he does not experience himself as a complete person but rather as 'split' in various ways, perhaps as a mind more or less tenuously linked to a body, as two or more selves
R. D. Laing sets out a method for reading psychosis as a response that follows its own logic rather than a defect to be catalogued. Working from case material drawn from his psychiatric practice, he traces how a person can come to feel unreal, divided, and unsafe in ordinary contact with others, and how the self splits to protect a private core from a world experienced as engulfing.
The book's clinical value lies in its close listening. Laing stays with what the patient says and does, treating delusion and withdrawal as communications with meaning, and he shows the sequence by which ontological insecurity hardens into breakdown. For a therapist, this offers a grammar for the schizoid position and for the false self that presents to the world while the real self hides.
First published in 1960, it put the patient's experience back at the centre of the encounter.
About the author
Ronald David Laing
Ronald David Laing (1927 to 1989) was a Scottish psychiatrist. Working within existential psychiatry, he treated psychosis as intelligible experience rather than only as a set of symptoms, taking a patient's account of their own feelings as a valid description of personal life. His first book, The Divided Self (1960), examined how a person maintains or loses a secure sense of self. Laing is associated with the anti-psychiatry movement, a label he himself rejected. He co-founded the Philadelphia Association and the Kingsley Hall community.
Details
- 1960
- English
- Penguin Modern Classics
- Penguin Modern Classics, 1960
- 240
- 9780141189376