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The Politics of Experience/The Bird of Paradise
by
R.D. Laing is at his most wickedly iconoclastic in this eloquent assault on conventional morality. Unorthodox to some, brilliantly original to others, The Politics of Experience goes beyond the usual theories of mental illness and alienation, and makes a convincing case for the "madness of morality." Compelling, unsettling, consistently absorbing, The Politics of Experienc
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Paperback, 192 pages
Published
August 12th 1983
by Pantheon
(first published 1967)
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Community Reviews
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What if the "delusions" reported by patients during psychotic episodes were not symptoms of a disease, but valid descriptions of their experiences?
Laing describes schizophrenia as a kind of journey into the inner self, one that is misunderstood by people in the "normal" world and labelled as madness. Why do we misunderstand it? Because we are so alienated from our own inner worlds that we cannot comprehend someone else's experiences there. Indeed, we are so alienated that even the thought of go ...more
Laing describes schizophrenia as a kind of journey into the inner self, one that is misunderstood by people in the "normal" world and labelled as madness. Why do we misunderstand it? Because we are so alienated from our own inner worlds that we cannot comprehend someone else's experiences there. Indeed, we are so alienated that even the thought of go ...more
Psychology as imperialism.
While the writing is at times clunky and some chapters are top-heavy with psycho-analyst speak -- gibberish to the non-specialist -- Liang does string together some powerful stuff at times:
“Madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be breakthrough. It is potentially liberation and renewal as well as enslavement and existential death.”
“The family’s function is to repress Eros; to induce a false consciousness of security; to deny death by avoiding life; to cut off tr ...more
While the writing is at times clunky and some chapters are top-heavy with psycho-analyst speak -- gibberish to the non-specialist -- Liang does string together some powerful stuff at times:
“Madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be breakthrough. It is potentially liberation and renewal as well as enslavement and existential death.”
“The family’s function is to repress Eros; to induce a false consciousness of security; to deny death by avoiding life; to cut off tr ...more
Is schizophrenia an understandable response to the unreasonable pressures of a terminally insane society? It's a notion with perennial appeal, one that's been brought up by many, many people (not just this guy). Certainly our modern world is a three-ring circus of demented behavior accepted as "normal". In a world of Honey Boo Boo, Beliebers, drone strikes, and mass government surveillance, the concept of what is "sane" or "normal" may just as well be vacationing off-planet at this point.
Howeve ...more
I am having a hard time finding words for this book. It is ostensibly about Psychiatry, and a few sections treat that subject fairly specifically, but the more striking parts of the book seem to have a much more general significance. In particular, chapters 1, 3, and 4 are . . . woah. They are incredibly striking and left me stunned. It fits in a lot with Derrick Jensen themes, although his wording is much more severe and "prophetic" than Jensen's. Particularly, Chapter Four, Us and Them, takes
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Schizophrenia, in some cases, may be a healthy reaction to an unhealthy situation. Laing views society and the family as positively destructive to its members; that shared, naked experience with another human being is nearly impossible. He claims we connect with others only by forming an Us mentality where a nexus of kinship is formed, but in doing so the nexus necessarily excludes some group of others and calls it Them. By forming these nexuses we create antagonistic relationships with Them and
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dear reader,
hello! what weather! welcome to another edition of "small talk" wherein i review a VERY recently published novel by an up-and-coming author! on the docket this week, it's "the politician's experience" by r.d. "swingin' low" laing (you may know his sister, k.d. laing!). ok, let's GO!
REVIEW:
all previous psychiatry is fundamentally flawed.
what is considered "mental illness" is rather a healthy reaction to an oppressive society, and insane standards of living.
existentialism.
psychoses - s ...more
hello! what weather! welcome to another edition of "small talk" wherein i review a VERY recently published novel by an up-and-coming author! on the docket this week, it's "the politician's experience" by r.d. "swingin' low" laing (you may know his sister, k.d. laing!). ok, let's GO!
REVIEW:
all previous psychiatry is fundamentally flawed.
what is considered "mental illness" is rather a healthy reaction to an oppressive society, and insane standards of living.
existentialism.
psychoses - s ...more
The book starts off very theoretical, but once you get past the beginning it becomes entirely absorbing. It entirely changed my perspective from which to view mental illness, in a good way -- basically, Laing posits that we're all alienated from ourselves in some shape or form; those labelled schizophrenic just express this alienation in forms non-acceptable to mainstream society. His ideas were very liberating for me.
Jul 11, 2010
Erik Graff
rated it
really liked it
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review of another edition
Recommends it for:
Laing fans
Recommended to Erik by:
no one
Shelves:
psychology
This is a short collection which, as I recall, contains the most substantial piece I've seen by Laing about psychedelic drugs. I read the thing in the midst of studying a lot of other work by him and his colleagues in "the antipsychiatry movement" in the context of doing independent study work in the nebulous field of "humanistic psychology" in college. The essay, "The Bird of Paradise", appears to have been written under the influence.
I love R.D. Laing.
One of the best books I have ever read, where Laing exposes the real nature of our social madness. The world in which we live, inevitably leads us to alignment, and make us blind. We can see other people’s behavior, but not their experience. Therefore, the experience of each other are inaccessible, invisible, and interpreted through the observed behavior. Laing says that psychiatrists have paid very little attention to the experience of the patient and the diagnosis, psychotherapy and treatment
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Offensively bad.
