The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise by R.D. Laing

Penguin, 1967, softcover, 156 pages, condition: very good.

R. D. Laing's work appeals to me for its attacks against two cultural strongholds that, due to my personal experience of both, I regard with feelings ranging from unease to overt antipathy: psychotherapy and the family.
Laing being a psychotherapist himself, one can safely say he was neither biased nor unaware of the risks he was taking in attacking such holy cows. Thus he became part of the Anti-psychiatry movement of the early 60s, possibly the one and only attempt at dignifying the theory and practice of psychotherapy, not to mention a source of inspiration for many philosophical currents whose achievements - though apparently under way in Laing's time - are yet to be fully implemented.

After reading his famous essay , which focuses on the double splitting of the self (between inside and outside, and subsequently between 'fake' outer self and 'real' inmer self) that takes place in schizoid and schizophrenic cases, in more or less intense degrees (from psychosis to psychopathology) I had sufficiently made up my mind about Laing's take on several issues; in fact I knew I had finally come across a truly convincing approach to mental illnesses and the social background that engenders them.
Such wider perspective is further analysed in this collection of short essays that brings together lectures and articles from the mid-60s. The result is an uncannily exhaustive text that reads as though its chapters had originally been conceived as parts of a whole. It's a text on alienation that not only captures the atmosphere of an era on the brink of a revolution that never occurred, but first and foremost describes what men have been doing to each other and to themselves ever since.

As a doctor and a thinker, Laing was primarily concerned with the causes of mental illness, whose roots go deep into the alienation we've come to accept as mankind's natural state.
As long as we keep splitting our being between a body and a mind, between an 'outside' and an 'inside' - which is in turn fragmented into a horde of ghosts and demons forever waging war against each other; as long as we build walls and buffer zones preventing our inner experience and our outward behaviour to communicate; as long as we dwell in our own bodies like strangers in a strange land; as long as we allow this to happen to the others and to ourselves, we are bound to live in a schizoid, paranoid, psychotic world of estrangement surrounded by other estranged beings, whose existence we only acknowledge in terms of illusory relationships or (self)destructive clashes.