The Politics of Experience

This is one of those rare books that, as soon as I finished it, I was tempted to start it again at the beginning. This is surely one of the best books I have read in a long time, and I read A LOT! There were so many interesting insights and thoughts in this book that I am very hesitant to try to summarize this book at all. I know I will be leaving much more out than I can possibly put into an amazon review. So, I will simply settle for listing what I think are some of the most thought-provoking ideas expressed in this book. This is going to be a fairly haphazard collection of thoughts and themes.IMPORTANCE OF EXPERIENCE. R.D. Laing has a number of complaints with modern psychiatry (at least, modern in his time, though, from the limited perspective of a layperson, I have a feeling many of his complaints would still apply today, perhaps even more so). R.D. Laing critiques the positivist, and behavioristic, scientific standpoint of "objective" observation, which reduces patients to "it" beings, and limits its observations to external behavior. It is important to realize that R.D. Laing is not critiquing this standpoint simply because it "objectifies" the human being, or "depersonalizes" them. It is not simply a moral critique. The main problem with this "objective" view is that it makes it impossible to understand psychotic behavior because, as R.D. Laing argues, our behavior is a function of the way we experience the world. Psychotic people BEHAVE differently because they EXPERIENCE the world differently. What appears psychotic to us makes sense once we see it in the context of the patient's experience.There is a place in the book where Laing quotes Kraepelin. Kraepelin is describing the behavior of a schizophrenic patient in an "objective" way and he says "the patient is in constant motion...On attempting to stop her movement, we meet with unexpectedly strong resistance...she holds a piece of bread...which she absolutely will not allow to be forced from her...If you prick her in the forehead with a needle, she scarcely winces or turns away, and leaves the needly quietly sticking there" (106-107; I have greatly condensed this passage in the interest of space). Kraepelin is describing what he takes to be the extraordinary and strange behavior of a schizophrenic, but R.D. Laing makes what I think is a brilliant observation that I will quote in full "If we see the situation purely in terms of Kraepelin's point of view, it all immediately falls into place. He is sane, she is insane...This entails looking at the patient's actions out of the context of the situation as she experienced it. But if we take Kraepelin's actions...out of the context of the situation as experienced and defined by him, how extraordinary they are!"In other words, the only reason we do not immediately classify Kraepelin's actions as insane is because we understand the context of them. He sees himself as a doctor, he sees the young woman as a patient, and he is testing her behavior and her reactions. If we abstract from that experience Kraepelin's actions would seem just as insane (probably more so) than the young woman's behavior. If we did not know Kraepelin considerd himself a doctor, and was attempting to test the reactions of his patient, what would we make of someone who went around trying to get in people's way for no reason, steal their bread, and poke needles in their head? R.D. Laing believes that psychology needs to take the experiences of schizophrenics and psychotics seriously as opposed to simply looking for symptoms, classifying, and treating. If we take their experience seriously it might make it easier to understand their behavior.OUR COLLECTIVE INSANITY. R.D. Laing believes that we are collectively insane (it should be remembered this book was written in the sixties, during Vietnam, though, again, I think all of Laing's complaints would certainly still apply today, perhaps even more so). We define people as "insane" because their behavior seems strange from the standpoint of the common world that we collectively define, but, Laing reminds us, we should not forget that "Normal men have killed perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years". What we call "normal", therefore, is merely a collectively agreed upon, or collectively shared, form of insanity. Laing argues that Freud's main contribution to our time was "his demonstration that the ordinary person is a shriveled, desiccated, fragment of what a person can be" (25-26). "What we call 'normal' is a product of repression, denial, splitting, projection, introjection and other forms of destructive action on experience" (27).This is an extremely important point that I will come back to. Our experience is determined, to a large degree, by our education, our society, our parents, etc.. The title of the book is "the politics of experience". I actually think that is a very pregnant title, and has a number of possible meanings, all of which I think are implied, but one meaning is: politics, in a very broad sense, determines what we experience, the kind of experience we have, whether full or desiccated, connected or alienated. Laing believes that our current form of society, our current forms of education, our current forms of interpersonal relationships, are highly destructive and lead to shriveled human beings, who experience the world in shriveled ways, and since our behavior is a function of our experience, it is no surprise that we are constantly courting collective suicide. The spirit of the sixties is clearly operative in Laing's work, but I do not think we should let the mistakes of the sixties lead us to dismiss Laing's insights, which I think are largely correct.So what do we do about it? Do we simply "turn on, tune in, and drop out"? I do not think that is what Laing is proposing. Instead, psychology needs to broaden its focus. It needs to see the patient in terms of his or her social context. Laing writes that "The social system, not single individuals extrapolated from it, must be the object of study...Something is wrong somewhere, but it can no longer be seen exclusively or even primarily 'in' the diagnosed patient" (115). In other words, insanity is not a problem that can be solved on the purely individual level. Elsewhere Laing argues that "The countermadness of Kraepelinian psychiatry is the exact counterpart of 'official' psychosis. Literally...it is as mad, if by madness we mean any radical estrangement from the totality of what is the case" (142).Laing believes that our current society experiences the world in an extremely impoverished way. It has gotten to such a ridiculous point that there are even people and movements (behaviorism) that deny that there is such a thing as experience at all! Our experience is so limited compared to other ages. Laing points out that "nowhere in the Bible is there any argument about the existence of gods, demons, angels. People did not first 'believe in' God: they experienced His presence" (141). Nowadays people are forced to "believe" because they lack the self-validating experience. It would have made no sense to tell an ancient Greek that there were no gods. The Greeks did not have to "believe" in their gods. They experienced them, they were possessed by them. We, on the other hand, have cut ourselves off from the inner world entirely, and live entirely in the public world of fact. Laing believes that psychosis can be part of a process that breaks through our impoverished and distorted reality. Laing is far from advocating or romanticizing insanity. Laing admits that insanity is often horrible for the people who experience it, and many people who do experience it never come back. Laing is not, therefore, saying: we should all try to go insane. What he is saying is: isn't it a shame that our experience is so impoverished that people's only way out is insanity (or, I would add, drugs)?INTERPERSONAL RELATIONS. One of the most interesting and, I think, exciting aspects of Laing's work is his analysis of interpersonal relationships. Laing argues that "The metapsychology of Freud...has no constructs for any social system generated by more than one person at a time. Within its own framework it has no concepts of social collectivities of experience shared or unshared between persons...It has no way of expressing the meeting of an 'I' with an 'other,' and the impact of one person on another" (49). This goes along with what I was saying above. Psychology needs to broaden its focus. My experience is not only a function of unconscious processes going on inside me coupled with processes of perception. My experience is also a function of my interpersonal relationships. If there are problems in those interpersonal relationships they are going to show up in my experience and my behavior.Not only that, but our failure to conceive of behavior in terms of interpersonal relations leads to confusion. This can be seen in Kraepelin's description of his schizophrenic patient. The patient's reactions might very well be "sane" reactions to the strange interpersonal situation she found herself in. She was, essentially, the object of scientific experiments. Is it really "insane" that she showed signs of resistance in her behavior? If we try to explain the experience solely in terms of the unconscious, thoughts, etc. then we risk totally distorting that behavior. Laing points out that behavior between two interacting people will form a sequence of interaction p1 - o1 - p2 - o2 - p3 - o3... and so on. If we isolate the p's and form an individual sequence p1 - p2 - p3...and so on, it is going to be impossible to really understand the person's behavior. But how do we conceptualize this? Laing begins to work out a scheme and a method for studying interpersonal perceptions (what I think of you, and what I think you think about me, and what I think you think I think about you, etc.). This can get quite complicated and is not easy to summarize in a short space, but Laing is really working out a very interesting theory of interpersonal relations and interpersonal perception that I think is really important.It is clear, for example, that very few of our actions are based on what other people actually believe. Most of our actions are based what we think other people believe, or what we think they think we believe. Laing describes how the category of "Them" can be created out of these kinds of experiences. "Them" is at once everyone and no one. Parents, for example, get upset when their daughter gets pregnant, not because they care, but because they think that other people will think, that they are bad parents. In this way a kind of "social conscience" can be created that is alienating for everyone since everyone is responding to what they think everyone else thinks. This is one of the social mechanisms that leads to alienated forms of experience. All of this is, I think, really, really, really important.HUMANITY. There is just one more quick point I want to make before bringing this overly long review to a close. One of the things I most appreciate about Laing's book is its humanity. Laing is clearly appalled by the way that schizophrenics and other psychotics are treated. Laing clearly has a great deal of compassion for the insane. That is why I do not really like the description on the back of Laing's book, which says: " [Laing] makes a compelling case for the 'madness of morality'". Laing may be a critic of morality, but he is a critic of morality in the same sense that Nietzsche was a critic of morality. Laing (and Nietzsche) is not advocating cruelty or immorality. Laing (and Nietzsche) criticizes morality because he perceives the cruelty and immorality that passes as morality. Both Laing and Nietzsche are offering a critique of the immorality of our standard morality. Our attempts to "treat" insane patients are often quite inhumane. Laing's book is a passionate cry for humanity.

