Laing’s objections to psychiatry penetrate further still. He objects on a socio-political level also to the treatment of ‘madness’ in society:
…psychiatry has been particularly concerned with individual experiences and behaviour regarded in our society as ‘abnormal’. (…) [the schizophrenic] is someone who has queer experiences and / or is acting in a queer way, from the point of view usually of his relatives and of ourselves (Laing & Esterson 1970: 16/18).
In other words, society decides what is normal and pathologises those who do not fit the mould. But in The Politics of Experience Laing describes the fundamental alienation, the ‘madness’ which underscores all of our experience:
The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one’s mind, is the condition of the normal man. (…) What we call ‘normal’ is a product of repression, denial, splitting, projection, introjection (…) We are bemused and crazed creatures, strangers to our true selves, to one another, and to the spiritual and material world – mad, even, from an ideal standpoint we can glimpse but not adopt (Laing 1990: 23-24/12).
In his own way, Laing is describing here the same ‘divided’ subject to be found in Freud and Lacan – indeed he does so using psychoanalytic terminology – but with an added socio-political, one might say Foucauldian dimension. This is the universal, eternal condition of man as cut off from his own mind, from his unconscious desires – in Freud’s terms (Freud 2005 [1915]: 142) – and alienated by language – in Lacan’s:
Man is, prior to his birth and beyond his death, caught up in the symbolic chain, a chain that founded his lineage before his history was embroidered upon it. (…) [man is] like a pawn, in the play of the signifier, and this is so even before its rules are transmitted to him (…) No prehistory allows us to efface the cut brought about by the heteronomy of the symbolic. On the contrary, everything it gives us merely deepens the cut (Lacan 2006 [1956]: 391-392).
Lacan is emphasising in stark terms, similar to those used by Laing, that man is subject to language, which he refers to as an ‘alienating intrusion’ whose significations ‘enslave the subject’. Man is castrated by the symbolic: ‘the cut’.
In Laing, the human subject becomes further desiccated by a violence perpetrated via messages passed on by one generation to the next:
the baby is subjected to these forces of violence, called love (…) These forces are mainly concerned with destroying most of its potentialities. (…) As [the child] is taught to move in specific ways, out of the whole range of possible movements, so he is taught to experience, out of the whole range of possible experiences (Laing 1990: 50-51).
In other words, we are alienated from our true potential. This idea is highly reminiscent of Freud’s own description of the ‘moral education’ of children:
As a rule parents and authorities analogous to them follow the precepts of their own super-egos in educating children (…) Thus a child’s super-ego is in fact constructed on the model not of its parents but of its parents’ super-ego; the contents which fill it are the same and it becomes the vehicle of tradition and of all the time-resisting judgements of value which have propagated themselves in this manner from generation to generation (Freud 2005 [1933]: 493).
However, there arises a divergence from Freud’s version of another aspect of emerging subjectivity. Laing says:
Our first way of experiencing the world is largely what psychoanalysts have called phantasy. This modality has its own validity, its own rationality. Infantile phantasy may become a closed enclave, a dissociated undeveloped ‘unconscious’, but this need not be so. This eventuality is another form of alienation (…) We do not then see phantasy in its true function but experienced merely as an intrusive, sabotaging infantile nuisance (Laing 1990: 26-27 my italics).