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Summary
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 Laing's second book, Self and Others (1961) was described as a sequel to The Divided Self. But The Divided Self
focused on "internal" developments, or the inner cleavages and
conflicts that accompany schizoid and psychotic behavior. By contrast, Self and Others
focused on the environmental conditions and patterns of communication
that engender this kind of inner turmoil and confusion. Another
difference worth noting is that in The Divided Self, Laing used
the term "ontological security" to describe what most of his
contemporaries called "normality". In other words, Laing's first
account of normality was prescriptive, because it posited the existence
of certain traits that define mental health regardless of the person's
social circumstances. Thus, said Laing, the ontologically secure person
identifies with his or her body, and when circumstances permit, is sure
enough of his own identity to engage in authentic self-disclosure
without suffering from fear of annihilation. Following Buber, Laing
also described the "normal", or non-schizoid person as someone who
oscillates naturally between solitude and sociability, the two poles of
human existence, without experiencing panic or despair, or desperately
clinging to one or the other.
In Self and Others,
however, Laing described normality as a state of unwitting immersion in
what he termed "social phantasy systems" - deeply shared assumptions
about reality that define the perspective of a particular group, but
are not necessarily shared by outsiders, and may not tally with the
facts. Though some may imagine that this was a mere shift in emphasis,
it had profound implications for everything else that followed. After
all, the concept of normality Laing endorsed in Self and Others
was no longer prescriptive, but purely descriptive, rendering the
content of the term "normality" context-dependent. It was even somewhat
pejorative , inasmuch as the average person was assumed to be so deeply
identified with the perspective of their particular reference group
that they were incapable of experiencing or expressing things that the
group considers taboo.
Having
re-framed normality in terms average everydayness, cultural congruence,
rather than genuine "mental health", Laing's approach to psychosis
shifted too. The intelligibility of the psychotic symptoms was no
longer sought in the antagonism between the "real", disembodied self
and the "false self." Instead, Self and Others described much
psychotic experience and behavior as the symbolic or "alienated
apperception" of social, interpersonal processes - rather than
"intrapsychic" ones. Psychotic ideas and utterances appear bizarre not
just because they are incoherent, or at variance with the facts.
Instead, said Laing , they are invalidated by "normal" people because
despite the considerable cognitive distortions they entail delusions,
hallucinations, and so on , also reference events and processes that
figure prominently in the patient's social world.
By
this second, more complex account, then, phantasy is not merely a
private inner world designed to protect the embattled "real self", as
it was in The Divided Self, but a "modality of experience" in
which social events and processes that are publicly disowned or denied
are represented in a personal, idiosyncratic way. Rather than being
construed primarily as a mechanism of escape from the communal and
corporeal dimensions of existence, individual phantasy was now
contrasted with "collective phantasy systems", and endowed with an
additional, truth-telling function. It became a vehicle for thinking
the unthinkable, uttering the unmentionable, and indirectly, addressing
collective delusion and denial. Rather than acknowledge the lucid,
intelligible core of the mad person's experience, "normal" people
invalidate or dismiss it altogether, for fear that acknowledgement of
these realities will threaten the group's equilibrium, which is only
maintained by clinging to a collective fiction.
While The Divided Self was written in the existential-phenomenological idiom, Self And Others
leaned strongly on contemporaneous findings of family and
communications research in the USA, with special emphasis on Gregory
Bateson's "double bind theory" and Jurgen Reusch's concept of
"tangential responses". These ideas were embellished augmented by
Laing's own inimitable reflections on what he called "pretence and
elusion", "collusion", "false and untenable positions", "attributions
and injunctions", and so on. The idea of "social phantasy systems" was
borrowed from the Kleinian school of psychoanalysis, but deliberately
re-cast in phenomenological idiom to exclude many of the theoretical
preconceptions about infancy and instincts that Kleinians invariably
attach to it. The tendency to represent dreaming and phantasy as a
distinctive mode of experience with a logic and validity all its own
draws on the phenomenological reflections of Edmund Husserl, while
Laing's account of "de-realization", or the uncanny experience of
stepping outside a collective phantasy system, borrows heavily from
Martin Heidegger's account of existential anxiety.
Because of dramatic shifts in emphasis, the incorporation of many new influences and ideas, and so on, Self and Others is a more complexly convoluted work than The Divided Self,
and for many, less rewarding, from a purely stylistic point of view.
There are fewer solid case histories, and a lot more discussion of what
Laing later termed "interpersonal defenses", using vignettes from group
therapy, quotes from Sartre and Dostoyevsky, etc. Still, for anyone
deeply interested in the subsequent development of Laing's thought,
this is "must" reading, which vividly anticipates all of Laing's
important ideas in the various books that follow.
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Contents
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Preface - First Edition
Preface - Second Edition
Acknowledgement
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Part One: Modes of Interpersonal Experience
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1
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Phantasy and Experience
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2
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Phantasy and Communication
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3
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Pretence and Elusion
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4
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Counterpoint of Experience
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5
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Coldness of Death
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Part Two: Forms of Interpersonal Action
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6
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Complementary Identity
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7
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Confirmation and Disconfirmation
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8
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Collusion
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9
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False and Untenable Postions
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10
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Attributions and Injunctions
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Appendix: A Notation for Dyadic perpsectives
Selected Bibliography
Index
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![Bibliography Main Page [link]](The_Self_and_Others__Laingsociety_files/bibliopg.gif){kind=small}
