The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness

"I think it’s a really important book and it’s a book that’s been hugely influential particularly in Britain but also here in the US and elsewhere, but it’s largely been forgotten. R D Laing was training as a doctor in a clinic outside Glasgow. But he was immersed in Sartre and existentialism and phenomenology, and he was treating people that were deemed institutionally insane. So, he puts those two together. The Divided Self I think is an extraordinarily vivid text to go back to and read. The question that he’s asking in the book is about how we categorise the mad and the sane, in particular the way in which certain people are declared to be schizophrenics. He’s trying to show the difference between the sane and the mad is not an absolutely difference: it’s not as if it’s a frontier that you pass, but there’s a kind of line of degrees. The crazy person – and Laing did think that there were crazy people – is at one end of that, and we’re at the other end of that, and we have lots of things in common with them. The great thing about Laing’s Divided Self is that in talking about the mad in this humane way, he thought that the way people were treated institutionally was horrific and he wanted it to change, and in doing that he says a great degree about so-called ‘normal’ human life. And, if you like, the takeaway for Laing is that we’re all a little bit mad and that’s good because that’s what makes us human. What the schizophrenic person is experiencing, that sense of loss or division of the self, we also experience in a more moderated way. When we isolate ourselves, when we experience loneliness and depression and phenomena like that, we’re a little bit mad too. “The takeaway for Laing is that we’re all a little bit mad and that’s good, because that’s what makes us human” So, picking up on the rich phenomenological descriptions of people like Sartre, Laing is able to provide these rich descriptions of cases of schizophrenic people which are both humane and powerful, but also lead us to reflect upon ourselves and this idea of what he calls the normal ‘schizoid self’: that we’re also, insofar as we’re reflective beings and self-conscious beings, we’re also divided against ourselves and we’re also at war with ourselves and, therefore, our relationship to the so-called mad should not be one of incarceration and exile, it should be one of sympathy and inclusion. It’s also a work which had direct social and policy implications which I think are still germane, because the way we treat the so-called mad is still horrific. It’s also just a great page-turner of a book. It was very important to David Bowie who is a hero of mine. Bowie read The Divided Self probably in the sixties, and when he listed his hundred favourite books it was in there. A lot of the cases in the book are cases of people who adopt personae, who adopt masks in order to retreat behind them. He talks for example of a couple of cases of people who play a role. He talks about the case of a student who dresses up in a cloak, who was very dramatic and appears to act out in all sorts of ways. He goes into what’s what making them do this and he thinks it’s a kind of retreat from the horror of the outside world. So, Laing gives us a rich phenomenology for describing the landscape of our inner lives which I recommend to people very strongly. It’s a great book."

"It was the first book I ever read about psychosis and schizophrenia, which is what most people would think about when they think about voices, visions, and hallucinations. And it had quite a profound effect on me as a teenager, just as I was starting to study psychology. It really changed how I thought, because Laing’s project is to make the un-understandable understandable, to show how states of madness can arise from thoughts, feelings and processes that we can all identify with in some way. That’s not to trivialise states of madness, but to pull them back within the fold and say that this is a part of human experience and understandable. Laing’s a controversial figure. After writing The Divided Self he went off in a direction that lots of people disagree with and is typically described as anti-psychiatry. But this is his first book—it was published in 1960—and it’s his first reaction to what he thought were misunderstandings and injustices inherent in how we treat and understand madness. It’s very much influenced by the existential philosophy of the time, thinking about how the self changes in relation to the world. Yes, I wouldn’t be described as someone who takes that critical position in psychology. I know of people from a range of backgrounds who have found Laing’s ideas if not inspirational then at least thought-provoking, in terms of thinking differently about this field. You don’t have to agree with all the arguments that come out of his critical position, and indeed much of it might not be quite right. For example, one of the criticisms levelled at him, even at the time, was that Laing puts too much causal weight and responsibility for madness on families, on parents, which can be damaging in other ways. In a similar way, at that time you had a predominantly psychoanalytically-informed understanding of autism which suggested that it was the result of a lack parental care, the ‘refrigerator mother’ idea, which I would never, ever endorse. So the way I read Laing, and the way a lot of people I speak to read Laing, is as a kind of provocation—a starting point for discussion—rather than the gospel truth."