The Divided Self by RD Laing
This classic account of how certain forms of mental distress develops is still relevant today.
I don't know how many people read RD Laing these days, but when this book was first published in 1960, it became a sensation. A psychiatrist and psychologist by training, The Divided Self was, as the introduction to my edition puts it, an attempt to reform psychiatry “from the inside”. Laing's later works broke definitively with mainstream psychiatry, and Laing became “an icon of the 1960's counter-culture”, forever yoked to Ken Kasey and Thomas Szasz. In a way, it's a pity that the book is considered so emblematic of a particular period because it makes it seem like a period piece. I think it's a brilliant work that in many ways still has a lot to teach us.
The Divided Self is described by its author as an “existential-phenomenological” account of how people move from sanity into certain types of psychosis associated with a diagnosis of schizophrenia. Laing posits that a “primary ontological security” is a prerequisite for good mental health. This is a state where a person,
“experience[s] his own being as real, alive, whole; as differentiated from the rest of the world in ordinary circumstances so clearly that his identity and autonomy are never in question; as a continuum in time; as having an inner consistency, substantiality, genuineness, and worth; as spatially coexistent with the body; and, usually, as having being in or around birth and liable to extinction with death”.
People who don't experience this state are ontologically insecure - they may not have a sense of themselves as existing in a physical body, for example. This state of insecurity gives rise to fears – of being engulfed by others and taken over by them; of implosion of the self in relationships; of petrification and desertification. Borrowing from the British psychologist, DW Winnicott, Laing suggests that people who are ontologically insecure develop a “false self”, a front that will interact with the world on behalf of the self and protect it from threats.
The false self is a coping system for ontological insecurity, and, like all coping systems, it seems to be effective at first. However, the false self system tends towards madness and disintegration.
The ways in which this happens are summarised by Laing as follows:
The false self system becomes more extensive
It becomes more autonomous
It becomes “harassed” by compulsive behaviour fragments
All that belongs to it becomes more and more dead, unreal, false, and mechanical
In other words, the false self system takes over the person's life, separating the real self further and further from the world. Laing quotes extensively throughout from case studies, looking at less developed 'false self' systems in the early chapters before moving onto people who are experiencing more florid psychosis.
In the introduction to my edition, Anthony David suggests that the reception to the book from psychologists was muted, “an impression that this book was a restatement in existential terms of truths already known and accepted” (although I don't think those “truths known and accepted” necessarily reflected in the treatments that people received in the fifties). However, as I've said, the book became iconic principally outside of those fields. Why? Well I think their are three reasons for that.
First, beyond what I've already used in this review, Laing tends to eschew psychiatric and psychological jargon. It's not an easy read – he enjoys long sentences with rather unusual syntax and lots of sub-clauses – but you won't need to know about other theories from the fifties to read it. Closely allied to this is a real respect for and empathy for his patients. He insists that doctors and therapists should see unclear language and word salads not simply as symptoms, but as attempts to communicate. This allows him to uncover meanings where they might otherwise be missed. Laing gives an example of a patient who uses another psychiatrist's determination to uncover his symptoms as an opportunity to insult the doctor. The patient thought that the doctor was an idiot and so, when the doctor asked if he heard voices, he answered that he heard one. When the doctor asked what the voice said, the patient said simply, “you are a fool”.
Secondly, Laing demystifies psychosis by showing its communalities with 'normal' experiences. He gives a working definition of madness that simplifies it in terms of basic relationships and removes any pejorative elements: “sanity or psychosis is tested by the degrees of confirmation or disjunction between two people where one is sane by common consent”. The early case studies in the book focus on use of the false self in cases where people are anxious, before progressing, showing a clear continuum between 'normal' behaviour and schizophrenia.
Of course, the book was written more than 60 years ago, and some of it has dated now. Laing quotes from a writer who proposes a psychoanalytic theory of autism that sounds like total bunkum, and there's a ridiculous theory on the development of homosexuality (still classed as a mental disorder when the book was written). Similarly, one facet of Laing's later work that caused controversy was his theory that schizophrenia was caused within the family system, and you can see that this line of thought is already fairly well-developed in this book.
However, if you're interested in mental health or psychology, I would encourage you to read it. It's one of the first examples I can think of where a doctor actually quotes extensively from a patient, a lot of his theory still makes sense, and his interpretations still feel plausible.
What I've been reading this week
I haven't actually read much this week as I've been out and about a good deal. I did start and finish Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt. This is a book narrated in part by a particularly intelligent octopus, and as soon as I heard that fact, I was irresistibly drawn to it (I'm fascinated by octopuses and their alternative system of intelligence). Marcellus is a giant Pacific octopus, bored of life in his aquarium and amusing himself by making forays from his tank to snack on some of the aquarium's other inhabitants. He's also taught himself English and knows that he doesn't have much time left before he dies. A chance encounter leads him to make friends with Tova, the elderly cleaner of the aquarium. I won't say much more about this as I'm going to write about it for Instagram, but it features a lonely woman who finds a support system over the course of the story, and I'm a sucker for stories about lonely people finding a family or friendships.
I'm also listening to Vilette, although I don't know that I'm going to have finished the book by Tuesday when the read-along officially ends. Lucy Snowe is growing closer to the literature professor, Monsieur Paul Emmanuel, and as she does so, the narration changes and becomes more hopeful, which makes it easier to warm to her. Mind you, Monsieur Paul reminds me of that line about Mr Bennett in one of the early chapters in Pride and Prejudice: “Mr. Bennet was so odd a mixture of quick parts, sarcastic humour, reserve, and caprice, that the experience of three-and-twenty years had been insufficient to make his wife understand his character.”. Monsieur Paul is “so odd a mixture”, so capricious, at times imperious and despotic, at other times generous and quixotic that it's difficult for the reader to form a settled opinion on him. He first appears as a bully to the teachers and pupils, haranguing people in a way that would be certain to see him barred from teaching today – but in later chapters, he's shown in a softer light, as when he takes the whole school on a day trip and buys them a luxurious breakfast. I have fewer than nine chapters left and as I can't remember any details of the ending, I look forward to seeing what happens next.
I've also started Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. I'm only 30 pages in, although it's one of those novels I've been meaning to read for years. I think that immediately, you can see why it was an instant success and has become such a classic. The style is spare, cool, restrained, but you can see it building a world that works totally different to that of Africa's colonisers, and you see why that invasion will bring such calamities to the characters.
Have a good start to the week and I will be back on either Wednesday or Thursday with a shorter review of a self-help book, The Monk who Sold his Ferrari.