109 Quotes by R.D. Laing

In the context of our present pervasive madness that we call normality, sanity, freedom, all our frames of reference are ambiguous and equivocal.

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.

We all live under the constant threat of our own annihilation. Only by the most outrageous violation of ourselves have we achieved our capacity to live in relative adjustment to a civilization apparently driven to its own destruction.

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

It seems also that the preferred method of attack on the other is based on the same principle as the attack felt to be implicit in the other’s relationship to oneself. Thus, the man who is frightened of his own subjectivity being swamped, impinged upon, or congealed by the other is frequently to be found attempting to swamp, to impinge upon, or to kill the other person’s subjectivity.

We all know from our personal experience that we can be ourselves only in and through our world and there is a sense in which ‘our’ world will die with us although ‘the’ world will go on without us.

The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one’s mind, is the condition of the normal man.

Life is a sexually transmitted disease.

The greatest psychopathologist has been Freud. Freud was a hero. He descended to the “Underworld” and met there stark terrors. He carried with him his theory as a Medusa’s head which turned these terrors to stone. We who follow Freud have the benefit of the knowledge he brought back with him and conveyed to us. He survived. We must see if we now can survive without using a theory that is in some measure an instrument of defense.