The Divided Self( An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness)[DIVIDED SELF REV/E][Paperback] Quotes

“Things fall apart, the center cannot hold, Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world -W.B.Yeats [Psychotic developments]”
― R.D.Laing, The Divided Self( An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness)[DIVIDED SELF REV/E][Paperback]

“I've been sort of dead in a way. I cut myself off from other people and became shut up in myself. And I can see that you become dead in a way when you do this. you have to live in the world with people. If you don't something dies inside.”
― R.D.Laing, The Divided Self( An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness)[DIVIDED SELF REV/E][Paperback]

“He belonged nowhere. He was going from anywhere to anywhere: he had no past, no future. He had no possessions, no friends. Being nothing, knowing nobody, being known by none, he was creating conditions the conditions which made it more easy for him to believe that he was nobody.”
― R.D.Laing, The Divided Self( An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness)[DIVIDED SELF REV/E][Paperback]

“[...] He tried to 'disconnect himself from everything' [...] and to this he added his method of 'uncoupling'. In this, he tried to sever the ties that related different aspects of his being together. [...] The body clearly occupies an ambiguous transitional position between 'me[' and the world. It is, on the other hand the core and center of my world, and on the other, it is an object in the world of the others. [..] he set about trying to reduce his whole being to non-being; he set about as systematically as he could to become nothing. Under the conviction that he was nobody, that he was nothing, he was driven by a terrible sense of honestly to be nothing. He felt if he was nobody he ought to become nobody. Being anonymous was one way of magically translating this conviction into fact.”
― R.D.Laing, The Divided Self( An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness)[DIVIDED SELF REV/E][Paperback]

“The worst effect of all efforts to be nothing was the deadness that settled over his whole existence. This deadness permeated his experience of his 'uncoupled self', [...] and his perception of the 'disconnected' world. Everything began to come to a stop. The world came to lose what reality it had for him and he had difficulty in imagining that he had any existence-for-others. Worst of all, he began to feel 'dead'. [...] He was coming to exist only for himself (intolerably), and ceasing to feel that he had any existence to the eyes of the world.”
― R.D.Laing, The Divided Self( An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness)[DIVIDED SELF REV/E][Paperback]

“He had all along felt that he was, in his own words, 'on the fringe of being', with only one foot in life and with no right even to that. He felt that he was not really alive and that anyway he was of no value and had hardly the right to the pretension of having life. He imagined himself to be outside it all, yet he cherished for a while one shred of hope.”
― R.D.Laing, The Divided Self( An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness)[DIVIDED SELF REV/E][Paperback]

“The need to be perceived is not, of course, purely a visual affair. It extends to the general need to have one's presence endorsed or confirmed by the other, the need for one's total existence to be recognized; the need, in fact, to be loved. Thus those people who cannot sustain from within themselves the sense of their own identity or, like Kafka's suppliant, have no inner conviction that they are alive, may feel that they are real live persons only when they are experiences as such by another.”
― R.D.Laing, The Divided Self( An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness)[DIVIDED SELF REV/E][Paperback]

“[...] onset of one man's illness occured when he looked into a mirror and saw someone else there (in fact, his own reflection): "him". 'He' was to be his prosecutor in a paranoid psychosis. 'He' was the instigator of a plot to kill him and he was determined to 'put a bullet through "him" ' (his alienated self).”
― R.D.Laing, The Divided Self( An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness)[DIVIDED SELF REV/E][Paperback]

“[...] this observing self often kills and withers anything that is under its scrutiny. The individual has now a persecuting observer in the very core of his being. It may be that the child becomes possessed by the alien and destructive presence of the observer who has turned bad in his absence, occupying the place of the observing self, of the boy himself outside the mirror. If this happens, he retains his awareness of himself as an object in the eyes of another by observing himself as the other: he lends the other his eyes in order that he may continue to be seen; he then becomes an object in his own eyes. But the part of himself who looks into him and sees him, has developed the persecutory features he has come to feel the real person outside him to have. [Self-consciousness, Freyd]”
― R.D.Laing, The Divided Self( An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness)[DIVIDED SELF REV/E][Paperback]

