Laing was a psychoanalyst in the mid sixties who was a revolutionary and controversial character. Within my project I will discuss the impact Laing had on the liberation of the voice of madness in the 60\u2019s. Even though his practices were not well renowned towards the end of his career, at his peak Laing was the \u2018pop star\u2019 of the psychological world. His medical practices were considered to be revolutionary in that he took madness out of the asylum and created a home within a city where the mentally insane were housed. His practices were controversial in that he condoned excessive drug use in order to access a \u2018higher reality\u2019 and due to the fact that he considered psychotic regression to be a necessary stage within the healing of madness. For example, he allowed one of his patients to smear her walls with her own faeces and to be fed out of a bottle like a baby. <\/p>\n
Once I have explained Laing\u2019s position within the history of madness I will focus the rest of my project on Laing\u2019s first book: \u2018The Divided Self\u2019. Within, he explains the existential view of madness from the stages of the schizoid condition to schizophrenia and psychosis. I will relate Laing\u2019s discussion of madness to Sartre\u2019s views on Bad Faith and the Other, as expressed within \u2018Being and Nothingness.\u2019 This will allow me to have a detailed discussion of Laing\u2019s existentialism of madness as expressed as the loss of the self to the point where the patient can be considered to be existentially dead.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe self, being transcendent, empty, omnipotent, free in its own way, comes to be anybody in phantasy and nobody in reality.\u201d – R. D. Laing<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Rebecca Adam, 2012, Stage 2<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8792,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[592,22,128],"tags":[87,370,315],"class_list":["post-2014","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-592","category-abstracts","category-stage-2-abstracts","tag-health","tag-madness","tag-psychology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/philosophy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2014","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/philosophy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/philosophy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/philosophy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8792"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/philosophy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2014"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/philosophy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2014\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/philosophy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2014"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/philosophy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2014"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/philosophy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2014"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}