“The paranoic has specific persecutors. Someone is against him. There is a plot on foot to steal his brains. A machine is concealed in the wall of his bedroom which emits mind rays to soften his brain, or to send electric shocks through him while he is asleep. The person I am describing feels at this phase persecuted by reality itself. The world as it is, and other people as they are, are the dangers.”
“Everyone is subject to a certain extent at one time or another to such moods of futility, meaningless and purposelessness, but in schizoid individuals these moods are particularly insistent. These moods arise from the fact that the doors of perception and/or the gates of action are not in the command of the self but are being lived and operated by a false self.”
In a nutshell
We take a strong sense of self for granted, but if we don’t have this, life can be torture.
In a similar vein
Karen Horney Our Inner Conflicts (p 156)
Melanie Klein Envy and Gratitude (p 180)
V. S. Ramachandran Phantoms in the Brain (p 232)
Carl Rogers On Becoming a Person (p 238)
William Styron Darkness Visible (p 278)
When Scottish psychiatrist R. D. Laing sat down to write The Divided Self: A Study of Sanity and Madness in the late 1950s, the conventional view in psychiatry was that the mind of an unbalanced person was just a soup of meaningless fantasies or obsessions. Patients were examined for the official symptoms of mental illness, and treated accordingly.
However, with his first book, written at the age of 28, Laing helped change the way we look at psychoses. His aim was “to make madness, and the process of going mad, comprehensible,” and he achieved this by showing how psychosis—specifically, that relating to schizophrenia—actually makes sense to the person suffering it. Therefore the psychiatrist’s role should be to get into the sufferer’s mind.
Laing was at pains to point out that The Divided Self was not a medically researched theory of schizophrenia, but rather a set of observations—colored by existentialist philosophy—about the nature of schizoid and schizophrenic people. The science of schizoid conditions has moved on considerably since his day, toward a biological and neurological explanation, but his descriptions of what it feels like to live with a divided self, go “mad,” or have a breakdown remain some of the best written.
In the first few pages, Laing expressed a view common in the 1960s and 1970s that it is not the people who are locked up in asylums who are truly mad, but the politicians and generals who are ready to destroy the human race at the push of a button. He felt it was somewhat arrogant of psychiatry to class some people as “psychotic,” as if they had ceased to be part of the human race. For Laing, the psychiatrist’s labels said more about the profession of psychiatry and the culture that created it than they did about anyone’s real state of mind.
Mainstream psychiatry had got it wrong in dealing with schizophrenics. The salient point about schizoid individuals, Laing noted, was their hypersensitivity to what is going on in their mind, as well as extreme protectiveness of the self hidden behind layers of false personality. A doctor looking only for “schizophrenic symptoms,” as if the person were an object, would be resisted at every turn. Such patients did not want to be examined but to be heard; the real question was what had led them to experience the world in such a way.
“I’ve been sort of dead in a way. I cut myself off from other people and became shut up in myself… You have to live in the world with other people. If you don’t something dies inside.”
Peter, one of Laing’s patients
Laing defined “schizoid” people as those who live with a split, either within themselves, or between themselves and the world. They do not experience themselves as “together” and feel a painful isolation from the rest of humanity. His distinction between the schizoid person and the schizophrenic was this: While a schizoid can remain troubled but sane, the schizophrenic’s split mind has crossed a line into psychosis.
Most people take for granted a level of certainty about themselves. They are essentially comfortable with who they are and their relationship to the world. Schizoid people, in contrast, have what Laing called an “ontological insecurity,” a basic, existential, and deep-rooted doubt about their identity and their place in the scheme of things.
Schizoid people’s unique forms of anxiety include:
The terrifying nature of interactions with others. They may even dread being loved, because being known by someone so clearly means being exposed. To avoid being absorbed into another person through love, the schizoid may go to the other extreme and choose isolation, or even prefer to be hated, as this involves less chance of being “engulfed.” A common feeling is that, with such a fragile sense of self, they are drowning or being burned up.
“Impingement,” the feeling that at any moment the world may crash into their mind and destroy their identity. Such an apprehension can only come from a great feeling of emptiness in the first place—if someone has little sense of self to begin with, the world can seem like a persecuting force.
“Petrification” and “depersonalization,” the feeling that they may turn to stone, which has a corresponding effect of wishing to deny other people their feelings of reality so that they become an “it” that does not have to be dealt with.
While Laing noted that “hysterics” will do what they can to forget or repress themselves, schizoids are fixated on themselves. Yet the fixation is the opposite of narcissism, as there is no self-love involved, only a coldly objective, relentless inspecting and prodding of the self to see what, if anything, is inside.
Laing commented that many people experience a mental schism as a way of dealing with horrible situations from which there is no physical or mental escape (for example, someone in a concentration camp). If they can’t accept what is happening, they may withdraw into themselves or fantasize about being elsewhere. This “temporary dissociation” is not an unhealthy way of dealing with life.
