name of our freedom and our brotherhood we are prepared to blow up the other half of mankind, and to be blown up in turn. Once people can be induced to experience a situation in a similar way, they can be expected to behave in similar ways.
Induce people all to want the same thing, hate the same things, feel the same threat, then their behaviour is already captive - you have acquired your consumers or your cannonfodder. Induce a common perception of Negroes as subhuman, or the Whites as vicious and effete, and behaviour can be concerted accordingly.
It is just possible that a further transformation is possible if men can come to experience themselves as One of Us. If, even on the basis of the crassest self interest, we can realize that We and Them must be transcended in the totality of the human race, if we in destroying them are not to destroy us all. As war continues, both sides come more and more to resemble each other. The uroborus eats its own tail.
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