RD Laing Radio Series

Listening to R.D. Laing in 2012

R.D. Laing: A Three-Part Portrait on CBC Radio (1988)
Written and Directed by Gary Marcuse

Comments on listening to the series in October 2012
By Mariia Demianchuk, student in the Master Program in Psychotherapy as a Science (modality: Psychoanalysis) at Sigmund Freud University, Vienna, Austria

“Are we in the middle of the dream? Is this real?”

What struck me about this ‘wild man in a conservative profession’ is his unorthodox approach towards the concept of mental illness as a myth. While others were discussing whether he was nuts, his idea of allowing fear to be your adviser in exploring the intellectual and spiritual limits of human existence is a bold and challenging way to introduce oneself to reality more closely.

He dares to make fun of issues that society takes so seriously, like psychiatry or the DSM, yet shows deep compassion for a hurt or vulnerable person. He insists on one’s own right to acquire life experience in the way one wants — what he calls “experiential anarchy” — even in ways that might, in classical terminology, be classified as symptoms of mental disorder.

Using Laingian language, there is something psychophobic in our society, a tendency to avoid tolerating peculiarities in others. Perhaps this is due to competition in the industrial world, where psychiatric hospitalization can serve to secure a bigger “slice of the pie” in the consumeristic feast. Or perhaps we are simply anxious about witnessing or being around people who openly display layers of psyche that society hides as primitive, politically incorrect, or inappropriate for a “highly developed democratic society.”

As R.D. Laing put it:

“We’re supposed to live in a homogenized, consensus reality where everyone sees, hears, and perceives the same thing at the same time.”

Disturbance in others stirs latent disturbance within us. It sometimes seems that psychiatrists are trained to see the person as a problem — as a list of symptoms — but not as a person. Why? Perhaps to minimize effort in thinking, as we live in an anti-mind society, with violent attacks on our brain functions.

Psychoanalysis, as a method that uses thinking to expand the psyche and foster integration and health, is therefore also under attack today. Throughout history, splitting of the mind (skhizein in Greek) was seen as the opposite of health. Laing pointed out:

“The words ‘health’ and ‘holy’ come from ‘heil’ and ‘hale’. Health, holy, wholeness are very much related to each other.”

Analysis is a valuable tool to widen the road of life experience through synthesis and deeper integration of inner and outer reality.

20.10.2012 — Mariia Demianchuk, Vienna