SOURCE: "The Politics of Dialogue: Ronald Laing," in Contemporary Psychology: Revealing and Obscuring the Human, Duquesne University Press, 1984, pp. 107-16.

[Friedman is an American educator who has written extensively on philosophy, religion, and psychology, including several books about the Jewish philosopher and theologian Martin Buber. In the following excerpt, he examines Laing's views on the relation of the individual to the "other," comparing them with similar ideas found in the writings of Buber, Rollo May, and other psychologists, philosophers, and theologians.]

"More significant than the issue between atheist and theological existentialists," I have written in my chapter on "The Existentialist of Dialogue" in To Deny Our Nothingness, "is the issue between those existentialists who see existence as grounded in the self and those who see it as grounded in the dialogue between person and person." Existential and humanistic psychotherapists may also be roughly divided along these lines. Except for Kierkegaard, all existentialists recognize the importance of intersubjectivity. There is, nonetheless, an important difference between those existentialists who regard the relations between subjects as an additional dimension of self but see existence primarily in terms of the self, and those who see the relations between selves as central to human existence. Among existentialist philosophers, Heidegger, Sartre, Berdyaev, and Tillich might well fit into the former category, with Buber, Marcel, Karl Jaspers, and Albert Camus in the latter. Rollo May and Carl Rogers both emphasize the centered self or becoming, while both recognize the centrality of dialogue in psychotherapy. But there are other existential and humanistic psychotherapists who might properly be considered existentialists of dialogue. Among these are Ludwig Binswanger, Ronald Laing, Viktor von Weizsacker, Hans Trub, Leslie H. Farber, Sidney Jourard, and Erving and Miriam Polster, the last six of whom we shall deal with at length in Dialogical Perspectives in Psychotherapy.

Dialogue, or the I-Thou relationship of openness and mutuality between person and person, is not to be confused with interpersonal relations in general. Dialogue includes a reality of over-againstness and separateness quite foreign to Sullivan's definition of the self as entirely interpersonal. Moreover, neither Sullivan nor Mead makes any basic, clear distinction between indirect interpersonal relations in which people know and use each other as subject and object—the I-It relation in Buber's terms—and direct, really mutual interpersonal relations in which the relationship itself is of value and not just a means to some individual satisfaction or goal. This latter relationship Buber calls "the interhuman." In interhuman relationships, the partners are neither two nor one. Rather, they stand in an interaction in which each becomes more deeply his or her self as he or she moves more fully to respond to the other.

Ronald Laing might well have been discussed under the heading of "Phenomenology and Existential Analysis" since, in important respects, he represents a continuation of this trend, particularly as it is represented by Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Binswanger. Nonetheless, unlike Sartre and like Binswanger, he recognizes the centrality of meeting, or the I-Thou relationship, and his use of Sartre is very often for the purpose of illustrating the pathology that results from the absence of relationship. What is more, he has gone beyond Binswanger in his direct attempts to use healing through meeting in his work with schizophrenics. In this respect, he represents a continuation of the work of Harry Stack Sullivan and Frieda Fromm-Reichmann. At the same time, he has attempted to construct a theoretical understanding of schizophrenia in interhuman and not just interpersonal terms, as Sullivan and Fromm-Reichmann have.

In The Divided Self Laing criticizes the tendency of psychiatry to take the person in isolation from that person's relation to the other and the world and to substantialize aspects of this isolated entity. Laing proposes instead to found a science of persons on the relationship between I and Thou:

Mind and body, psyche and soma, psychological and physical, personality, the self, the organism—all these terms are abstracta. Instead of the original bond of I and You, we take a single man in isolation and conceptualize his various aspects into "the ego," "the superego", and "the id." The other becomes either an internal or external object or a fusion of both. How can we speak in any way adequately of the relationship between me and you in terms of the interaction of one mental apparatus with another?… This difficulty faces not only classical Freudian metapsychology but equally any theory that begins with man or a part of man abstracted from his relation with the other in his world. [The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness]

