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 The
essential project of R.D. Laing’s The
Divided Self (1960/1990) is to make "insane"
experience intelligible in terms of the
patient’s agency and the context in which s/he
is situated. Its purpose is "to make madness and
the process of going mad comprehensible" (p. 9). In
contrast to the approaches of formal clinical
psychiatry and psychopathology, Laing seeks an
existential-phenomenological account of schizoid
and schizophrenic people. Laing utilized the
existential-phenomenological method to characterize
the nature of the schizoid’s and
schizophrenic’s experience of him/her self and
his/her world. He wanted to describe the individual
so as to set all of his/her experience in the
context of his/her total being-in-the-world. Issues
pertaining to the schizoid and schizophrenic
require the existential-phenomenological
perspective to uncover their true human
significance.
Like
others (e.g. Szasz, 1970, 1974) Laing rejected the
disease model of mental illness and expressed open
hostility to exclusively genetic or organic
explanations of mental disorder:
It
seems extraordinary that whereas the physical
and biological sciences of it-processes have
generally won the day . . . an authentic science
of persons has hardly got started by reason of
the inveterate tendency to depersonalize or
reify persons. People who experience themselves
as automata . . . are rightly regarded as crazy.
Yet why do we not regard a theory that seeks to
transmute persons into automata or animals as
equally crazy? (Laing, 1960/1990, p. 23)
Laing
did not argue that schizoidness and schizophrenia
were in no way biological. He disputed the assumed
meaninglessness behind behaviors characteristic of
these disorders. When examined phenomenologically,
these apparently meaningless behaviors could be
understood as the individual’s attempts to
contend with his/her frightening existential
condition. These behaviors were not symptoms of a
medical disease; they were defenses to ontological
insecurity. Laing’s work with people who had
been labeled "schizophrenic" led him to believe
that their symptomatic behavior may be understood
as a defensive "strategy that a person invents in
order to live in an unlivable situation"
(1964/1970, p. 186).
Laing
asserted that the anxiety his patients defended
against could be explained in terms of ontological
insecurity, an insecurity about the
individual’s very being. Ontologically
insecure individuals experience a split that
extends into two relational dimensions: there is a
disruption in his/her relation with his/her world
and there is a split within him/her self. On one
level, the individual experiences a split between
him/her self and others who become viewed as being
potentially dangerous to self-autonomy. On another
level, the split reflects an internal fragmentation
such that a rent is experienced between aspects of
the self, which have been accepted, and others that
appear to be alien. Laing used the term schizoid to
refer to an individual whose totality of experience
is split in these two ways. The term schizoid was
not restricted only to extreme forms of psychosis
because most everyone experiences some degree of
schizoid splitness at times in their lives. The
defensive behavior of "normal"— that is
ontologically secure— individuals differs only
in degree, not kind, from that of ontologically
insecure people.
The
ontologically secure individual has temporal
continuity and a sense of being with others who are
equally real, continuous, and alive. The
ontologically insecure individual is "pre-occupied
with preserving rather than gratifying himself: the
ordinary circumstances of living threaten his
low threshold of security" (Laing,
1960/1990, p. 42). The ontologically insecure
person feels dead, unreal, and is hardly able to
differentiate him/herself from the rest of the
world. His/her identity and autonomy are always in
question. S/he also lacks temporal continuity,
cohesiveness, and tends to experience him/herself
as partially divorced from his/her body. The
ontologically insecure person becomes closed off
from the world and begins to whither. He "is
developing a microcosmos within himself; but of
course, this autistic, private, intra-individual
‘world’ is not a feasible substitute for
the only world, the shared world" (Laing,
1960/1990, pp. 74-75). "Normal" people dissociate
from their bodies under extreme stress yet return
once their crisis has passed. In contrast, the
schizoid person experiences him/herself as
unembodied and under threat on a day-to-day basis
thus never fully inhabiting his/her body (Burston,
1986).
The
unembodied self becomes the onlooker to the actions
of the body. Existing as separate from his/her
shared world, the schizoid person "becomes more and
more empty and volatized. The ‘self’
whose relatedness to reality is already tenuous
becomes more and more engaged in phantastic
relationships with its own phantom imagos" (ibid.,
p. 85). The ontologically insecure individual,
having a fragmentary sense of self, questions
his/her being on three levels: his/her existence
(that one is), essence (what one is) and identity
(who one is). With such insecurities, interpersonal
and intrapersonal relations may be interpreted as
threatening and to be avoided in order to preserve
one’s being (Spinelli, 1989).
The
schizoid individual makes it his aim to make the
split between his self, who only he knows, and what
others can see of him. One can live his/her life in
a seemingly "normal" way but may be schizoid. Laing
(1960/1990) presented the case of a man whose
original complaint was that he could never have
intercourse with his wife but only with his own
image of her. This man’s body had sexual
relations with his wife’s body but, during
these acts, his mental self only served as an
observer to what his body was doing. His wife was
unaware that he was never fully present during
these acts. A schizoid’s actions may seem from
another person’s point of view "normal" while
the schizoid feels he is not "really"
participating. The schizoid’s self, being
disembodied, is free to engage in any fantasy s/he
wishes yet this "freedom" becomes tortured by a
sense of self-duplicity.