Published in 1967 (Laing said it took him 3 years to write). Read the introduction and chapter 4, and you'll think he wrote them this morning. The problems he identifies so eloquently (he can be a difficult read, go slowly and carefully) are still the problems that are keeping us from evolving. Then, look up and read Presence, whose authors describe a path to the solution.

This has been one of the most pivotal books I’ve read for providing me with an alternative window into the world of anomalous experiences and those who undergo that challenging but often ultimately enlightening journey. Highly recommended.

This paperback printing is disgraceful, but more importantly, it is difficult to read as the text on both open pages folds so tightly into the spine its a struggle to get at it! Aside from the poor cover art... sad.

This book influenced me greatly when I first read it decades ago. Because it is referenced heavily by John Rember in his soul-stirring book for writers, MFA in a Box (unfortunate title; it's not that at all), which I am reading avidly for a second time this week, I thought it might be time to read Politics of Experience again because I don't remember many of the particulars. I have no doubt I will again be stimulated and enriched by this book.So I ordered this edition, and here's the reason I am writing this review before I have reread the book. There is no clue that I can see in the book description that it is a quite small format, about the dimensions of a mass market paperback - that's OK, just barely, though i would prefer a standard size quality paperback. What's not OK is that the pages are too heavily inked, giving the type a blaring black quality. I theorize that the paper may be a cheap quality too porous for the ink that was used on it, but I don't really know. Whatever the reason I find this unpleasant to read. I have no idea if all the copies are like that. Perhaps something went wrong with a particular print run. So I recommend you see if there is some other edition available and order this one only if you can't find an alternative.Since reviews are for content, I have not docked any stars for poor print job. It's the content that gets four stars, docked one star for those parts of Laing's thinking that are over the edge even for an old radical like me. Mostly, though, he is right on.

This is the 3rd time I have bought this book due to loaning out to people. A psych professor gave this to me in college and it blew me away- top top notch writer

Great book

Incredible . Eye-opening .