Against the psychiatric establishment
The book’s main critique is evident from the beginning: it
challenges the standard practice of British and American psychiatry, which
viewed psychotic patients merely as collections of symptoms without considering
their personal life histories or “existential positions.’ Laing, heavily
influenced by the phenomenological tradition—spanning Husserl, Heidegger, and
especially Sartre’s existential psychoanalysis—argued that psychiatry should
strive to understand the world as the patient experiences it, aiming to ‘grasp
the patient’s own existential position.” At the time, this was a notably
radical stance, opposing both the view that mental suffering results solely
from organic issues and the deterministic Freudian model based on fixed
instinctual stages.
Laing’s key clinical idea— “ontological
insecurity”—describes a state in which a person lacks a stable sense of
reality, autonomy, and continuity. The schizoid mechanism of withdrawal,
involving the creation of a “false self” that interacts with the world while
the true self stays hidden, is not seen as random pathology but as a logical,
if devastating, defence against overwhelming relationships. The case histories
of individuals like “Julie” and “David” are thoughtfully and skillfully
written, making the internal coherence of their experiences clear—something
often missing in clinical notes of the time, which tend to view these
experiences as mere disorder. This humanising approach is Laing’s lasting
contribution, yet it also highlights the limits of what his existential
perspective could fully understand.
The family as a site of harm — and the limits of
phenomenology
Laing's most disruptive contribution—and its influence on
the anti-psychiatry movement linked to Cooper, Foucault, and Szasz—was his
assertion that these patterns originate in actual family relationships. He emphasised
that communication patterns, especially those that systematically invalidate a
child’s perceptions, are at the root. This was a significant step forward from
traditional psychiatric views because it identified pathology within authentic
social interactions rather than attributing it to a presumed biochemical
defect.
But here the decisive theoretical gap opens. The family…
tends to appear as a closed interpersonal system, to be understood through the
categories of existential phenomenology.
This is exactly the issue. Laing sees the family as a source
of psychic harm. Still, he considers it a self-sufficient system driven by
existential concepts like “being-for-others,” “bad faith,” and “ontological
insecurity.” What’s lacking is a detailed explanation of how the particular
pressures of capitalist society influence the modern family and lead to its
pathology.
A Marxist perspective argues that the family is not an
isolated personal space but serves to reproduce labour power, influenced by
capitalist production needs. The “systematic invalidation” of children's
perceptions, as Laing describes, is not merely a failed communication method
but an expression of a societal demand: children are conditioned to accept a
life of alienation and a world where their actions are perceived as external,
alien forces.
Laing’s existential vocabulary, precisely because it
abstracts from these contradictions, can diagnose alienation with great
sensitivity but cannot explain why it takes the specific forms it does, or why
it became so pervasive in mid‑twentieth‑century life.
The postwar intellectual milieu: a shared retreat from
history
The conceptual deadlock in The Divided Self reflects wider
postwar intellectual trends. The Frankfurt School—of which Fromm was a part—shifted
focus from engaging the working class politically to critiquing culture and
psychology. Adorno and Horkheimer forsook the proletariat in favour of a
pessimistic view of history; Marcuse aimed for revolutionary change through
students and marginalised groups; and Fromm’s Freudo-Marxism attributed the
root of capitalist society’s problems to distorted human needs instead of class
conflict.
Laing’s existentialism marked a different kind of withdrawal. While the Frankfurt School embraced cultural pessimism, Laing looked inward, emphasising inner experience through a mystical perspective. Both approaches reflect the same core reality: postwar intellectuals becoming disconnected from the working class. The disappointment of the revolutionary wave after the Russian Revolution, the rise of Stalinism, and the integration of social-democratic parties into capitalism distanced the intelligentsia from active class struggle. Consequently, they turned inward towards subjectivity, phenomenology, structuralism, and eventually mysticism. Laing’s later works—such as The Politics of Experience, Knots, and his interest in Eastern spirituality—are not personal quirks but the logical result of a framework that recognised alienation but failed to grasp its material roots.
