Selected Product:
| Politics of Experience
Paperback
Author: R.D. Laing
Publisher: Pantheon
Release Date: 1983-08-12
ISBN-10: 039471475X
ISBN-13: 9780394714752
List Price: $9.67
Average Customer Rating:
 | |
The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness (Penguin Psychology)
ISBN-10: 0140135375
ISBN-13: 9780140135374
List Price:$15.00
The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness
ISBN-10: 080501604X
ISBN-13: 9780805016048
List Price:$23.00
Knots
ISBN-10: 0394717767
ISBN-13: 9780394717760
List Price:$11.00
Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her
ISBN-10: 1578050472
ISBN-13: 9781578050475
List Price:$18.95
The Creation of Patriarchy (Women & History)
ISBN-10: 0195051858
ISBN-13: 9780195051858
List Price:$19.95
|
To use our price comparison to get the cheapest price, please click on the "Find the Cheapest Price" button located above for Politics of Experience by R.D. Laing (ISBN-10: 039471475X, ISBN-13: 9780394714752).
At this time we have not yet written a review for Politics of Experience by R.D. Laing (ISBN-10: 039471475X, ISBN-13: 9780394714752). Please continue to keep checking back to this page as we are constantly adding reviews.
Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com
Laing attacks accepted assumptions about the nature of "normality" with a challenging view of the mental sickness built into our society.
This will open your mind & burn your soul!
| Customer Rating: | First published to great controversy & acclaim some 40 years ago, R.R. Laing's ferocious, heartfelt cri de coeur is even more relevant today. Technically it's psychology -- but in truth, it's a poetic, prophetic work in the tradition of William Blake. Laing's horror & outrage at the needless suffering inflicted on humanity by The Normal Man blazes from every page, and he demands that we face our own inner darkness rather than gloss over it.
Many will disagree with his assessment of schizophrenia ... and they may well be right in a literal sense. We've certainly learned that it has major biological origins. Yet in the modern zeal to medicate rather than analyze, to smooth over wounds rather than delve into their roots, we do ourselves a grave disservice by ignoring its psychological & social components. It's a symptom & reflection of the times, I suppose -- the 1960s emphasized community & social responsibility, as well as the importance of the individual; the contemporary attitude is all too often one of fitting in & getting with the program. If time & science call into question Laing's medical diagnosis of schizophrenia, his philosophical & moral diagnosis remains terribly potent.
How much have we really advanced since the book's publication? We see the same Normal Man calmly talking of pre-emptive wars, of acceptable civilian causalities, of torture as rational policy ... and it's Laing's anguish & compassion that are called crazy. If he were alive today, he'd undoubtedly be even more appalled by what passes for civilization. The dumbing down of the past decades, the push for blind, unthinking obedience, the Pavlovian appeal to patriotic buzzwords -- all this would sicken him. As it should sicken us. What to do in the face of such despair?
Laing reminds us:
"Yet if nothing else, each time a new baby is born there is a possibility of reprieve. Each child is a new being, a potential prophet, a new spiritual prince, a new spark of light, precipitated into the outer darkness. Who are we to decide that it is hopeless?"
The Bird of Paradise is there, hovering in the darkness, waiting for us to join it & soar into the heavens ... if we can only break free of the chains of normality. Most highly recommended!
|
RD Laing POE
| Customer Rating: | | Not sure about schizophrenia as a strategy to deal with untenable circumstances. Outside of that, this is the most profound book I have read in my life. I have been reading it on and off for 13 years |
60s insights still valid
| Customer Rating: | | I had this book years ago and lost it; The Politics of Experience should be on everyone's shelf and is the perfect antidote to isolationist approaches to mental health. The interaction of people, families and communities, and how that interaction affects the participants' mental health, is important to remember in in our travels through life. |
Doctor cries for help
| Customer Rating:  | Ravings of the mad have been metaphorized as "cries for help." Ronald Laing's '67 opus Politics of Experience could be similarly cast as the doctor's cries for help, were one compelled to do so.
Drawing foremost from fellow Scotsman John MacMurray, who insisted that philosophy was only the product of @least two people in relation (& never the product of platitudinous Cartesian contemplative solitude), & then from his own acquired capacity to talk to the designated mad, Laing issued this stinging rebuke of diagnosing & treating selected scapegoats: the invalidation, mystification (the word is Marx's), & finally execution of experience, for the purpose of maintaining social order.
After MacMurray, Laing & assorted colleagues waded into Sartre's last philosophical tome, the octopus-like Critique of Dialectical Reason (which @the time was available only in French), an arduous examination of how the varieties of human groupings appear & are recognized as such.
Lest Laing be construed as a muddle-headed humanist, he knew that although the time was ripe, lepers were not yet kissing saints: in Sartre's terms, no genuine reciprocity.
Despite the general acceptance of schizophrenia by professionals, media interpreters, & the lay population as a bio-genetic anomaly, no one has yet connected THIS particular chemical imbalance with THAT particular objectionable behavior. To his eternal credit, Laing resisted the easy answers with which most of us are so readily mesmerized; the product of what he called "incautious extrapolation." |
Portrayiing schizphrenic astuteness via complex and cyclical words.
| Customer Rating: | Schizophrenics often--not always--have a sensitivity for the Unconscious and what might be going on the mind of the other as well as themselves,but few of us ever get to "hear" it. In the very first three pages Laing gets into the mind and mind- reading of interpersonal relations of the schizophrenic ;eg" you can only experience the fact that I am experiencing your experience..."
this goes on page after page, also in Knots (another book by him). NEVER have I been so engulfed by the thought process; one knows, as he reads these lines, that "he is there" (with the schizophrenic) and knows it unforgettably. Harry Stack Sullivan also struggled with capturing that inner world, which he often shared, of the schizophrenic. Read this book and be introduced poetically into another reality.
Martin J.Kaplan, Ph.D. Clinical Psychologist |
|
