Schizophrenia & ‘Fight Club’
R D Laing (7 October 1927 – 23 August 1989), was a Scottish psychiatrist who wrote extensively on mental illness – in particular, the 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 experiences.
On mental illness:
Laing argued that the strange behavior and confused speech of people undergoing a psychotic episode were understandable as an attempt to communicate worries and concerns, often in situations where this was not permitted. He argued that individuals can often be put in impossible situations, where they are unable to conform to the conflicting expectations, leading to a "lose-lose situation" and immense mental distress for the individuals concerned. The symptoms of schizophrenia were therefore an expression of this distress, and seen as a cathartic and transformative experience.
Laing was revolutionary in valuing the content of psychotic behavior and speech as a valid expression of distress, albeit wrapped in an enigmatic language of personal symbolism that is meaningful only from within their situation.
Laing expanded a view of the "double bind" hypothesis and came up with a new concept to describe the highly complex situation that unfolds in the process of "going mad" - an "incompatible knot". Laing compared this to a situation where your right hand can exist but your left hand cannot. In this untenable position, something has got to give, and more often than not, what gives is psychological stability; a self-destruction sequence is set in motion.
Laing viewed mental illness in a radically different light from his contemporaries. For Laing, mental illness could be a trans-formative episode whereby the process of undergoing mental distress was compared to a shamanic journey. The traveler could return from the journey with (supposedly) important insights, and may have become a wiser and more grounded person as a result.
Key Work:
Laing, R.D. (1960) The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
View the link below for an insight into this perspective.
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