He completely denies the practicality of the (admittedly subjective) views society forces upon us regarding 'normality' and mental illness. While these are arguably an evil in themselves, they are necessary for the effective functioning of society which in turn is necessary for our physical and emotional security. A schizophrenic is dissociated from the collective reality and is thus less able to attain contentedness within it. Madness is the most profound form of loneliness and ...more
He completely denies the practicality of the (admittedly subjective) views society forces upon us regarding 'normality' and mental illness. While these are arguably an evil in themselves, they are necessary for the effective functioning of society which in turn is necessary for our physical and emotional security. A schizophrenic is dissociated from the collective reality and is thus less able to attain contentedness within it. Madness is the most profound form of loneliness and ...more
Even more mindblowing!!
What started out as a promising and innovative read has turned out to be a disappointment. While Laing's writing is much clearer than many other psychoanalyst's I've come across, the evidence for his claims is shotty at best. The Politics of Experience is a book that tries to fundamentally tackle the claim that mental illness (particularly schizophrenia) is a natural reaction to an insane human social world. While a part of me would like to believe this - as to do so implies that mental illness
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I haven't really read anything quite like this before and found it very insightful. The part that kicks off the book with defining experience and the way interpersonal experience can be strident and tricky was excellent and set a great tone. I thought perhaps, however, his thesis that schizophrenia was a sort of right of passage that just needs those who suffer to come out the other side was somewhat challenging and edgy, but wonder how someone who presumably doesn't suffer from the disorder can
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You can feel the feverishness of the writing as soon as it begins. Nonsensical in parts - a lot of words to communicate ideas that are neither complex nor thoroughly thought.
‘The sky is blue’ suggests that there is a substantive ‘sky’ that is ‘blue’. This sequence of subject verb object, in which ‘is’ acts as the copula uniting sky and blue, is a nexus of sounds, and syntax, signs and symbols, in which we are fairly completely entangled and which separates us from at the same time as it refers u ...more
‘The sky is blue’ suggests that there is a substantive ‘sky’ that is ‘blue’. This sequence of subject verb object, in which ‘is’ acts as the copula uniting sky and blue, is a nexus of sounds, and syntax, signs and symbols, in which we are fairly completely entangled and which separates us from at the same time as it refers u ...more
I admit I haven't read this in years, not since my youth. I barely remember you. But I do remember you were one of those books that pretty much completely altered my perception of reality. And now that I've been out of therapy for a number of years I can say that remnants of that shattering are still there, and really more important now. Now that the "madness of morality" is a lot more evident in this world.
Even looking on later psychological events, like say the infamous Stanford Prison Experi ...more
Even looking on later psychological events, like say the infamous Stanford Prison Experi ...more
this was a mind-blowing book to read as a young man coming of age in the sixties and seventies...in a few words, it's lasting premise is that 'everything is political' in the broadest sense of the word...and the subtle truth that the decision to view the world 'objectively' is itself a 'subjective' choice
A disturbing, compelling book about Schizophrenia, a disease that is hard to treat. Because mental health professionals know so little about the brain, helping Schizophrenics is difficult. This book raises interesting questions. Are Schizophrenics crazy or are they enlightened individuals who don't fit in?
Interesting read on perception, consciousness, id/ego etc. Quite Jungian in my mind...a fun juant.
I was attracted to Laing’s book because it has been said to be a source of Doris Lessing’s novel, A Briefing for a Decent into Hell, which she denied. Laing’s text is a compilation of reworked articles he published between 1962 and 1965 and center on human perception and its relationship to schizophrenia of society as a whole.
Existential relationships are characterized in terms of experience and behavior within the framework a feedback loop but Laing’s method of presentation seems to be too rep ...more
Existential relationships are characterized in terms of experience and behavior within the framework a feedback loop but Laing’s method of presentation seems to be too rep ...more
Laing, a doctor in the practice of psychiatry, is a poet of a logician who detail out a great analysis of human society. He adventures into the deep minds of men especially those disturbed and shows that in our great "Age of Darkness", conditions like the "broken soul" are unavoidable. Laing's treatise is a good enlightening read filled with wit and good humor, best read with a cup of tea.
Highly pretentious and self-important, The Politics of Experience is worth reading if only for its comparatively lucid and deeply insightful meditations on schizophrenia and the psychotic experience, in chapters 5 and 7 respectively. The Bird of Paradise is like some kind of Dadaist spiel which is still somehow funny, depressing and baffling in equal measure.
Gee whiz. Took me about 9 years to get through this schizophrenic book. Lots of ideas that, when read, related to that moment in time when I picked up the book at the dog-eared page. Style is stop-start, self-indulgent.
This book is extremely plod driven, character driven and engaging. I loveit, couldnt put it down and need more of this.
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Found it to be a very rich, moving and transformative book.
super duper gary cooper
Reflection on transcendence vs therapy
excellent book as a primer to decolonizing the minds of indigenous peoples
Chapters discussing family, experience, groups (we vs them) and schizophrenia are interesting and give some good insights. Last chapter (Bird in Paradise) belongs in a different book.
tips for a good book: don't suck freud's dick while writing, because then you just make no sense at all.
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Ronald David Laing was a Scottish psychiatrist who wrote extensively on mental illness – in particular, the subjective experience of psychosis. Laing's views on the causes and treatment of serious mental dysfunction, greatly influenced by existential philosophy, ran counter to the psychiatric orthodoxy of the day by taking the expressed feelings of the individual patient or client as valid descrip
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“Madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be break-through. It is potential liberation and renewal as well as enslavement and existential death.”
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131 likes
“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. The more one sees this, the more senseless it is to continue with generalized descriptions of supposedly specifically schizoid, schizophrenic, hysterical ‘mechanisms.’ There are forms of alienation that are relatively strange to statistically ‘normal’ forms of alienation. The ‘normally’ alienated person, by reason of the fact that he acts more or less like everyone else, is taken to be sane. Other forms of alienation that are out of step with the prevailing state of alienation are those that are labeled by the ‘formal’ majority as bad or mad.”
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