R. D. Laing Quotes

• Life is a sexually transmitted disease.

  R. D. Laing

  Topics in Uncategorized

• We are effectively destroying ourselves by violence masquerading as love.

  R. D. Laing

  Topics in Love

  Tags in Violence

• The experience and behavior that gets labeled schizophrenic is a special strategy that a person invents in order to live in an unlivable situation.

  R. D. Laing

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Strategy, Situation, Madness

• 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.

  R. D. Laing

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Feel, Guilt, Growth

• Life is a sexually transmitted disease and the mortality rate is one hundred percent.

  R. D. Laing

  Topics in Death, Life

  Tags in Mortality

• 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.

  R. D. Laing

  Topics in History, Uncategorized

  Tags in Change, Live

• 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.

  R. D. Laing

  Topics in Risk

  Tags in Help, People

• Children do not give up their innate imagination, curiosity, dreaminess easily. You have to love them to get them to do that.

  R. D. Laing

  Topics in Love

  Tags in Imagination, Curiosity

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

  R. D. Laing

  Topics in Achievement

  Tags in Destiny, Violence

• 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

  R. D. Laing

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Terror

• 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.

  R. D. Laing

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Madness

• 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.

  R. D. Laing

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Know, Think

• Insanity – a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world.

  R. D. Laing

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in World, Perfectly, Rational

• 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.

  R. D. Laing

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Rule

• Schizophrenia cannot be understood without understanding despair.

  R. D. Laing

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Understand

• 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.

  R. D. Laing

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Change, Little, Thoughts

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

  R. D. Laing

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Social, Condition

• We are all in a post-hypnotic trance induced in early infancy.

  R. D. Laing

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Early, Induced, Infancy

• 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.

  R. D. Laing

  Topics in Life

  Tags in Pain, Great

• 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.

  R. D. Laing

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Matter

R. D. Laing (22)

Birth:	7th October, 1927
Death:	23rd August, 1989
Nationality:	Scottish
Profession:	Psychiatrist

About

Ronald David Laing was a Scottish psychiatrist who wrote extensively on mental illness in particular, the experience of psychosis. Laing's views on the causes and treatment of serious mental dysfunction, greatly influenced by existential philosophy, ran counter to the psychiatric orthodoxy of the day by taking the expressed feelings of the individual patient or client as valid descriptions of
lived experience rather than simply as symptoms of some separate or underlying disorder. Laing was associated with the
anti-psychiatry movement, although he rejected the label. Politically, he was regarded as a thinker of the New Left.

Related Authors

• William Glasser
• Theodore Isaac Rubin
• Ilsa J. Bick
• Augustus Y. Napier
• Brian Weiss
• Stanislav Grof
• Robert Jay Lifton
• José N. Harris
• Harry Stack Sullivan
• Ben Goldacre

Advertisement

Today's Anniversary - 21st November

Births

• 1912 - Eleanor Powell
• 1870 - Mary Johnston
• 1971 - Michael Strahan
• 1844 - Ada Cambridge
• 1953 - Tina Brown

Deaths

• 2000 - Sir Cyril Astley Clarke
• 1996 - Mohammad Abdus Salam
• 1926 - Joseph McKenna
• 1969 - Norman Lindsay
• 1958 - Mel Ott