The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness

by R.D. Laing

Ronnie Laing proved that a sensibility to poetry, art and philosophy was not only not incompatible with psychiatric practice but also a positive boon.

I am still writing in this book too much about Them, and too little of Us. Freud insisted that our civilization is a repressive one. There is a conflict between the demands of conformity and the demands of our instinctive energies, explicitly sexual. Freud could see no easy resolution of this antagonism, and he came to believe that in our time the possibility of simple natural love between human beings had already been abolished. Our civilization represses not only ‘the instincts’, not only sexuality, but any form of transcendence. Among one-dimensional men,* it is not surprising that someone with an insistent experience of other dimensions, that he cannot entirely deny or forget, will run the risk either of being destroyed by the others, or of betraying what he knows.