One acts toward an organism entirely differently from the way one acts toward a person. "The science of persons is the study of human beings that begins from a relationship with the other person and proceeds to an account of the other still as person." Laing postulates as fundamental that separateness and relatedness are mutually necessary. "Personal relatedness can exist only between beings who are separate but not isolated." Both our relatedness to others and our separateness are essential aspects of our being. Psychotherapy, accordingly, is an activity in which the patient's relatedness to others is used for therapeutic ends. Since relatedness is potentially present in everyone, the therapist "may not be wasting his time in sitting for hours with a silent catatonic who gives every evidence that he does not recognize his existence." "Inclusion," in Buber's sense of the term, is an absolute and obvious prerequisite in working with psychotics:

One has to be able to orientate oneself as a person in the other's scheme of things rather than only to see the other as an object in one's own world, i.e., within the total system of one's own reference. One must be able to effect this reorientation without prejudging who is right and who is wrong. [The Divided Self]

Laing goes even further than Rollo May in his distinction between knowing the person and knowing about the person. One can have a thorough knowledge of ego defects, disorders of thought, and hereditary incidence of manic-depressive psychosis without being able to understand one single schizophrenic. In fact, such data are all ways of not understanding the person; for seeing the "signs" of schizophrenia as a "disease" and looking and listening to a person simply as a human being are radically different and incompatible ways of knowing. If we do the latter, however, we must have the plasticity to transpose ourselves into another strange and even alien view of the world without forgoing our own sanity. Only thus can we arrive at an understanding of the patient's existential position. None of this means that we see the schizophrenic as really just the same as ourselves. "We have to recognize all the time his distinctiveness and differentness, his separateness and loneliness and despair" [The Divided Self].

Laing is at his best in his insight into schizophrenia as a deficient mode of relatedness. In order that one may be related as one human being to another, he points out, a firm sense of one's own autonomous identity is required. But this is just what the schizophrenic lacks. Any and every relationship threatens the schizophrenic with the loss of identity, or engulfment. "The individual experiences himself as a man who is only saving himself from drowning by the most constant, strenuous, desperate activity." This main maneuver for this purpose is isolation, as a result of which the schizophrenic substitutes for the polarities of separateness and relatedness of the autonomous individual "the antithesis between complete loss of being by absorption into another person (engulfment) and complete aloneness (isolation)." The schizophrenic does not have the option of a third alternative—a dialogical relationship between two persons each sure of his or her own ground and for this very reason able to "lose himself" in the other.

Although it is lonely and painful to be always misunderstood, this is relatively safe compared to the danger of being understood: "To be understood correctly is to be engulfed, to be enclosed, swallowed up, drowned, eaten up, smothered, stifled in or by another person's supposed all-embracing comprehension." Similarly, all love is intolerable to the schizophrenic for it places him or her under an unsolicited obligation. The last thing therapists should do is to pretend more love and concern for their schizophrenic patients than they have. If their concern for the other is genuinely prepared to "let him be," as opposed to either engulfment or indifference, then there is some hope on the horizon. For the schizophrenic is equally threatened by being turned into a robot, automation, or thing, an it without subjectivity. If one is treated as an "it," "one's own subjectivity drains away from him like the blood from the face"; for "he requires constant confirmation from others of his own existence as a person." Yet such a one cannot sustain a person-to-person relationship and will regard the therapist as a robot, feeling that one can thereby appear to be a "person" in contrast. Thus, one who is frightened of one's own subjectivity being swamped frequently is found trying to swamp or kill the other person's subjectivity. By so doing one becomes in actuality less of a person oneself: "With each denial of the other person's ontological status, one's own ontological security is decreased." One's lack of a sense of autonomy means that one feels one's own being to be bound up in the other or the other in oneself "in a sense that transgresses the actual possibilities within the structure of human relatedness." In the face of this situation Laing sees the task of the of the psychotherapist as appealing to the freedom of the patient. "A good deal of the skill in psychotherapy lies in the ability to do this effectively" [The Divided Self].

