Out of Mind, Out of Sight?

“The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one’s mind, is the condition of the normal man. Society highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal. Normal men have killed perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years.” - R.D. Laing “The Politics of Experience

I recently came across an insight from Ronald David Laing that I found very interesting. In a book called “The Divided Self”, the Scot psychiatrist Laing puts forth a maverick understanding of mental illness. Usually, we tend to think of a person with mental illness as out of touch with reality, psychologically rotten, or out of their mind. Laing, on the other hand, thinks the exact opposite.

According to Laing, in terms of mental illness, there are two types of people in the world: the secure person and the one who “cannot take the realness, aliveness, autonomy and identity of himself and others for granted and who consequently contrives strategies to avoid ‘losing his self’". A secure person, for example, is a person who has come to terms with his or her own peculiar view of the world, with his or her own mind and the way it perceives the world, whether or not this involves what society would call a ‘mental illness’. The other kind of person is the vast majority of people, people who have striven to become normal by molding themselves onto society’s expectations for, say, socially approved behavior. Their unique, idiosyncratic mind is suppressed to appear ‘normal’.

Think of Thoreau’s famous maxim: most men live lives of quiet desperation. This ‘quiet desperation’ seems to a symptom of something that the course of humankind has been unable to excise. But then we meet people in the everyday, workaday world. They don’t appear to be in despair. Exactly, says Laing: they are asleep. They don’t appear to be in despair because they can’t take the ‘identity of themselves and others for granted’. By this, I think he means that they can’t come to terms with how they really feel about themselves, and that these despairing feelings might actually be a window to the universal human condition of desperation. They tend to waive off such feelings as unnatural and unhealthy, and we have what William James would have called The Religion of Healthy Mindedness in his Varieties of Religious Experience.

But Laing is saying that mental illness, the quiet hours of desperation, are portals to the human condition: that the person who accepts the unusual ways these feelings manifest themselves in his consciousness is the person who is secure in who he or she is. Thus, extreme illnesses such as schizophrenia or psychosis are not illnesses at all: they are gifts given to particular individuals that enable them to see a part of the world that is really there!

The people society thinks are psychotic, according to Laing, are those that society can’t put to sleep. The schizoid hears what others are deaf to and perhaps these voices tell the truth. I think of St. Paul in Romans 7 as he struggled with his divided self and how dealing with this division, accepting it, lead him to truth.