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Ronald David Laing Quotes

1927–1989 Scotland

Ronald David Laing (usually known as R.D. Laing, October 7, 1927 – August 23, 1989) was a Scottish psychiatrist who wrote on mental illness and the experience of psychosis.

Scotland
Academics
Psychiatrists

Also known as: R. D. Laing, R.D. Laing, RD Laing

Random Ronald David Laing quote

30 quotes

We are effectively destroying ourselves by violence masquerading as love.

The Politics of Experience (1967)

Psychology is the logos of experience. Psychology is the structure of the evidence, and hence psychology is the science of sciences.

The Politics of Experience (1967)

We can see other people's behaviour, but not their experience.

The Politics of Experience (1967)

Alienation as our present destiny is achieved only by outrageous violence perpetrated by human beings on human beings.

The Politics of Experience (1967)

There is no such "condition" as "schizophrenia," but the label is a social fact and the social fact a political event.

The Politics of Experience (1967)

I shall try to show that there is a comprehensible transition from the sane schizoid way of being-in-the-world to a psychotic way of being-in-the-world.

The Divided Self (1960)

Experience used to be called The Soul. Experience as invisibility of man to man is at the same time more evident than anything.

The Politics of Experience (1967)

Existential phenomenology attempts to characterize the nature of a person's experience of his world and himself.

The Divided Self (1960)

These forces are mainly concerned with destroying most of its potentialities, and on the whole this enterprise is successful.

The Politics of Experience (1967)

Social phenomenology is the science of my own and of others' experience.

The Politics of Experience (1967)

Society highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal. Normal men have killed perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years.

The Politics of Experience (1967)

Even facts become fictions without adequate ways of seeing "the facts". We do not need theories so much as the experience that is the source of the theory.

The Politics of Experience (1967)

The other person's behaviour is an experience of mine. My behaviour is an experience of the other.

The Politics of Experience (1967)

I cannot experience your experience. You cannot experience my experience. We are both invisible men.

The Politics of Experience (1967)

It is of fundamental importance not to make the positivist mistake of assuming that because a group’s members are in formation this means that they’re necessarily on course.

The Politics of Experience (1967)

Few books today are forgivable.

The Politics of Experience (1967)

We live in a moment of history where change is so speeded up that we begin to see the present only when it is already disappearing.

The Politics of Experience (1967)

He does not think there is anything the matter with him because

Knots (1970)

I'm ridiculous to feel ridiculous when I'm not.
You must
be laughing at me
for feeling you are laughing at me
if you are not laughing at me.

Knots (1970)

If I don't know I don't know
I think I know
If I don't know I know
I think I don't know

Knots (1970)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Ronald David Laing (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.