Quotes by R. D. Laing - Page 3 | QuoteForever

A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
X
Y
Z

Even facts become fictions without adequate ways of seeing "the facts". We do not need theories so much as the experience that is the source of the theory. We are not satisfied with faith, in the sense of an implausible hypothesis irrationally held: we demand to experience the "evidence".
R. D. Laing / Psychiatrist
Adequate
Fiction
Needs
Copy Quote
From the moment of birth, when the Stone-Age baby confronts the twentieth-century mother, the baby is subjected to these forces of violence called love, as its father and mother and their parents and their parents before them, have been. These forces are mainly concerned with destroying most of its potential.
R. D. Laing / Psychiatrist
Love
Baby
Mother
Copy Quote
True sanity entails in one way or another the dissolution of the normal ego, that false self competently adjusted to our alienated social reality... and through this death a rebirth and the eventual re-establishment of a new kind of ego-functioning, the ego now being the servant of the divine, no longer its betrayer.
R. D. Laing / Psychiatrist
Ego
Reality
Self
Copy Quote
A child born today in the United Kingdom stands a ten times greater chance of being admitted to a mental hospital than to a university ... This can be taken as an indication that we are driving our children mad more effectively than we are genuinely educating them. Perhaps it is our way of educating them that is driving them mad.
R. D. Laing / Psychiatrist
Children
Mad
Taken
Copy Quote
If you have passion for what you do, the company you keep, the life you live, it will be reflected in whatever you create. Passion is like that; it springs out, jumps, unpredictable and unplanned, into everything we touch. If it doesn't, others know. Passion can't be faked and it can't be manufactured. Which is why it is so priceless.
R. D. Laing / Psychiatrist
Company You Keep
Passion
Spring
Copy Quote
The schizophrenic may indeed be mad. He is mad. He is not ill. I have been told by people who have been through the mad experience how what was then revealed to them was veritable manna from Heaven. The person's whole life may be changed, but it is difficult not to doubt the validity of such vision. Also, not everyone comes back to us again.
R. D. Laing / Psychiatrist
Heaven
Mad
People
Copy Quote
Our civilization represses not only "the instincts", not only sexuality, but any form of transcendence. Among one-dimensional men, it is not surprising that someone with an insistent experience of other dimensions, that he cannot entirely deny or forget, will run the risk either of being destroyed by the others, or of betraying what he knows.
R. D. Laing / Psychiatrist
Running
Men
Civilization
Copy Quote
In a world full of danger, to be a potentially seeable object is to be constantly exposed to danger. Self-consciousness, then, may be the apprehensive awareness of oneself as potentially exposed to danger by the simple fact of being visible to others. The obvious defence against such a danger is to make oneself invisible in one way or another.
R. D. Laing / Psychiatrist
Self
Simple
World
Copy Quote
The condition of alienation, 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.
R. D. Laing / Psychiatrist
Learning
Men
Children
Copy Quote
In certain cases, a man blind from birth may have an operation performed which gives him his sight. The result: frequently misery, confusion, disorientation. The light that illumines the madman is an unearthly light, but I do not believe it is a projection, an emanation from his mundane ego. He is irradiated by a light that is more than he. It may burn him out.
R. D. Laing / Psychiatrist
Men
Believe
Light
Copy Quote
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.Q.s if possible.
R. D. Laing / Psychiatrist
War
Children
Dirty
Copy Quote
Conventions are convenient. It is inconvenient to say people are dead when they are alive, or alive when they have been buried, or that the world is crumbling when it is, as everyone can see, there as usual. If all A that does not fit B is ipso facto disqualified, we have to tailor A to shape and size to avoid serious trouble, and not all are equally gifted in this art.
R. D. Laing / Psychiatrist
Art
People
Usual
Copy Quote
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. We who follow Freud have the benefit of the knowledge he brought back with him and conveyed to us. He survived. We must see of we now can survive without using a theory that is in some measure an instrument of defence.
R. D. Laing / Psychiatrist
Benefits
Hero
Medusa
Copy Quote
Man as seen as an organism or man as seen as a person discloses different aspects of the human reality to the investigator. Both are quite possible methodologically but one must be alert to the possible occasion for confusion. (...) Seen as an organism, man cannot be anything else but a complex of things, of its, and the processes that ultimately comprise an organism are it-processes.
R. D. Laing / Psychiatrist
Men
Confusion
Reality
Copy Quote
How do we define, how do we describe, how do we explain and/or understand ourselves? What sort of creatures do we take ourselves to be? What are we? Who are we? Why are we? How do we come to be what or who we are or take ourselves to be? How do we give an account of ourselves? How do we account for ourselves, our actions, interactions, transactions (praxis), our biologic processes? Our specific human existence?
R. D. Laing / Psychiatrist
Giving
Our Actions
Who We Are
Copy Quote
Our capacity to think, except in the service of what we are dangerously deluded in supposing is our self-interest and in conformity with common sense, is pitifully limited: our capacity even to see, hear, touch, taste and smell is so shrouded in veils of mystification that an intensive discipline of unlearning is necessary for anyone before one can begin to experience the world afresh, with innocence, truth and love.
R. D. Laing / Psychiatrist
Self
Smell
Thinking
Copy Quote
When I go beyond a certain range it's outside of my direct horizon therefore I've got to rely on the writings and personal communications given to me by other people that I know.... I've got to try to piece together some tentative information picture of what the whole thing is like, but I'm aware that it becomes more and more speculative as it becomes more and more second, third, fourth hand. And this applies to absolutely everyone.
R. D. Laing / Psychiatrist
Communication
Hands
Writing
Copy Quote
Our time has been distinguished, more than by anything else, by a mastery, a control, of the external world, and by an almost total forgetfulness of the internal world. If one estimates human evolution from the point of view of knowledge of the external world, then we are in many respects progressing. If our estimate is from the point of view of the internal world, and of oneness of internal and external, then the judgment must be very different.
R. D. Laing / Psychiatrist
Oneness
Progress
Views
Copy Quote
Before one goes through the gate one may not be aware there is a gate One may think there is a gate to go through and look a long time for it without finding it One may find it and it may not open If it opens one may be through it As one goes through it one sees that the gate one went through was the self that went through it no one went through a gate there was no gate to go through no one ever found a gate no one ever realized there was never a gate
R. D. Laing / Psychiatrist
Long
Self
Thinking
Copy Quote
The individual in the ordinary circumstances of living may feel more unreal than real; in a literal sense, more dead than alive; precariously differentiated from the rest of the world, so that his identity and autonomy are always in question.... He may not possess an over-riding sense of personal consistency or cohesiveness. He may feel more insubstantial than substantial, and unable to assume that the stuff he is made of is genuine, good, valuable. And he may feel his self as partially divorced from his body.
R. D. Laing / Psychiatrist
Consistency
Real
Self
Copy Quote
To mystify, in the active sense, is to befuddle, cloud, obscure, mask whatever is going on, whether this be experience, action, or process, or whatever is "the issue." It induces confusion in the sense that there is failure to see what is "really" being experienced, or being done, or going on, and failure to distinguish or discriminate the actual issues. This entails the substitution of false for true constructions of what is being experienced, being done (praxis), or going on (process), and the substitution of false issues for the actual issues.
R. D. Laing / Psychiatrist
Clouds
Confusion
Issues
Copy Quote
We are effectively destroying ourselves by violence masquerading as love. I am a specialist, God help me, in events in inner space and time, in experiences called thoughts, images, reveries, dreams, visions, hallucinations, dreams of memories, memories of dreams, memories of visions, dreams of hallucinations, refractions of refractions of refractions of that original Alpha and Omega of experience and reality, that Reality on whose repression, denial, splitting, projection, falsification, and general desecration and profanation our civilisation as much as anything is based.
R. D. Laing / Psychiatrist
Dream
Memories
Reality
Copy Quote