“[...] 'other people provide me with my existence'. On his own, he feels that he is empty and nobody. 'I can't feel real unless there is someone there.... ' Nevertheless, he cannot feel at ease with another person, because he feels as 'in danger' with others as by himself. He is, therefore, driven compulsively to seek company, but never allows himself to 'be himself in the presence of anyone else. He avoids social anxiety by never really being with others. He never quite says what he means or means what he says. The part he plays is always not quite himself. He takes care to laugh when he thinks a joke is not funny, and look bored when he is amused. He makes friends with people he does not really like and is rather cool to those with whom he would 'really' like to be friends. No one, therefore, really knows him, or understands him. He can be himself in safety only in isolation, albeit with a sense of emptiness and unreality. With others, he plays an elaborate game of pretence and equivocation. His social self is felt to be false and futile. What he longs for most is the possibility of 'a moment of recognition', but whenever this by chance occurs, when he has by accident 'given himself away', he is covered in confusion and suffused with panic.”
― R.D.Laing, The Divided Self( An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness)[DIVIDED SELF REV/E][Paperback]

“[...] he turns the living spontaneity of his being into something dead and lifeless by inspecting it. This he does to others as well, and fears their doing it to him (petrification). We are now in a position to suggest that whereas he is afraid not to be dead and lifeless - as stated, he dreads real aliveness so also he is afraid not to continue being aware of himself. Awareness of his self is still a guarantee, an assurance of his continued existence, although he may have to live through a death-in-life. Awareness of an object lessens its potential danger. Consciousness is then a type
of radar, a scanning mechanism. The object can be felt to be under
control. As a death ray, consciousness has two main properties: its
power to petrify (to turn to stone: to turn oneself or the other into
things); and its power to penetrate. Thus, if it is in these terms that
the gaze of others is experienced, there is a constant dread and
resentment at being turned into someone else's thing, of being
penetrated by him, and a sense of being in someone else's power
and control. Freedom then consists in being inaccessible.”
― R.D.Laing, The Divided Self( An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness)[DIVIDED SELF REV/E][Paperback]

“[...] It struck me that if 1 stared long enough at the environment that I would blend with it and disappear just as if the place was empty and 1 had disappeared. It is as if you get yourself to feel you don't know who you are or where you are. To blend into the scenery so to speak. Then, you are scared of it because it begins to come on without encouragement. I would just be walking along and felt that I had blended with the landscape. Then I would get frightened and repeat my name over and over again to bring me back to life, so to speak.”
― R.D.Laing, The Divided Self( An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness)[DIVIDED SELF REV/E][Paperback]

“[...] 'There has never been a time in which I have been convinced from within myself that I am alive.' The need to gain a conviction of his own aliveness and the realness of things is, therefore, the basic issue in his existence His way of seeking to gain such conviction is by feeling himself to be an object in the real world; but, since his world is unreal, he must be an object in the world of someone else, for objects to other people seem to be real, and even calm and beautiful. At least, '...it must be so, for I often hear people talking about them as though they were'. Hence it is that he makes his confession '...don't be angry if I tell you that it is the aim of my life to get people to look at me' [Self-consciousness]”
― R.D.Laing, The Divided Self( An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness)[DIVIDED SELF REV/E][Paperback]

“Not one word of it was the expression of how I felt. It was all how I felt I was expected to feel'. [...] But he had not dared to admit this possibility to himself because it would have precipitated him into a violent conflict with all the values that had been inculcated into him and entirely disrupted his own idea of who he was. [The false-self system ]”
― R.D.Laing, The Divided Self( An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness)[DIVIDED SELF REV/E][Paperback]

“A man without a mask' is indeed very rare. One even doubts the possibility of such a man. Everyone in some measure wears a mask, and there are many things we do not put ourselves into fully. In 'ordinary' life it seems hardly possible for it to be otherwise. [The false-self system]”
― R.D.Laing, The Divided Self( An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness)[DIVIDED SELF REV/E][Paperback]

“He says, 'It would not be fair to anyone I might love, to love him.' What he may then do is to destroy 'in his mind' the image of anyone or anything he may be in danger of becoming fond of, out of a desire to safeguard that other person or thing in reality from being destroyed. If, then, there is nothing to want, nothing to envy, there may be nothing to love, but there is nothing to be reduced to nothing by him. [The inner self in the schizoid condition ]”
― R.D.Laing, The Divided Self( An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness)[DIVIDED SELF REV/E][Paperback]

“He is unable to believe that he can fill his own emptiness without reducing what is there to nothing. He regards his own love and that of others as being as destructive as hatred. To be loved threatens his self; but his love is equally dangerous to anyone else. His isolation is not entirely for his own self's sake. It is also out of concern for others. [The inner self in the schizoid condition ]”
― R.D.Laing, The Divided Self( An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness)[DIVIDED SELF REV/E][Paperback]