One special form in which the schizophrenic accomplishes this desired isolation from others is through divorcing oneself from one's body, which is felt more as an object among other objects than as the core of one's own being. This keeps the self in a pure I-It relation with other persons. Deprived of any direct participation in any aspect of the life of the world, the self becomes pure observer and controller. Such a schizoid individual is trying, in fact, "to be omnipotent by enclosing within his own being, without recourse to a creative relationship with others, modes of relationship that require the effective presence to him of other people and of the outer world." This shut-up self can only lead, of course, to despair, futility, and a progressive impoverishment of the inner world until one comes to feel one is merely a vacuum.

The isolation of the self is the corollary of the need to be in control. The schizoid individual is afraid of letting anything of oneself go, of coming out of oneself or losing oneself in any experience because one imagines one will be depleted, exhausted, emptied, sucked dry. Laing analyzes this schizoid condition of the inner self in terms of a deficiency in I-Thou relatedness: "The reality of the world and of the self are mutually potentiated by the direct relationship between self and other." But for the schizoid self, a creative relationship with the other in which there is mutual enrichment is impossible. For this I-Thou relationship one substitutes a quasi It-It interaction which may seem to operate efficiently and smoothly for a while but which is sterile and has no life in it. The schizoid "self can relate itself with immediacy to an object which is an object of its own imagination and memory but not to a real person" [The Divided Self]. Thus, in the case of the schizophrenic, Sartre's "bad faith," which introduces the structure of intersubjectivity into the intrasubjective, or psyche, is identical to Buber's description, in the second part of I and Thou, of the Thou that strikes inward when there is no longer any genuine relationship to any really other Thou.

Laing's Self and Others goes beyond The Divided Self in its understanding of forms of interpersonal action. Writing in 1961, Laing declared that the most significant theoretical and methodological development in the psychiatry of the previous two decades was the growing dissatisfaction with any theory or study of the individual which isolates him from his context. Our identities are complementary, Laing points out; for "every relationship implies a definition of self by other and other by self." "A person's 'own' identity cannot be completely abstracted from his identity-for-others." In fact, other people become a sort of identity kit through which one can piece together a picture of oneself. This very fact leads to the temptation of seeking confirmation from others by "seeming," Laing asserts, using Buber's categories from The Knowledge of Man. It also leads to a collusion between persons in which they shore up each other's false identities. It is essential that the therapist basically frustrate the self's search for a collusive complement for false identity. Put positively, "one basic function of genuinely analytical or existential therapy is the provision of a setting in which as little as possible impedes each person's capacity to discover his own self." Put negatively, "the therapist's intention is not to allow himself to collude with the patients in adopting a position in their phantasy-system and, alternatively, not to use the patients to embody any phantasy of his own" [The Politics of Experience].

It is in The Politics of Experience (1967) that Laing attains the fullest expression of what we might call his "politics of dialogue." Essential to this politics of dialogue is the recognition that although experience is invisible to the other, it is neither "subjective" nor "objective," "inner" nor "outer," process nor praxis, input nor output, psychic nor somatic, and least of all is it "intrapsychic process." My experience is not in my psyche; my psyche is my experience. The relations between persons are not merely the interplay of ongoing intrapsychic processes. There is no thing that is between two people, and the "between" itself is not a thing: "The ground of the being of all beings is the relation between them. This relationship is the 'is,' the being of all things, and the being of all things is itself nothing" [The Politics of Experience].

Laing bases his approach to psychotherapy squarely on this ontology of the between:

We all live on the hope that authentic meeting between human beings can still occur. Psychotherapy consists in the paring away of all that stands between us, the props, masks, roles, lies, defenses, anxieties, projections and introjections, in short, all the carryovers from the past, transference and countertransference, that we use by habit and collusion, wittingly or unwittingly, as our currency for relationships. [The Politics of Experience]

But the metapsychology of Freud, Federn, Rapaport, Hartman, and Kris is incompatible with this approach to psychotherapy; for it "has no constructs for any social system generated by more than one person at a time," for social collectivities of experience shared between persons, or a category of "you," such "as there is in the work of Feuerbach, Buber, Parsons."

