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Portrait of R. D. Laing

R. D. Laing

(1927–1989) Military Physician

105 quotes in 579 categories

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R. D. Laing was a military physician, best known for Reason & violence.

Quick Facts About R. D. Laing

Born: October 7, 1927
Died: August 23, 1989
Profession: Military Physician
Notable works: Reason & violence

About R. D. Laing

Ronald David Laing, usually cited as R. D. Laing, was a Scottish psychiatrist who wrote extensively on mental illness, particularly psychosis and schizophrenia. Politically, Laing was regarded as a thinker of the New Left. He has been theatrically portrayed by Mike Maran, Alan Cox, Billy Mack, and David Tennant in the 2017 film Mad to Be Normal.

Quotes by R. D. Laing · Page 2

We live equally out of our bodies and out of our minds.

Body

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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.

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In the society of men the truth resides now less in what things are than in what they are not.

Men

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

Death

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Beauty is almost no longer possible if it is not a lie.

Beauty

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The truth brings with it a great measure of absolution, always.

Absolution

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I cannot experience your experience. You cannot experience my experience. We are both invisible men.

Experience

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A mental healer may be a psychiatrist. A psychiatrist may or may not be a mental healer.

Healer

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The experience and behavior that gets labeled schizophrenic is a special strategy that a person invents in order to live in an…

Behavior

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I am quite sure that a good number of "cures" of psychotics consist in the fact that the patient has decided, for…

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The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice. And because we fail to notice…

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

Child

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

Illness

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To live in the past or in the future may be less satisfying than to live in the present, but it can…

Live in the present

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Children are not yet fools, but we shall turn them into imbeciles like ourselves, with high I.Q.'s if possible.

Child

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Doctors have throughout time made fortunes on killing their patients with their cures. The difference in psychiatry is that it is the…

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Our capacity to think, except in the service of what we are dangerously deluded in supposing is our self-interest and in conformity…

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What is to be done? We who are still half alive, living in the often fibrillating heartland of a senescent capitalism --…

Alive

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Man as seen as an organism or man as seen as a person discloses different aspects of the human reality to the…

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From the moment of birth, when the Stone-Age baby confronts the twentieth-century mother, the baby is subjected to these forces of violence…

Age

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How do we define, how do we describe, how do we explain and/or understand ourselves? What sort of creatures do we take…

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Long before a thermonuclear war can come about, we have had to lay waste our own sanity. We begin with the children.…

Brainwashing

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Freud was a hero. He descended to the "Underworld" and met there stark terrors. He carried with him his theory as a…

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The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice. And because we fail to notice…

Deeds

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In our society many of the old rituals have lost much of their power. New ones have not arisen.

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The psychiatrist must become a fellow traveler with his patient.

Fellow travelers

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The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice.

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Schizophrenia is a successful attempt not to adapt to pseudo- social realities.

Illness

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Schizophrenia cannot be understood without understanding despair.

Despair

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

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Insanity - a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world.

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Experience is mad when it steps beyond the horizons of our common, that is, our communal sense.

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Normal men have killed perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years.

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No one has schizophrenia, like having a cold. The patient has not "got" schizophrenia. He is schizophrenic.

Cold

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Philosophy does not exist. It is nothing but an hypostatized abstraction.

Abstraction

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Psychological breakdowns are actually breakthroughs to enlightenment.

Breakdown

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If we can revert to the truth, then a great deal of one's suffering can be erased, because a great deal of…

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The dynamics and structures found in those groups called families in our society may not be evident in those groups called families…

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Freud was a hero. He descended to the Underworld and met there stark terrors. He carried with him his theory as a…

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We are all murderers and prostitutes - no matter to what culture, society, class, nation one belongs, no matter how normal, moral,…

Class

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R. D. Laing by topic

Men (12) Time (10)