The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness

by R.D. Laing

to be hated as such is often less disturbing than to be destroyed, as it is felt, through being engulfed by love.

To be understood correctly is to be engulfed, to be enclosed, swallowed up, drowned, eaten

up, smothered, stifled in or by another person’s supposed all-embracing comprehension. It is lonely and painful to be always misunderstood, but there is at least from this point of view a measure of safety in isolation.

The whole behaviour of some schizophrenics is hardly anything else than a patchwork of other people’s peculiarities made more peculiar by the incongruity of the setting in which they are reproduced.