others unless he himself ‘gives the show away’. The child who cannot keep a secret or who cannot tell a lie because of the persistence of such primitive magical fears has not established his full measure of autonomy and identity (p.107).
It is from such states of unestablished autonomy and identity that Laing’s concepts of the ‘false-self systems’ that comprise schizophrenic being-in-the-world arise, that a subject’s own thinking may seem to them monstrously and uncontrollably telekinetic, and that the flipside of this influencing finds itself in the Tauskian ‘influencing machines’ that may haunt and persecute such subjects. What Laing insists on in all of this, though, is hearing the truth of these very divided subjects, these divided selves:
Undoubtedly, most people take to be ‘really’ true what has to do with grammar and the natural world. A man says he is dead but he is alive. But his ‘truth’ is that he is dead. He expresses it perhaps in the only way common (i.e. the communal) sense allows him. He means that he is ‘really’ and quite ‘literally’ dead, not merely symbolically or ‘in a sense’ or ‘as it were’, and is seriously bent on communicating his truth. The price, however, to be paid for transvaluating the communal truth in this manner is to ‘be’ mad, for the only real death we recognize is biological death (pp.37-38).
Laing was attuned and attentive to the futural and deeply present implications of discourses that dared to transvaluate communal, or the commonly consented-to, truth; he risked riveting himself to the rivening Spaltung of the subject, to the divisions of the selves he encountered, to gain the perspicuity in relation to its subject matter – and its subjects mattering – that The Divided Self is laden with.