The schizoid personality, however, feels that the dissociation is permanent. Their experience is life, without feeling alive. Invoking a literary allusion, Laing observed that Shakespeare’s characters are often flawed types with significant personal conflicts, yet they still remain in the flow of life and in possession of themselves. The characters in Kafka’s novels and Samuel Beckett’s plays, on the other hand, lack this basic existential security and therefore recall the schizoid type. They cannot simply “question their own motives,” since they do not even have a solid, cohesive sense of self to question. Life becomes a daily battle to preserve themselves against threats from the outside world.
Because schizoid people do not have self-certainty, they often try to impersonate the sort of the person they think the world expects them to be, blending into their environment to a morbid extent. A patient of Laing’s, a 12- year-old girl, had to walk across a park every night and was afraid of being attacked. To cope with the situation, she developed the belief that she could make herself disappear and therefore be safe. Such a defensive fantasy, he wrote, could only be contemplated by someone with a vacuum inside where we would normally find a self.
Laing made a distinction between embodied people—who have “a sense of being flesh and bones,” feel normal desires, and seek to satisfy them—and unembodied people, who experience a gap between their mind and body.
Schizoid people live such an internal, mental life that their body does not represent their true self. They set up a “false self system” through which they encounter the world, but in doing so their real self becomes more hidden. They have a great fear of being “uncovered” and so try to control every interaction with other people. This elaborate internal world enables them to feel protected, but because it is no replacement for real-world relations their interior life becomes impoverished. Ironically, their eventual collapse or breakdown does not come from the others they feared, “but by the devastation caused by the inner defensive maneuvers themselves.”
For the schizoid, everything is experienced as desperately personal, yet inside it feels as if there is a vacuum. The only relationship they experience is with the self, yet it is a relationship in turmoil—hence their extreme anguish and despair.
What makes someone with schizoid tendencies actually cross the line into psychosis?
Living with a system of false selves that are presented to the world, schizoid people are able to live an imaginary inner life. In the place of normal, creative relationships are attachments to things, trains of thought, memories, and fantasies. Anything becomes possible. Schizoids feel free and omnipotent, but as this happens they are whirling themselves further away from the center of objective truth. If their fantasies are destructive, these are likely actually to result in destructive acts, since without access to a real self there can be no guilt or reparation.
This is why schizophrenic people can apparently seem normal one week and psychotic the next, declaring that a parent or husband or wife is trying to kill them, or that someone is trying to steal their mind or their soul. The veil of the false self or selves that made them seem relatively normal is suddenly lifted, revealing the secret, tortured self that has been hidden from the world’s view for so long.
The Divided Self also presented Laing’s controversial belief that if a child has a genetic predisposition to schizophrenia, there may be certain ways that a mother (or larger family) acts that will either encourage or prevent the condition from being expressed. Unsurprisingly, this angered parents of schizophrenics.
The more lasting effect of the book was to help lift the taboo around mental illness and create a better understanding about the schizoid mind. It was also important in its idea that psychology should be about achieving personal growth and freedom instead of mimicking the disease/symptom/cure paradigm of conventional medicine. Exploring who you were, even if the explorations were risky adventures, Laing saw as vital; the other route was to try to make yourself fit into society’s regimented molds, with all the related anxieties of such a compromise.
Because of such ideas Laing became famous in the 1960s, attractive to anyone who felt marginalized by their families or cultures, or who wanted to be a part of the “self-realization” mindset of the human potential movement.
Drug use, alcohol addiction, depression, and an interest in unorthodox subjects such as shamanism and reincarnation all contributed to a lowering of Laing’s professional reputation, and he was forced to resign from the UK’s medical register in 1987.
Despite critics’ attempts to devalue his work, his twin aims of changing attitudes to mental illness and helping to recast the ultimate aim of psychology were realized. Laing remains one of the major figures of twentieth-century psychology.
Born an only child in 1927 in Glasgow to middle-class Presbyterian parents, Ronald David Laing later wrote of a lonely and often frightening childhood. He excelled at school, reading Voltaire, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud by the time he was 15, and went on to study medicine at the University of Glasgow.
He worked as a psychiatrist with the British Army, and in 1953 took up a post at the Gartnavel Psychiatric Hospital in Glasgow. In the late 1950s, he began a program of psychoanalytical training at the Tavistock Clinic in London.
In 1960s London, Laing counted among his friends writer Doris Lessing and rock band Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters. In 1965 he established a psychiatric community, Kingsley Hall, in which patients were not coerced into particular behaviors or drug regimes, and were treated as equals by the staff.
Laing’s The Politics of Experience (1967), which criticized the family and political institutions of the West, sold millions of copies. Other books include Sanity, Madness and the Family (1964), and his autobiography, Wisdom, Madness and Folly (1985). His critical view of standard psychiatric practice has been echoed in the writings of Thomas Szasz (The Myth of Mental Illness) and William Glasser ( Reality Therapy).
Laing has been the subject of at least five biographies. He died of a heart attack in 1989 in St Tropez while playing tennis.