Laing, Ronald. The Politics of the Family and Other Essays. New York: Random House, 1971.

There are many types of social crisis: when defined as a medical emergency, the view usually is that if the medical emergency is dealt with, that is, if the patient is treated adequately and recovers, then this will resolve the social crisis (provided this crisis has not generated another: e.g. an economic crisis). When a particular social situation is defined as a social crisis occasioned by a medical emergency, this definition is a call for a particular type of action: it is an unequivocal prescription to get one person right by ‘treatment’ and, if thought necessary, to give auxiliary help to the other members of the situation to cope with illness in the one person, and with its secondary social consequences. This definition of the situation and the call for action are two sides of the same coin. The correct rational strategy of intervention is prescribed in and through the definition of the situation. (p. 22)

No one in the situation may know what the situation is. We can never assume that the people in the situation know what the situation is. A corollary to this is: the situation has to be discovered. You may think this is a banal proposition, but consider the implications. The stories people tell do not tell us simply and unambiguously what the situation is. These stories are part of the situation. (p. 33)

When the situation has ‘broken down’ to the extent that an outside agency is brought in, not only may some or all of those in the situation not themselves see what the situation is, but also they may not see that they do not see it. To realize this may be very frightening for them, and is frightening for us, who are not ‘in’ it in the same way. (p. 34)

If they cannot see it, and begin to see it, we sometimes hope that thereby they will be better able to cope adequately themselves. But frequently, a contributing cause of the breakdown of the situation, as well as an effect of the breakdown (so it seems to us), is that the situation cannot itself be seen by any of the people in it for what we think we can see it to be. Any formulation of this type invites us to develop of social theory of social ignorance and mystification. (p. 34)

Social diagnosis is a process: not a single moment. It is not an element in an ordered set of before-after events in time…What one sees as one looks into the situation changes as one hears the story. (pp. 40-41)

Schizophrenia is the name for a condition that most psychiatrists ascribe to patients they call schizophrenic. This ascription is a system of attributions that has a variable internal consistency, and is predominantly derogatory. It is frequently in a mixture of clinical-medical-biological-psychoanalytical psychiatrese, which vies with schizophrenese itself in its apparent profound confusion. (p. 44)

Those who employ the term schizophrenia as a name for a pathological condition in some people fall into a self-validating explanation of why they do so, if they reason that they employ this term for a pathological condition, from which the patient suffers, because the patient is obviously suffering from a pathological condition whatever it may be. The pathological condition is either an assumption or a hypothesis. It cannot at present be taken as a fact because no one has so far discovered it. (p. 44)

The concept of schizophrenia is a straitjacket that restricts psychiatrists and patients. By taking off this straitjacket we an see what happens. It has been shown, in the field of ethology, that observations on the behaviour of animals in captivity tell us nothing reliable about their behaviour in their natural setting. The whole of our present civilization may be in captivity. But the observations upon which psychiatrists and psychologists have drawn in order to build up the prevailing picture of schizophrenia have, almost entirely, been made on human beings in double or even treble captivity. (pp. 57-58)

Man does not always need bars for cages. Ideas can be cages too. Doors are being opened in mental hospitals as chemical constraints become more effective. The doors in our minds are the most difficult to open. (p. 58)

The most common situations I encounter in families is when what I think what is going on bears almost no resemblance to what anyone in the family experiences or thinks is happening, whether or not this coincides with common sense. Maybe no one knows what is happening. However, one thing is often clear to an outsider: there is concreted family resistance to discovering what is going on, and there are complicated stratagems to keep everyone in the dark, and in the dark they are in the dark. (p. 77)

Between truth and lie are images and ideas we imagine and think are real, that paralyse our imagination and our thinking in our efforts to conserve them. (p. 77)

Rules govern all aspects of experience, what we are to experience, and what not to experience, the operations we must and must not carry out, in order to arrive at a permitted picture of ourselves and others in the world. (p. 107)

One may be instructed, if things seem to be going wrong, to examine one’s instructions. They may be wrong. They may require adaptation, modification, or to be dropped. But a special situation exists if there is a rule against examining, or questioning rules: and beyond that, if there are rules against even being aware that such rules exist, including this last rule. (p. 107)