Public Intelligence Blog

2011  The Politics of the Family

Essays by the renowned psychiatrist on that most central unit: the family.  Focus on the breakdowns within families and between families and larger social networks.

1996  Mad to Be Normal: Conversations with R. D. Laing

As we listen to him describe his relations with the prominent philosophers, psychoanalysts, and critics of his day, his recounting of his emotional and spiritual development, and of his dashed hopes and unrealized dreams, we begin to get a sense of what it might have been like to be around Laing when he was alive.

1990  Sanity, Madness and the Family: Families of Schizophrenics

Family as heaven, family as hell — mind-control and duty within the modern family.

Continue reading “R. D. Laing: Sanity and Madness in Family and Society”

Abnormalcy bias is an excellent term for describing the dynamic of society gone mad. Psychiatrist R.D. Laing also believed that human society has gone mad. It's hard to find good ways to explain it, but in the first paragraph of the following article, Aldous Huxley explained it very well:

Abnormalcy Bias

The first paragraph is what I'm most interested in. The rest of the article, by JimQ, is more political in nature and I only skimmed it, but it looks like an excellent article. And R.D. Laing also described the madness as having political roots, which is why he titled the book in which he described these things, The Politics of Experience, which is a collection of excerpts from a number of his books. But he was looking at it more from the perspective of a social psychologist and from the perspective of deep human history. And he believed the madness has even corrupted the family, to the point where the family structure was both the consequence of the madness and the institution that perpetuated it. The madness he describes has been common for thousands of years. It's so common that the roots of it stretch back into prehistory. And that's why we tend to see it as normal when it's not. Or that's the theory. This is the first paragraph of the article:

“The real hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal. Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does. They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society. Their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness. These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted.” – Aldous Huxley – Brave New World Revisited