Laing Among the Postwar Radicals
R.D. Laing’s The Divided Self arose from the same postwar
intellectual upheaval that influenced Sartre, Marcuse, Foucault, Fanon, and
Goffman. This period was characterised less by new theories than by the deep
disorientation caused by the working class's defeats and the rise of bourgeois
subjectivism. Laing is clearly part of this group, though his path more sharply
illustrates its limits. Sartre supplied Laing with fundamental concepts such as
the importance of lived experience, the drama of being-for-others, and the self-caught
between authenticity and bad faith. However, Sartre’s own
retreat from Marxism following the failure of the French left in the 1940s
foreshadowed Laing’s later drift. Both tried to combine existential
phenomenology with social critique, yet ultimately found themselves stuck in a
vocabulary that could vividly describe alienation but struggled to explain its
historical roots.
Marcuse, a member of the Frankfurt School, presented an
alternative perspective on retreat. He combined Freud and Marx to identify the
psychological toll of advanced capitalism but shifted the focus away from the
working class as the primary revolutionary subject. Instead, he looked to
students, minorities, and marginalised groups as agents of change. Laing’s
anti-psychiatry, which romanticised madness as a form of authenticity, echoed
Marcuse’s emphasis on psychological rebellion over class struggle as a path to
liberation.
Foucault and Goffman, despite their different methods, both
shared Laing’s mistrust of institutional power. Foucault’s archaeological
approach to madness and Goffman’s study of “total institutions” revealed the
violence inherent in psychiatric confinement. However, they failed to explain
why capitalist society tends to produce mental illness on a widespread scale.
Their critiques focused on discourse and institutional practices but lacked a
theory of class exploitation. Although Laing’s phenomenology humanised the
issue, it faced the same fundamental limitation.
Fanon is somewhat of an exception. His analysis of colonial
violence recognised that psychic disintegration is socially constructed—a
subjective outcome of observable domination. Still, Fanon’s insightful work
primarily targeted national liberation efforts rather than offering a Marxist
critique of global capitalism. Laing’s emphasis on mysticism represented
another response to the same historical impasse.
Overall, these figures illustrate how the postwar
intelligentsia tried to comprehend alienation after the collapse of
revolutionary Marxism as an active force. Laing’s perspective — which stresses
that psychosis has social meaning — remains influential. Yet, his inability to
situate the “divided self” within the fractured society that produces it
exposes the limits of the postwar radical range. Without a materialist view of
capitalist social relations, critiques of alienation become more critiques of
personal experience, and the quest for liberation centres on authenticity.
Laing is part of this range not as an outsider, but as its most telling
example.
Laing’s later work increasingly romanticised psychosis as a
kind of privileged inner journey. Viewing psychosis as authentic means
abandoning efforts to understand it as a response to social conditions causing
suffering. It replaces a mystical appreciation of symptoms with an analysis of
the illness itself. This was the main shortcoming of the anti-psychiatry
movement. While Foucault’s history of madness and Goffman’s institutional
sociology revealed the violence of psychiatric authority, neither explained why
capitalism generates mental illness on a widespread scale. Without a theory of
class exploitation, critique remains passive rather than revolutionary.
The social origins of mental illness
A materialist perspective
starts from the understanding that mental illness is a social disease, arising
from the specific alienations caused by capitalist society. The widespread
mental suffering is not due to faulty family communication or biochemical issues.
Instead, it results from: social atomization; reducing human relationships to
monetary exchanges; extending working hours and increasing labour intensity;
dehumanising sexuality; and destroying collective life and political agency.
These are not merely "environmental factors" but are direct outcomes
of the capitalist mode of production, which presents the individual as an alien
force, separates him from the products of his labour, and turns social
relations into relations between things. Laing’s existential framework could
not achieve this analysis.
None of this should overshadow what The Divided Self
achieved. Laing challenged a psychiatric system focused on custodial care,
electroshock, and a purely descriptive classification, asserting that the
experiences of the mentally ill were meaningful and needed understanding rather
than just management. He also linked family dynamics to the causes of mental
illness, bringing a humanising perspective to a discipline that desperately
required it. However, today’s readers must recognise both the impressive
clinical and literary success of Laing’s phenomenological portrayal of schizoid
and schizophrenic experiences and acknowledge the theoretical dead end inherent
in its existentialist framework.
