| My Book Reviews |
| The Divided Self - R.D. Laing Back when I was a 17-18 year old I was serious fan of a progressive rock band called Gentle Giant who used R.D.Laing's words for one of their mad songs. At the same time I was also doing Sociology at college which was blowing my mind. This teenage explosion of interest in deep meaningful things prompted me to buy The Divided Self by R.D.Laing. I remember distinctly reading the first page 'The existential-phenomenological foundations for a Science of Persons' and wondering what I had let myself in for. I had no prior knowledge of psychiatry or any of the common terminology of psychology, so I found myself reaching for the dictionary virtually every paragraph. However I persevered and after a while I began to grasp the meaning of what he was saying which I found mind blowing literally! He was taking apart consciousness and the personality and showing that ordinary, non dysfunctional people don't see 'reality' at all, they're just projecting their own phantasies (his spelling) onto it. Because I have always been an outsider and have always found people on the whole to be very strange and perplexing creatures I took this concept on easily. As I went onto read many other of his books, most notably 'Self and Others' and 'Sanity, Madness and the Family'. Laing showed how social reality is constructed by the collusion of individuals and their own own phantasy perspectives. He called these social-psychological constructions Phantasy Systems and we are all to lesser or greater extent involved in them, and this was a profound revelation for me. It meant there was no objective view of truth in everyday life. I already didn't, from a sociological position, trust governments or organisations to give me the truth. I didn't believe in a God, and now mundane truth had disappeared and so for me 'reality' didn't exist at all ! As I saw it then, Science was the only thing that could prove it was true and I became a convert to its cause. My primary 'scientific' interest at that age was to discover as much of 'reality' as I could and I turned my gaze upon the paranormal intending to show how illusory it all was.....Oh Dear ! So then I was in a completely unreal world! Society lacked any kind of substance and now I believed in the ethereal paranormal. I consider the intellectual state I was in then a perfect position from which then to begin investigating the paranormal. One of the most satisfying things for me is that through all the twists and turns in my voyage of personal and intellectual discovery, I still find the key information in The Divided Self has relevance to the framework of the paranormal that I have constructed. However, I have a criticism of the whole overblown 'wordy' style of the book, there's so many jargonesque words that would exclude a wider audience from understanding it. I mean, I know Mr Laing knew what 'existential-phenomenological' meant, but I'm afraid I didn't then and I still don't know now exactly what it means,and anyway it did not preclude me from understanding of the subject, it just made it difficult. Personally speaking I've come to believe in plain speaking and am a bit suspicious of excessive use of non common usage words, because it looks like a deliberate attempt at exclusion. I have, also one other criticism of the R.D. Laing and his writings and that is, his references to serious works of literature made me, an impressionable lad, go and read them. He mentioned writers like Kafka, Genet and Dostoyevsky, and so I ploughed through such joyous works as The Trial (Kafka), Our Lady of the Flowers (Genet) and something by Dostoyevsky looking for information. Undoubtedly these works do have something to say about the human condition, it's just that they're novels, not reference works, and you're supposed to absorb that knowledge as you're going along. So I decided that from then on I would read only non fiction books to get my information from and read for pleasure only. I mean, I was reading 'The Trial' as a struggling musician living in a crummy flat, struggling to exist in the oppressive rat race that was London. A place were the servants of the system crammed everyday into tube trains to work in unbelievably massive organisations that were housed in huge, intimidating buildings. Thanks R.D.! |
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| The Divided Self - R.D.Laing |
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