Laing, Ronald. The Politics of Experience. New York: Routledge Press, 1961.

The other person’s behavior is an experience of mine. My behavior is an experience of the other. The task of social phenomenology is to related my experience of the other’s behavior to the other’s experience of my behavior. Its study is the relation between experience and experience: its true field is interexperience. (p. 4)

I see you, you see me. I experience you, and you experience me. I see your behavior. You see my behavior. But I do not and never have and never will see your experience of me. Just as you cannot “see” my experience of you. My experience of you is not “inside” me. It is simply you, as I experience you. And I do not experience you as inside me. Similarly, I take it that you do not experience me as inside you. (p. 4)

“My experience of you” is just another form of words for “you-as-I-experience-you,” and “your experience of me” equals “me-as-you-experience-me.” Your experience of me is not inside you and my experience of you is not inside me, but your experience of me is invisible to me and my experience of you is invisible to you. (p. 4)

I cannot experience your experience. You cannot experience my experience. We are both invisible men. All men are invisible to one another. Experience is man’s invisibility to man. (p. 4)

Social phenomenology is the science of my own and of other’s experience. It is concerned with the relation between my experience of you and your experience of me. That is, with interexperience. It is concerned with your behavior and my behavior as I experience, and your and my behavior as you experience it. (p. 5)

Natural science is concerned only with the observer’s experience of things. Never with the way things experience us. That is not to say that things do not react to us, and to each other. (p. 5)

Many people used to believe that angels moved the stars. It now appears that they do not. As a result of this and like revelations, many people do not now believe in angels. (p. 7)

Many people used to believe that the “seat” of the soul was somewhere in the brain. Since brains began to be opened up frequently, no one has seen “the soul.” As a result of this and like revelations, many people do not now believe in the soul. (p. 7)

Normal alienation from experience (p. 10)

The relevance of Freud to our time is largely his insight and, to a very considerable extent, his deomonstration, that the ordinary person is a shriveled, desiccated fragment of what a person can be. (p. 10)

What we call “normal” is a product of repression, denial, splitting, projection, introjection and other forms of destructive action on experience. It is radically estranged from the structure of being. (p. 11)

The more one sees this, the more senseless it is to continue with generalized descriptions of supposedly specifically schizoid, schizophrenic, hysterical “mechanisms.” (pp. 11-12)

There are forms of alienation that are relatively strange to statistically “normal” forms of alienation. The “normally” alienated person, by reason of the fact that he acts more or less like everyone else, is taken to be sane. Other forms of alienation that are out of step with the prevailing state of alienation are those that are labeled by the “normal” majority as bad or mad. (p. 12)

The condition, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one’s mind, is the condition of the normal man.

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.

Our behavior is a function of our experience. We act according to the way we see things.

If our experience is destroyed, our behavior will be destructive.

If our experience is destroyed, we have lost our own selves. (p. 12)

A man can estrange himself from himself by mystifying himself and others. He can also have what he does stolen from him by the agency of others. (p. 13)

If we are stripped of experience, we are stripped of our deeds; and if our deeds are, so to speak, taken out of our hands like toys from the hands of children, we are bereft of our humanity. We can be deceived. Men can and ho destroy of the humanity of other men, and the condition of this possibility is that we are interdependent. We are not self-contained monads producing no effects on each other except our reflections. We are both acted upon, changed for good or ill, by other men; and we are agents who act upon others to affect them in different ways. Each of us is the other to the others. Man is a patient-agent, agent-patient, interexperiencing and interacting with his fellows. (p. 13)

Fantasy is a particular way of relating to the world. It is part of, sometimes the essential part of, the meaning or sense (le sens: Merleau-Ponty) implicit in action. As relationship we may be dissociated from it; as meaning we may not grasp it; as experience it may escape our notice in different ways. That is, it is possible to speak of fantasy being “unconscious,” if this general statement is always given specific connotations. (pp. 14-15)

Under the heading of “defense mechanisms,” psychoanalysis describes a number of ways in which a person becomes alienated from himself. For example, repression, denial, splitting, projection, introjection. These “mechanisms” are often described in psychoanalytic terms as themselves “unconscious,” that is, the person himself appears to be unaware that he is doing this to himself. Even when a person develops sufficient insight to see that “splitting,” for example, is going on, he usually experiences this splitting as indeed a mechanism, an impersonal process, so to speak, which has taken over and which he can observe but cannot control or stop. (p. 17)

Psychotherapy must remain an obstinate attempt of two people to recover the wholeness of being human through the relationship between them. (p. 32)

When our personal worlds are rediscovered and allowed to reconstitute themselves, we first discover a shambles. Bodies half-dead; genitals dissociated from heart; heart severed from head; head dissociated from genitals. Without inner unity, with just enough sense of continuity to clutch at identity – the current idolatry. Torn – body, mind and spirit – by inner contradictions, pulled in different directions. Man cut off from his own mind, cut off equally from his own body – a half-crazed creature in a mad world. (p. 33)