“If you steal what you want from the other, you are in control; you are not at the mercy of what is given. But every intention is instantly felt to be reciprocated. The desire to steal breeds phobias of being robbed. The phantasy that one has got any worth that one possesses by stealing it is accompanied by the counterphantasy that the worth that others have has been stolen from oneself (see Rose, Chapter 9), and that anything one has will be taken away finally: not only what one has, but what one is, one's very self. [The inner self in the schizoid condition]”
― R.D.Laing, The Divided Self( An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness)[DIVIDED SELF REV/E][Paperback]

“The abundance there is longed for, in contrast to the emptiness here; yet participation without loss of being is felt to be impossible, and also is not enough, and so the individual must cling to hisisolation - his separateness without spontaneous, direct relatedness - because in doing so he is clinging to his identity. His longing is for complete union. But of this very longing he is terrified, because it will be the end of his self. He does not wish for a relationship of mutual enrichment and exchange of give-and-take between two beings 'congenial' to each other. He does not conceive of a dialectical relationship. [The inner self in the schizoid condition]”
― R.D.Laing, The Divided Self( An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness)[DIVIDED SELF REV/E][Paperback]

“[...] He was afraid of being absorbed into Nature, engulfed by her, with irrevocable loss of his self; yet what he most dreaded, that also he most longed for. Mortal beauty, so Gerard Manley Hopkins said, is dangerous. If such individuals could take his advice to meet it, then let it alone, things would be easier. But it is just this which they cannot do.”
― R.D.Laing, The Divided Self( An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness)[DIVIDED SELF REV/E][Paperback]

“there is evoked a welter of conflicting emotions, from a desperate longing and yearning for what others have and he lacks, to frantic envy and hatred of all that is theirs and not his, or a desire to destroy all the goodness, freshness, richness in the world. These feelings may, in turn, be offset by counter-attitudes of disdain, contempt, disgust, or indifference. [The inner self in the schizoid condition]”
― R.D.Laing, The Divided Self( An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness)[DIVIDED SELF REV/E][Paperback]

“For the schizoid individual direct participation 'in' life is felt as being at the constant risk of being destroyed by life, for the self's isolation is, as we said, its effort to preserve itself in the absence of an assured sense of autonomy and integrity. [..] In the absence of a spontaneous natural, creative, relationship with the world which is free from anxiety, the 'inner self thus develops an overall sense of inner impoverishment, which is expressed in complaints of the emptiness, deadness, coldness, dryness, impotence, desolation, worthlessness, of the inner life. For instance, one presenting complaint was of the impoverishment of the imaginative and emotional life. The patient explained that he regarded this as a consequence of his own decision to shut himself out from reality. As a result, as he put it, he was getting no supplies from reality to enrich his imagination.[The inner self in the schizoid condition]”
― R.D.Laing, The Divided Self( An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness)[DIVIDED SELF REV/E][Paperback]

“[...] But the person who does not act in reality and only acts in phantasy becomes himself unreal. The actual 'world' for that person becomes shrunken and impoverished. The 'reality' of the physical world and other persons ceases to be used as a pabulum for the creative exercise of imagination, and hence comes to have less and less significance in itself. Phantasy, without being either in some measure embodied in reality, or itself enriched by injections of 'reality', becomes more and more empty and volatilized. The 'self whose relatedness to reality is already tenuous becomes less and less a reality-self, and more and more phantasticized as it becomes more and more engaged in phantastic relationships with its own phantoms (imagos) [The inner self in the schizoid condition].”
― R.D.Laing, The Divided Self( An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness)[DIVIDED SELF REV/E][Paperback]

“. . . we can recognize two distinct selves in us: the imaginary self with its tendencies and desires - and the real self. There are imaginary sadists and masochists, persons of violent imagination. At each moment our imaginary self breaks in pieces and disappears at contact with reality, yielding its place to the real self. For the real and the imaginary cannot coexist by their very nature. It is a matter of two types of objects, of feelings and actions that are completely irreducible. [Sartre, Psychology of Imagination (1950, pp. 165-6)]”
― R.D.Laing, The Divided Self( An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness)[DIVIDED SELF REV/E][Paperback]

