Laing, Ronald. Self and Others. New York: Pantheon Books, 1969 (2nd Edition).
The psychoanalytic thesis can be stated thus: it is not possible to prove the existence of unconscious phantasy to the person who is immersed in it. Unconscious phantasy can be known to be phantasy only after the person’s own emergence from it. This way of putting it is riddled with difficulties, and so is every other way. (p. 3)
My self-being, my consciousness and feeling of myself, that taste of myself, of I and me above and in all things, includes my taste of you. I taste you and you taste me. I am your taste and you are mine, but I do not taste your taste of me in your ear. One cannot be everything and everything at once. (p. 20)
It is difficult to understand the self-being of the other. I cannot experience it directly. I must rely on the other’s action and testimony to infer how he experiences himself. The psychiatrist is immediately involved in this area when he listens to the testimony of his patients. By what token do changes in the way a man experiences his self-being, his being-for-himself, determine his own definition of himself as ‘ill’, ‘physically’ or ‘psychologically’, and what leads one person to decide that the self-being, the being-for-himself of the other, is sick? (p. 20)
A person in an alienated false position within a social phantasy system, who begins partially to apperceive his position, may give ‘psychotic’ expression to his partial apperception of the actual phantasy state of affairs by saying that he is being subjected to poisons concealed in his food, that his brains have been taken from him, that his actions are controlled from outer space, etc. Such delusions are partially achieved derealizations-realizations. (p. 24)
A person may be placed in an untenable position comprising a non-compossible set of positions. When his position, or positions in the social phantasy system become such that he can neither stay in nor leave his own phantasy, his position in untenable. (p. 25)
What is called a psychotic episode in one person, can often be understood as a crisis of a peculiar kind in the inter-experience of the nexus, as well as in the behavior of the nexus. (p. 25)
The greater need there is to get out of an untenable position, the less chance there is of doing so. The more untenable a position is, the more difficult it is to get out. (p. 26)
The choice in phantasy comes to be to suffocate to death inside, or to risk exposing one’s self to whatever terrors there may be outside. But as soon as one goes through a door in a space that is now inside, one is back right inside the inside that one took inside from the outside in order to get outside what one was inside. So as soon as one goes through that door that way, one is more inside the more one thinks one is outside. (p. 27)
Some ‘psychotics’ look on psychoanalysis as a relatively safe place to tell someone what they really think. They are prepared to play at being a patient and even to keep up the charade by paying the analyst, provided he does not ‘cure’ them. They are even prepared to pretend to be cured if it will look bad for him if he is having a run of people who don’t seem to be getting better. (p. 28)
The man-in-the-street takes a lot for granted: for instance, that he has a body which has an inside and an outside; that he has begun at his birth and ends biologically speaking at his death; that he occupies a position space; that he occupies a position in time; that he exists as a continuous being from one place to the next and from one moment to the other. The ordinary person does not reflect upon these basic elements of his being; he takes his way of experiencing himself and others to be ‘true’. However, some people do not. They are often called schizoid. Still more, the schizophrenic does not take for granted his own person (and other persons) as being an adequately embodied, alive, real, substantial, and continuous being, who is at one place at one time and at a different place at a different time, remaining the ‘same’ through-out. In the absence of this ‘base’ he lacks the usual sense of personal unity, a sense of himself as the agent of his own actions rather than as a robot, a machine, a thing, and of being the author of his own perceptions, but rather feels that someone else is using his eyes, his ears, etc. (pp. 35-36)
Man is always between being and non-being, but non-being is not necessarily experienced as personal disintegration. The insecurity attendant upon a precariously established personal unity is one form of ontological insecurity, if this term is used to denote the insecurity inescapably within the heart of man’s finite being. (p. 36)
The most significant theoretical and methodological development in the psychiatry of the last two decades is, in my view, the growing dissatisfaction with any theory or study of the individual which isolates him from his context. (p. 65)
By complementarity I denote that function of personal relations whereby the other fulfils or completes the self. (p. 66)
To be ‘authentic’ is to be true to oneself, to be what one is, to be ‘genuine’. To be ‘inauthentic’ is not to be oneself, to be false to oneself: to be not as pone appears to be, to be counterfeit. We tend to link the categories of truth and reality by saying that a genuine act is real, but that a person who habitually uses action as a masquerade is not real. (pp. 108-109)
The person in a false position may not be aware of being ‘in’ such a position. Only to the extent that he is not completely ‘in’ this position, that he is not totally estranged from his ‘own’ experience and actions, can he experience his position as false. (p. 113)
The person in a false position has lost a starting-point of his own from which to throw or thrust himself, that is, to pro-ject himself, forward. He has lost the place. He does not know where he is or where he is going. He cannot get anywhere however hard he tries. In despair, just as one place is the same as another, so one time is the same as another. The future is the resultant of the present, the present is the resultant of the past, and the past is unalterable. (p. 113)
What constantly preoccupies and torments the paranoid is usually the precise opposite of what at first is most apparent. He is persecuted by being the center of everyone else’s world, yet he is preoccupied with the thought that he never occupies first place in anyone’s affection. (p. 118)
In an untenable position, no matter how he feels or how he acts, or what meaning the situation has, his feelings are denuded of validity, his acts are stripped of their motives, intentions, and consequences, the situation is robbed of its meaning. (p. 124)
The attributions one ascribes to a person define him and put him in a particular position. By assigning him to a particular position, attributions ‘put him in his place’ and thus have in effect the source of injunctions. (p. 132)
In the area of disjunction between the person’s ‘own’ intentions and those attributed to him by others, issues of secrecy, deception of the other or deception of oneself, equivocation, lying, or telling the truth come into play. Much guilt and shame have to be understood in terms of such discrepancies, over such matters as being a fake, being a phoney. True guilt is guilt at the obligation one owes to oneself to be oneself, to actualize oneself. False guilt is guilt felt at not being what other people feel one ought to be or assume that one is. (p. 133)
It is an achievement to realize one is not necessarily who others take one to be. Such awareness of discrepancy between self-identity, being-for-oneself, and being-for-others, is painful. There is a strong tendency to feel guilt, anxiety, anger, or doubt if self-attributions are disjunctive with attributions made about self by other, particularly when attributions are taken as injunctions. (p. 133)