The book raises the question of how the “divided self”
relates to the divided society that creates it, but it cannot answer it. The
key division is not internal — between “true” and “false” selves — but between
the individual and a social environment that appears as an alien force. This
gap cannot be bridged through phenomenological insight alone; it requires transforming
social relations. This involves dismantling a system where people face the
outcomes of their collective labour as adversarial, and building a society
where, as Marx stated, “the free development of each is the condition for the
free development of all." Laing could identify alienation but not explain
its origins or remedies. That challenge lies outside existential phenomenology,
belonging instead to historical materialism and the revolutionary overhaul of
society.
Sources and Bibliography
Primary Works
R.D. Laing
- Laing,
R.D. The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness.
London: Tavistock, 1960.
- Laing,
R.D. The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise.
Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967.
- Laing,
R.D. Knots. London: Tavistock, 1970.
Jean-Paul Sartre
- Sartre,
Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness. Trans. Hazel Barnes. New York:
Philosophical Library, 1956.
- Sartre,
Jean-Paul. Existential Psychoanalysis. In Essays in
Existentialism. New York: Citadel, 1965.
Herbert Marcuse
- Marcuse,
Herbert. Eros and Civilisation: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud.
Boston: Beacon Press, 1955.
- Marcuse,
Herbert. One-Dimensional Man. Boston: Beacon Press, 1964.
Michel Foucault
- Foucault,
Michel. Madness and Civilisation: A History of Insanity in the Age of
Reason. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Pantheon, 1965.
- Foucault,
Michel. The Birth of the Clinic. New York: Pantheon, 1973.
Frantz Fanon
- Fanon,
Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Trans. Charles Lam Markmann. New
York: Grove Press, 1967.
- Fanon,
Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Trans. Constance Farrington. New
York: Grove Press, 1963.
Erving Goffman
- Goffman,
Erving. Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and
Other Inmates. New York: Anchor Books, 1961.
- Goffman,
Erving. Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity.
Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1963.
Secondary Works and Contextual Studies
Marxist and ICFI Analyses
- North,
David. The Frankfurt School, Postmodernism and the Politics of the
Pseudo-Left. Mehring Books, 2015.
- Walsh,
David. “Mental Illness and the American Dream.” World Socialist Web
Site, 2000.
- Steiner,
Nick. Marxism and the Dialectic of Alienation. London: Palgrave,
2012.
On Postwar Intellectual History
- Jacoby,
Russell. The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe.
New York: Basic Books, 1987.
- Jay,
Martin. The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School.
Boston: Little, Brown, 1973.
- Elliott,
Anthony. Subjectivity in the Postwar World: Laing, Sartre, and the
Crisis of the Self. Cambridge: Polity, 2014.
On Anti‑Psychiatry and Critical Psychiatry
- Mullan,
Bob. Mad to Be Normal: Conversations with R.D. Laing. London: Free
Association Books, 1995.
- Crossley,
Nick. Contesting Psychiatry: Social Movements in Mental Health.
London: Routledge, 2006.
- Showalter,
Elaine. The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture,
1830–1980. New York: Pantheon, 1985.
On Fanon, Colonialism, and the Psychology of Oppression
- Bulhan,
Hussein Abdilahi. Frantz Fanon and the Psychology of Oppression.
New York: Plenum Press, 1985.
- Gordon,
Lewis R. Fanon and the Crisis of European Man. New York: Routledge,
1995.
On Foucault and Institutional Power
- Dreyfus,
Hubert, and Paul Rabinow. Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and
Hermeneutics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982.
- Porter,
Roy. Madness: A Brief History. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2002.
Archival and Historical Context
- British
Psychological Society Archives, London.
- Tavistock
Institute Papers, Wellcome Collection.
- World
Socialist Web Site (WSWS) archives on psychiatry, social conditions, and
postwar intellectual history.
