Whether life is worth living depends on whether there is love in life.
About R. D. Laing
Ronald David Laing (7 October 1927 – 23 August 1989), usually cited as R. D. Laing, was a Scottish psychiatrist who wrote extensively on mental illness–in particular, psychosis and schizophrenia.
Laing’s views on the causes and treatment of psychopathological phenomena were influenced by his study of existential philosophy and ran counter to the chemical and electroshock methods that had become psychiatric orthodoxy.
More quotes from R. D. Laing
True guilt is guilt at the obligation one owes to oneself to be oneself. False guilt is guilt felt at not being what other people feel one ought to be or assume that one is.
unorthodox Scottish psychiatrist
We are effectively destroying ourselves by violence masquerading as love.
unorthodox Scottish psychiatrist
Freud was a hero. He descended to the Underworld and met there stark terrors. He carried with him his theory as a Medusa’s head which turned these terrors to stone.
unorthodox Scottish psychiatrist
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.
unorthodox Scottish psychiatrist
Life is a sexually transmitted disease and the mortality rate is one hundred percent.
unorthodox Scottish psychiatrist
Rule A: Don’t. Rule A1: Rule A doesn’t exist. Rule A2: Do not discuss the existence or non-existence of Rules A, A1 or A2.
unorthodox Scottish psychiatrist
Alienation as our present destiny is achieved only by outrageous violence perpetrated by human beings on human beings.
unorthodox Scottish psychiatrist
Children do not give up their innate imagination, curiosity, dreaminess easily. You have to love them to get them to do that.
unorthodox Scottish psychiatrist
Creative people who can’t help but explore other mental territories are at greater risk, just as someone who climbs a mountain is more at risk than someone who just walks along a village lane.
unorthodox Scottish psychiatrist
We are all murderers and prostitutes – no matter to what culture, society, class, nation one belongs, no matter how normal, moral, or mature, one takes oneself to be.
unorthodox Scottish psychiatrist
We are all in a post-hypnotic trance induced in early infancy.
unorthodox Scottish psychiatrist
If I don’t know I don’t know, I think I know. If I don’t know I know I know, I think I don’t know.
unorthodox Scottish psychiatrist
The experience and behavior that gets labeled schizophrenic is a special strategy that a person invents in order to live in an unlivable situation.
unorthodox Scottish psychiatrist
Schizophrenia cannot be understood without understanding despair.
unorthodox Scottish psychiatrist
The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice. And because we fail to notice that we fail to notice, there is little we can do to change; until we notice how failing to notice shapes our thoughts and deeds.
unorthodox Scottish psychiatrist
Madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be break-through. It is potential liberation and renewal as well as enslavement and existential death.
unorthodox Scottish psychiatrist
Insanity – a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world.
unorthodox Scottish psychiatrist
Whether life is worth living depends on whether there is love in life.
unorthodox Scottish psychiatrist
There is a great deal of pain in life and perhaps the only pain that can be avoided is the pain that comes from trying to avoid pain.
unorthodox Scottish psychiatrist
There is no such condition as ‘schizophrenia,’ but the label is a social fact and the social fact a political event.
unorthodox Scottish psychiatrist