Laing
presents three fears experienced by the
ontologically insecure individual. These fears are
not separate but ultimately linked in that they
reflect anxieties about living. The first fear,
engulfment, is characterized by anxiety
related to feelings of being taken over by some
alien external force. Engulfment is the "extreme
distress of the person who finds himself under a
compulsion to take on the characteristics of a
personality . . . alien to his own" (Laing,
1960/1990, p. 58). The second fear,
implosion, is similar to that of engulfment
in that it too is a fear of being taken over. The
difference is that one experiencing the fear of
implosion feels the terror of his emptiness. S/he
experiences "the world as liable at any moment may
crash in and obliterate all identity as a gas will
rush in and obliterate a vacuum" (ibid., p. 45).
People experiencing the third fear,
petrification, are afraid of being
depersonalized by others: "The people in focus here
both feel themselves as depersonalized and tend to
depersonalize others. By destroying, in his own
eyes, the other person as a person, he robs the
other of his power to crush him" (ibid., p. 46-48).
In the schizoid’s attempts at self-defense we
see the beginnings of what could evolve into
schizophrenia. In defending against these fears,
the schizoid may act in strange yet meaningful
ways. Few mental health professionals who seek to
help schizoids or schizophrenics view any of their
actions as meaningful. Interpreting their behaviors
as symptoms of illness, they succeed in further
alienating the ontologically insecure person from
his/her shared world.
Laing
viewed his goal as that of discovering the hidden
meanings behind the behavior of the psychologically
disturbed individual. He noted that the term
therapist is derived from theraps, a Greek
word meaning "attendant" (c.i. Evans, 1976, p. 80).
"Rather than intervene, dispute the
individual’s claims or numb the fears with
medication, Laing observed and provided . . .
empathy so that he could eventually reconstruct the
individual’s situation and understand the
fears being defended against" (ibid., p. 141). No
matter how meaningless, odd, or even destructive
the schizophrenic’s behaviors may be, their
aim is to save what is left of his/her being.
Although often misguided, they are attempts at
self-survival.
What
is the aetiology of the schizoid split? In a speech
given at the Rochester International Conference on
Schizophrenia, Laing (1967) said "Everyone who has
made a close study of the families of
schizophrenics appears to agree that much, if not
all, the apparent irrationality of the individual
finds its rationality in the family context" (c.i.
Kirsner, 1976, p. 120). In The Divided Self,
Laing posits that the loss of the mother, at an
early age, threatens the child with the loss of
his/her self. The mother is more than a thing the
child can see; she is also a person who sees the
child. Thus, a necessary part in the development of
the self is the experience of being viewed in the
eyes of the mother. The emergence of the self, or a
"being-for-itself," is largely a function of the
child’s growing awareness of being an object
for the mother’s intentional
activities—feeding, bathing, holding, etc.
Laing implied that being-for-oneself and
being-for-another are intertwined and if the two
become confused disturbance may result (Burston,
1996, pp. 73-82).
Laing
emphasized early infancy as an important period for
establishing later schizoid and schizophrenic
personalities. Physical birth and existential birth
do not necessarily occur at the same moment. For
normal development, it is important that the child
and mother recognize one another as individual
persons at a relatively early stage. "It is out of
the earliest loving bonds with the mother that the
infant develops the beginnings of a
being-for-itself" (Laing, 1960/1990, p. 190). The
mothers of schizophrenics often do not allow for
this development and the baby comes to experience
the world as not feasible to be in. Laing suggests
that although the first years of life with the
mother are important, the relationships with father
and siblings should not be ignored with regard to
schizophrenogenesis.
In
a family the growing child learns what actions are
acceptable and unacceptable based upon the
reactions of his/her family members. For Laing, the
term "good" tends to be tantamount with compliance
to the family’s wishes and the term "bad"
refers to acts that defy the family’s code of
conduct. The family reinforces "good" acts and
punishes the child for "bad" acts. A problem arises
when the family fails to distinguish between the
child’s actions and the child’s being.
Once a child’s self is directly linked to
his/her actions, parents’ attempts to punish
or deny the child’s actions become translated
as threats to his/her being. Under the terms of
this equation, schizoid fragmentation is almost
always inevitable. In order to maintain his/her
self, the child adopts a variety of fragmentary
defenses. The child learns that others will value
or threaten him/her according to his/her actions.
The family serves not only as the source of
positive dimensions of the self but also serves in
defining "bad" aspects of the self which must not
be allowed expression in thought or behavior. To
express them, the child believes, would threaten
family relationships and his/her being.