In order to rationalize our industrial-military complex, we have to destroy our capacity to see clearly any more what is in front of, and to imagine what is beyond, our noses. Long before a thermonuclear war can come about, we have had to lay waste our own sanity. We begin with the children. It is imperative to catch them in time. Without the most thorough and rapid brainwashing their dirty minds would see through our dirty tricks. Children are not yet fools, but we shall turn them into imbeciles like ourselves, with high I.W.s if possible. (p. 36)

Love and violence, properly speaking, are polar opposites. Love lets the other be, but with affection and concern. Violence attempts to constrain the other’s freedom, to force him to act in the way we desire, but with ultimate lack of concern, with indifference to the other’s own existence or destiny. (p. 36)

We are effectively destroying ourselves by violence masquerading as love. (p. 36)

We must then repudiate a positivism that achieves its “reliability” by successfully masking what it is and what is not, by serializing the world of the observer, by turning the truly given into capta which are taken as given, by denuding the world of being and relegating the ghost of being to a shadow land of subjective “values.” (pp. 38-39)

The theoretical and descriptive idiom of much research in social science adopts a stance of apparent “objective” neutrality. But we have seen how deceptive this can be. The choice of syntax and vocabulary is a political act that defines and circumscribes the manner in which “facts” are to be experienced. Indeed, in a sense it goes further and even creates the facts that are studied. (p. 39)

The “data” (given) of research are not so much given as taken out of a constantly elusive matrix of happenings. We should speak of capta rather than data. The quantitatively interchangeable grist that goes into the mills of reliability studies and rating scales is the expression of a processing that we do on reality, not the expression of the processes of reality. (p. 39)

Natural scientific investigations are conducted on objects, or things, or the patterns of relations between things, or on systems of “events.” Persons are distinguished form things in that persons experience the world, whereas things behave in the world. Thing-events do not experience. Personal events are experiential. Natural scientism is the error of turning persons into things by a process of reification that is not itself part of true natural scientific method. Results derived in this way have to be dequantified and dereified before they can be reassimilated into the realm of human discourse. (p. 39)

Fundamentally, the error is the failure to realize that there is an ontological discontinuity between human beings and it-beings. (p. 39)

Human beings relate to each other not simply externally, like two billiard balls, but by the relations of the two worlds of experience that come into play when two people meet. (p. 39)

In over 100 cases where we studied the actual circumstances around the social even when one person comes to be regarded as schizophrenic, it seems to us that without exception the experience and behavior that gets labeled schizophrenic is a special strategy that a person invents in order to live in an unlivable situation. In his life situation the person has come to feel he is in an untenable position. He cannot make a move, or make no move, without being best by contradictory and paradoxical pressures and demands, pushes and pulls, both internally from himself, and externally from those around him. He is, as it were, in a position of checkmate. (pp. 78-79)

This state of affairs may not be perceived as such by any of the people in it. The man at the bottom of the heap may be being crushed and suffocated to death without anyone noticing, much less intending. The situation here described is impossible to see by studying the different people in it singly. The social system, not single individuals extrapolated from it, must be the object of study. (p. 79)

“Schizophrenia” is a diagnosis, a label applied by some people to others. This does not prove that the labeled person is subject to an essentially pathological process, of unknown nature and origin, going on in his or her body. It does not mean that the process is, primarily or secondarily, a psycho-pathological one, going on in the psyche of the person. But it does establish as a social fact that the person labeled is one of Them. It is easy to forget that the process is a hypothesis, to assume that it is a fact, then to pass the judgment that it is biologically maladaptive, and, as such, pathological. (pp. 82-83)

But social adaptation to a dysfunctional society may be very dangerous. The perfectly adjusted bomber pilot may be a greater threat to species survival than the hospitalized schizophrenic deluded that the Bomb is inside him. Our society may itself have become biologically dysfunctional, and some forms of schizophrenic alienation from the alienation of society may have a sociobiological function that we have not recognized. (p. 83)

There is no such “condition” as “schizophrenia,” but the label is a social fact and the social fact a political event. This political event, occurring in the civic order of society, imposes definitions and consequences on the labeled person. It is a social prescription that rationalizes a set of social actions whereby the labeled person is annexed by others, who are legally sanctioned, medically empowered and morally obliged, to become responsible for the person labeled. The person labeled is inaugurated not only into a role, but into a career of patient, by the concerted action of a coalition (a “conspiracy”) of family, G.P., mental health officers, psychiatrists, nurses, psychiatric social workers, and often fellow patients. The “committed” person labeled as patient, and specifically as “schizophrenic,” is degraded from full existential and legal status as human agent and responsible person to someone no longer in possession of his own definition of himself, unable to retain his own possessions, precluded from the exercise of his discretion as to whom he meets, what he does. His time is no longer his own and the space he occupies is no longer his choosing. After being subjected to a degradation ceremonial known as psychiatric examination, he is bereft of his civil liberties in being imprisoned in a total institution known as a “mental” hospital. More completely, more radically than anywhere else in our society, he is invalidated as a human being. In the mental hospital he must remain, until the label is rescinded or qualified by such terms as “remitted” or “readjusted.” Once a “schizophrenic,” there is a tendency to be regarded as always a “schizophrenic.” (p. 84)