Related Psychiatrist Authors

William Glasser
Psychiatrist
Monday, May 11, 1925
Friday, Aug 23, 2013
Wafa Sultan
Psychiatrist
Saturday, Jun 14, 1958
Thomas Szasz
Psychiatrist
Thursday, Apr 15, 1920
Saturday, Sep 08, 2012
Stanislav Grof
Psychiatrist
Wednesday, Jul 01, 1931
Silvano Arieti
Psychiatrist
Sunday, Jun 28, 1914
Friday, Aug 07, 1981
Sally Satel
Psychiatrist
Monday, Jan 09, 1956
Robert Jay Lifton
Psychiatrist
Sunday, May 16, 1926
Richard Von Krafft-Ebing
Psychiatrist
Friday, Aug 14, 1840
Monday, Dec 22, 1902
R. D. Laing
Psychiatrist
Friday, Oct 07, 1927
Wednesday, Aug 23, 1989
Peter D. Kramer
Psychiatrist
Friday, Oct 22, 1948
Peter Breggin
Psychiatrist
Monday, May 11, 1936
Patrick Mcgorry
Psychiatrist
Park Dietz
Psychiatrist
Norman Doidge
Psychiatrist
Milton H. Erickson
Psychiatrist
Thursday, Dec 05, 1901
Tuesday, Mar 25, 1980

View All Psychiatrist Quotes

Top Authors

Steve Jobs
Entrepreneur
Thursday, Feb 24, 1955
Wednesday, Oct 05, 2011
Kobe Bryant
Basketball Player
Wednesday, Aug 23, 1978
Stephen Hawking
Physicist
Thursday, Jan 08, 1942
Stephen Covey
Author
Monday, Oct 24, 1932
Monday, Jul 16, 2012
Alfred Lord Tennyson
Poet
Saturday, Aug 05, 1809
Thursday, Oct 06, 1892
Pope Francis
Thursday, Dec 17, 1936
Robert Frost
Poet
Thursday, Mar 26, 1874
Tuesday, Jan 29, 1963
Kim Kardashian
Television Personality
Tuesday, Oct 21, 1980
Soren Kierkegaard
Philosopher
Wednesday, May 05, 1813
Sunday, Nov 11, 1855
Julius Caesar
Roman Dictator
Thursday, Jan 01, 1970
Khalil Gibran
Poet
Saturday, Jan 06, 1883
Friday, Apr 10, 1931
Thomas Jefferson
3Rd US President
Saturday, Apr 13, 1743
Tuesday, Jul 04, 1826
Lucy Larcom
Poet
Friday, Mar 05, 1824
Monday, Apr 17, 1893
Vincent Van Gogh
Painter
Wednesday, Mar 30, 1853
Tuesday, Jul 29, 1890
Carrie Fisher
Actress
Sunday, Oct 21, 1956
Tuesday, Dec 27, 2016

View All Authors

Share This Page