Do You Love Me? An Entertainment in Conversation and Verse

by R.D. Laing

s/t: An entertainment in conversation and verse

Genres: Poetry, Psychology, Fiction

87 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1976

About the author

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 descriptions of lived experience rather than simply as symptoms of some separate or underlying disorder.

Laing was associated with the anti-psychiatry movement although he rejected the label.

Reviews

[Kressel Housman]

At the time that I read this, I thought R.D. Laing was the cat's pajamas, so I read this collection of poetry over and over and over. It was much easier reading than his other books. I don't know if I'd love it as much now, but one line sticks with me after all these years: "I'm past mending. I'm a happy ending."

[Megan McGarvey]

sooo the book was all likeee do you love me? and i was all likeee I meannnn I can stand you I guess..

[Antonio Silva]

this book was referenced in psx lain so i was very curious about it,but it was very dissapointing.
one or two poems were interesting,and i got the gist of their narrative.but they were all still so horrible!

[Zach Butler]

Some of the poems really hit me. Most of them are snippets of conversation with the subject matter being left out. What your left with is a pretty accurate view of the peoples feeling or intentions. I suppose I am doing a very poor job of describing this. It is poetry though and we all take from it what we want. Most of them seemed to be about love or relationships and peoples needs, neediness, or lack of true concrete feelings. Some of it was very profound some of it was boring but it was brief and the good parts would be your loss for missing. Pick it up if you can find it.

[Himadri ॐ ˚꩜]

"Does he kiss me and pet me
Just to perplex me ?
If i cut my throat
Will he aid and abet me?"

"You are at the stage of infantile omnipotence."

[mrt.marta]

“Come la neve a me l'amore pare
quand'è venuto se ne deve andare

non dir cosí, che questa è una bugia
l'amore resta, il tempo vola via”

3.5/4

[Ashley Reynolds]

I don't know why I put off reading this for as long as I did, I finished it in about an hour. It's a very quick read, and I think anyone who's been in a serious relationship or two could relate to it in some sense.
This book was better than I expected and very uniquely written. I enjoyed this more than I expected to!

[caramels]

"By the time he collapsed and died of a heart attack while playing tennis in August 1989, R. D. Laing had devolved from one of the most compelling intellectual heroes of the 1960's into a gruesome purveyor of pop mysticism and bad poetry."*

I M CRYING

*(from an article on the nytimes)

[Mad Medico]

A brief and profound collection of dialogues and cracked verse providing an accessible route into Laing’s thought. There are more hits than misses here - the dialogues are well observed, on the theme of understanding and madness, with the he/she sections especially capturing a tense, fraught and uncomfortable atmosphere where truth, honesty and love are pulled apart and destroyed and communication is impossible. They really get into the root of madness as being a natural response to taken-for-granted societal structures and relations. The last third of the book is composed of absurd tales on nursery rhymes, music-hall songs and limericks which hit much harder than I expected- the contrast between the trite, hollow structures and bitter and, in some cases, angry and impassioned tone and messages of the pieces works fantastically. Plenty to revisit.

I dreamt I was a dead rat
in a city sewer
I started to rust
and turned to dust
until I was no more

[Aggie Kidd-Ray]

I really like laings classic poem structure when it’s deeply rooted in psychiatry and psychology such as the ones in knots and on the first half / 2/3, towards the second half of this book however, I feel like he tries to dip his toes into shell Silverstein territory and though some of them are truly lovely, q lot of them are nothing worth mentioning.
A good read nonetheless

[T Brown]

The character building here was really generative. It also made the reader aware of the frustration of language to further confuse a subject in dialogical progression. We are literally not understanding each other...

[Rebecca DeLucia]

i don‘t love you... verse should be banished unless used for satirical purposes

[Billy Degge]

less successful than knots but still wild and cool.

[Sandra Cooper]

Sadly accurate and funny at the same time.

[Greta]

I get why some people might think this book of "poems" or conversations is meaningful, but I didn't.

[Lulu]

Entertaining little book

[Brandon DeLoach]

very interesting, can’t say i understood but i did enjoy it. real question is was it meant to be understood

[Muhammad]

If someone loved anybody, he will sacrifice and will not be crucified. There is no God, but Allah SWT. Peace be upon him. Ahlussunnah wal jama'ah.

[Monica Iacarelli]

La mia mente:

[Jázmin]

thought-provoking, thats the best way to describe this book. Its abstract yet raw, i personally loved it.

[DeadWeight]

Read in an afternoon while staying on Mike & Willis' couch, after discovering it tucked away in a lost nook of the bookshelf.

An absurd collection of incredibly short psychological vignettes, readily illustrating all the anxieties and missed connections that dog human communication and love.

[Viktoria]

It is an interesting little book about relationships. I might be too young to understand some of them but it is portraying common situations and talks that we experience. Mostly how we avoid answering questions and how we destroy ourself by creating problems.

[Ffiamma]

ora
se non eternamente
è
a volte
meglio che niente

[Andrea]

"Lei è odiosa con me / così io sono odioso con lei
lei segue me / così io seguo lei"

[Italia Pesavento]

Libro del tutto psichedelico, apparentemente senza significati troppo impegnativi, però davvero apprezzabile ed originale.