Critique of Theory
Laing goes on to argue that theory itself – both psychiatric and psychoanalytic – enhances alienation, it embodies the very divisions we are subject to by reifying them in the language it uses:
we cannot give an adequate account of the existential splits unless we can begin from the concept of the unitary whole, and no such concept exists, nor can any such concept be expressed within the current language system of psychiatry or psycho-analysis (Laing 1964: 19).
He argues that, by using words such as mind and body, psyche and soma, psychological and physical, we are referring to man in isolation from the other and the world, and we are trapped in a conceptual cul-de-sac, ‘condemned to start our study of schizoid and schizophrenic people with a verbal and conceptual splitting that matches the split up of the totality of the schizoid being-in-the-world.’ (Laing 1964: 20) In The Politics of Experience, Laing quotes Heidegger: ‘the Dreadful has already happened’; the division of inner from outer has radically cut us off from ourselves: ‘Man cut off from his own mind, cut off equally from his own body’ (Laing 1990: 47) He emphasises that psychotherapists – theorists – are also, of course, implicated: ‘The therapists, too, are in a world in which the inner is already split from the outer.’ (Laing 1990: 46)
In other words, since Freud’s endeavour was to transpose metaphysics into metapsychology, and since western metaphysics has, since Descartes, been entrenched in a logocentrism which conceptually divides everything into hierarchical dichotomies—mind//body, inner//outer, presence//absence—with no way of representing a totality; so psychoanalytic theory, as well as those who practise it, are bound to recreate the splits which have themselves caused the problem of being which Laing is describing. He attempts to disrupt these conceptual divisions:
This distinction between outer and inner usually refers to the distinction between behaviour and experience; but sometimes it refers to some experiences that are supposed to be ‘inner’ in contrast to others that are ‘outer’. More accurately this is a distinction between different modalities of experience, namely perception (as outer) in contrast to imagination etc. (as inner). But perception, imagination, phantasy, reverie, dreams, memory, are simply different modalities of experience, none more ‘inner’ or ‘outer’ than any others (Laing 1990: 18).
Only existential thought, Laing argues, has attempted to bring together as a totality, the ‘original experience of oneself in relationship to others in one’s world’. This crucial concept is ‘existence’, ‘being-in-the-world’. Thus whilst Laing accepts that ‘alienation’ is our natural state, the therapeutic project he proposes has the potential to awaken and reintegrate the subject, to put the pieces back together again:
Ultimately it is possible to regain the ground that has been lost. These defence mechanisms are actions taken by the person on his own experience. On top of this he has dissociated himself from his own action. The end-product of this twofold violence is a person who no longer experiences himself fully as a person, but as a part of a person (…) The psychotherapeutic relationship is therefore a re-search. A search, constantly reasserted and reconstituted for what we have all lost (Laing 1990: 30/47).
By a process of gradual ‘de-alienation’, a sort of enlightenment, of insight, facilitated by the therapist, the subject reclaims responsibility for ‘actions on himself’, becomes agent of his own destiny and can become ‘whole’ again.