It
has been suggested (Kirsner, 1976) that Laing made
full use of Gregory Bateson’s double-bind
communications theory of the origins of
schizophrenia. Bateson et al. (1956) described
schizophrenia as a state of mind that’s
origins lie in impossible demands placed by
parents, primarily the mother, on children. A
double-bind communication sends two mutually
incompatible messages and despite how the child
responds, s/he is wrong:
A
young man who had fairly well recovered from an
acute schizophrenic episode was visited in the
hospital by his mother. He was glad to see her
and impulsively put his arm around her shoulder
whereupon she stiffened. He withdrew his arm and
she asked, "Don’t you love me anymore?" He
then blushed and she said, "Dear, you must not
be so easily embarrassed and afraid of your
feelings." The patient was able to stay with her
only a few minutes more and following her
departure he assaulted an aide. (Bateson et al.,
1956, p. 251)
In
extremely schizogenic homes, anything the child
does in accordance with the wishes of one parent
simultaneously displeases the other. Struggles
between spouses are covert, so the child cannot
even experience relief from admitting to
him/herself that he knows this. The child becomes
caught up in an impossible task in which there is
no chance of success. Only in temporary decreases
of anxiety does s/he learn to behave in such a
manner as to challenge the processes his/her
parents place on him/her and on each other. The
eleven families Laing and Esterson describe in
Sanity, Madness and the Family (1964/1970)
fit this pattern. In each family, the parents
viewed raising children as an insult that
challenged their opportunity to make demands upon
the child that expressed the uneasy truce of their
marriage. "These patterns . . . become very
complicated networks of slow and tormented human
strangulation" (Friedenberg, 1977, p. 18).
Laing
believed that the basis for severely schizoid
individuals rested in their lack of any continuing
development towards an autonomous identity.
Schizoid people experience thwarted development due
to their inability to incorporate the "bad" self
into their identity. In childhood, the "bad" self
comes to be perceived as an overwhelming threat to
the self so they try to be "good" all the time in
an attempt to seek approval from their families.
The power to prescribe what is "good" lies entirely
in the hands of the family members and the
family’s love is removed when the child is
"bad." The child in this situation then draws the
conclusion that s/he must never act "bad"; yet such
a goal is impossible since the "bad" self cannot
simply dissipate. The "bad" self may assert its
presence verbally and behaviorally in outbursts
that the "good" self can neither explain nor
control. These outbursts tend to be interpreted by
the family as symptoms of constitutional insanity.
Laing’s examination of the family structure of
schizoid individuals revealed some common elements.
One common feature of these families was a
particular intolerance of "bad" behavior in their
children. The families might act as if the
individual simply did not exist when the "bad" self
emerged, as was the case with Peter in The
Divided Self.
Laing’s
analysis of the schizoid split examines the
existential conditions of the ontologically
insecure individual. These dimensions tend to be
ignored in psychiatric theories since they are
mostly concerned with organic explanations of
mental disorder. Laing did not summarily dismiss
organic factors in "insanity" but was primarily
concerned with utilizing the appropriate context to
elucidate such phenomena. Laing (1976) said:
If
I am disturbed, I may be disturbed spiritually,
intellectually, emotionally, and physically.
Many neurologists, once they find something, as
they say "organic," they think that’s it .
. . Until chemists and geneticists see the focus
within the context, and realize there is
an interplay between chemistry and social
interaction, we can’t develop the
theoretical speculation at a pure science level
we must have. (c.i. Spinelli, 1989, p.
146)
An
organic perspective is not the appropriate context
to examine schizoidness and schizophrenia due to
the fact that who is deemed "insane" is socially
determined. In The Divided Self reality is
presented as a shared world of a common sense.
Reality is what sane people take it to be and
sanity is defined in terms of common consent. By
common consent, the "real" world of sane
individuals is taken as preferable to the private
world of the schizoid. In cases where there is a
radical scission between who I think I am and who
you think I am, one of us will be labeled as
insane. This a principle of interpersonal
phenomenology, that insanity is a function of an
"experiential disjuncture of some kind, of a
rupture between one’s being ‘for
oneself’ and being ‘for another.’"
Laing believed that one who attempts to construct
an identity that is detached from communal meanings
and the experience of the other is truly,
existentially mad and not merely a victim of
collective fear (Burston, 1986, p. 69).
Laing
argued that schizoids and schizophrenics need
guidance and support to help them resolve, among
other things, their split between being-for-oneself
and being-for-another to encourage a more authentic
identity. It is interesting to note that
Laing’s assertion that schizophrenia reflects
family pressures and stress has received some
support from empirical research of family factors
in schizophrenia (Nevid, Rathus, & Greene,
1994). Laing believed that in exploring the created
meanings of experience and exposing the existential
anxieties that provide the context for the mental
disorder, the apparently "meaningless" behavior may
be better understood, alleviated, and possibly even
eliminated.
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