“[...] Nothing moves; nothing is alive; everything is dead, including the self. The self by its detachment is precluded from a full experience of realness and aliveness. What one might call a creative relationship with the other, in which there is mutual enrichment of the self and the other (benign circle), is impossible, and an interaction is substituted which may seem to operate efficiently and smoothly for a while but which has no 'life' in it (sterile relationship). There is a quasi-it-it interaction instead of an I-thou relationship. This interaction is a dead process. [The inner self in the schizoid condition ]”
― R.D.Laing, The Divided Self( An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness)[DIVIDED SELF REV/E][Paperback]

“The paranoic has specific persecutors. Someone is against him. There is a plot on foot to steal his brains. [...] The person I am describing feels at this phase persecuted by reality itself. The world as it is, and other people as they are, are the dangers. [...] This detachment of the self means that the self is never revealed directly in the individual's expressions and actions, nor does it experience anything spontaneously or immediately. The self's relationship to the other is always at one remove. The direct and immediate transactions between the individual, the other, and the world, even in such basic respects as perceiving and acting, all come to be meaningless, futile, and false. One can represent the alternative state of affairs schematically as shown opposite.”
― R.D.Laing, The Divided Self( An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness)[DIVIDED SELF REV/E][Paperback]

“If the whole of the individual's being cannot be defended, the individual retracts his lines of defence until he withdraws within a central citadel. He is prepared to write off everything he is, except his 'self'. But the tragic paradox is that the more the self is defended in this way, the more it is destroyed. The apparent eventual destruction and dissolution of the self in schizophrenic conditions is accomplished not by external attacks from the enemy (actual or supposed), from without, but by the devastation caused by the inner defensive manoeuvres themselves.”
― R.D.Laing, The Divided Self( An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness)[DIVIDED SELF REV/E][Paperback]

“[...] His whole effort is rather to preserve his self. This, as we have pointed out, is precariously established; he is subject to the dread of his own dissolution into non-being, into what William Blake described in the last resort as 'chaotic non-entity'. His autonomy is threatened with engulfment. He has to guard himself against losing his subjectivity and sense of being alive. In so far as he feels empty, the full, substantial, living reality of others is an impingement which is always liable to get out of hand and become implosive, threatening to overwhelm and obliterate his self completely as a gas will obliterate a vacuum, or as water will gush in and entirely fill an empty dam. The schizoid individual fears a real live dialectical relationship with real live people. He can relate himself only to depersonalized persons, to phantoms of his own phantasies (imagos), perhaps to things, perhaps to animals. [The embodied and unembodied self]”
― R.D.Laing, The Divided Self( An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness)[DIVIDED SELF REV/E][Paperback]

“No one feels more 'vulnerable', more liable to be exposed by the look of another person than the schizoid individual. If he is not acutely aware of being seen by others ('self conscious'), he has temporarily avoided his anxiety becoming manifest by one or other of two methods. Either he turns the other person into a thing, and depersonalizes or objectifies his own feelings towards this thing, or he affects indifference. [...] The depersonalized person can be used, manipulated, acted upon. [...] In the attitude of indifference the person or thing is treated with casualness, or callousness, as though he or it did not matter, ultimately as though he or it did not exist. A person minus subjectivity can still be important. A thing can still matter a great deal. Indifference denies to persons and to things their significance. Petrification, we remember, was one of Perseus's methods of killing his enemies. By means of the eyes in Medusa's head, he turned them into stones. Petrification is one way of killing. Of course, to feel that another person is treating or regarding one not as a person but as a thing need not itself be frightening if one is sufficiently sure of one's own existence. Thus, being a thing in someone else's eyes does not represent to the 'normal' person a catastrophic threat, but to the schizoid individual every pair of eyes is in a Medusa's head which he feels has power actually to kill or deaden something precariously vital in him. He tries therefore to forestall his own petrification by turning others into stones. By doing this he feels he can achieve some measure of safety.”
― R.D.Laing, The Divided Self( An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness)[DIVIDED SELF REV/E][Paperback]

“[...] a false-self system is that the 'personality', false self, mask, 'front', or persona that such individuals wear may consist in an amalgam of various part-selves, none of which is so fully developed as to have a comprehensive 'personality' of its own. Close acquaintance with such a person reveals that his observable behaviour may comprise quite deliberate impersonations along with compulsive actions of every kind. One is evidently witness not to a single false self but to a number of only partially elaborated fragments of what might constitute a personality, if any single one had full sway.”
― R.D.Laing, The Divided Self( An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness)[DIVIDED SELF REV/E][Paperback]