It has no way of expressing the meeting of an "I" with "an other," and the impact of one person on another…. How two mental apparatuses or psychic structures or systems, each with its own constellation of internal objects, can relate to each other remains unexamined. Within the constructs the theory offers, it is possibly inconceivable. Projection and introjection do not in themselves bridge the gap between persons. [The Politics of Experience]

Laing criticizes even more severely behavior therapy and, by implication, the psychology of B. F. Skinner as the most extreme example of a schizoid theory and practice that proposes to think and act purely in terms of the other without reference to the self of the therapist or the patient. Behaviorism implies behavior without experience, objects rather than persons. "It is inevitably therefore a technique of nonmeeting, of manipulation and control." He sees it, indeed, as one of a number of theories that, not founded on the nature of being human, betray the inhuman and inevitably lead to inhuman consequences if the therapist is consistent:

Any technique concerned with the other without the self, with behavior to the exclusion of experience, with the relationship to the neglect of the persons in relation, with the individuals to the exclusion of their relationship, and most of all, with an object-to-be-changed rather than a person-to-be-accepted, simply perpetuates the disease it purports to cure. [The Politics of Experience]

In contrast to all these theories, Laing insists that "it is the relations between persons that is central in theory and practice." We must, says Laing, continue to struggle through our confusion and persist in being human. "Psychotherapy must remain an obstinate attempt of two people to recover the wholeness of being human through the relationship between them" [The Politics of Experience]. In the last part of The Politics of Experience, Laing loses sight of the "between" that transcends the inner-outer dichotomy in favor of a celebration of the inner, for which he rightly cites Jung as the groundbreaker in psychology. Nonetheless, even there he sees the (sometimes romanticized) schizophrenic voyage as "as natural way of healing our own appalling state of alienation called normality" [The Politics of Experience].

As an outgrowth of his work with schizophrenics, Ronald Laing has been more and more directly concerned with family therapy. Following the tradition of the existential analysts, Laing has been more concerned with portraying the negative aspects of the family that obscure the human image than with revealing the avenues toward healing that might bring the human image out of its eclipse. In The Politics of Experience, Laing defines the family as a "protection racket" in which each person incarnates the nexus of the family and acts in terms of its existence. Since the person is essential to the nexus and the nexus to the person, the danger to each person is the dissolution or dispersion of "the family." As a result, each member of the family may act on each other member "to coerce him (by sympathy, blackmail, indebtedness, guilt, gratitude, or naked violence) into maintaining his interiorization of the group unchanged." Any defection from the nexus is accordingly punished, with the worst punishment being exile or excommunication: group death. In numerous studies of families of schizophrenics in England and America, "no schizophrenic has been studied whose disturbed pattern of communication has not been shown to be a reflection of, and reaction to, the disturbed and disturbing pattern characterizing his or her family of origin" [The Politics of Experience].

In The Politics of the Family, Laing offers a somewhat subtler analysis of the families of schizophrenics. What is internalized in the individual, he points out, is not the individual members of the family but the sets of relations between them, the family as a system. Since "each family member incarnates a structure derived from relations between members," each person's identity rests on a shared "family" inside the others who, by that token, are themselves in the same family. A crisis occurs if any member of the family wishes to leave by dissolving the "family" in himself or herself since the "family" may be felt as the whole world and the destruction of it as worse than murder and more selfish than suicide. This leads to an acute dilemma for the person who feels himself or herself threatened by the family: "If I do not destroy the 'family,' the 'family' will destroy me. I cannot destroy the 'family' in myself without destroying 'it' in them. Feeling themselves endangered, will they destroy me?"

It is not surprising that the "family" comes to serve as a bulwark against total collapse, disintegration, emptiness, despair, and guilt. It is this understanding of the family that leads Laing to his insight into "knots," to which he devotes a whole book and which he himself makes still knottier with his choice of language: "Each person's relations to himself is mediated through the relations between the relations that comprise the set of relations he has with others." Laing's family scenarios are full of inductions, attributions, and double binds.

What they tell him he is, is induction, far more potent than what they tell him to do. Thus through the attribution: 'You are naughty,' they are effectively telling him not to do what they are ostensibly telling him to do. [The Politics of the Family, and Other Essays].

Despite this grim picture of the family, Laing's approach to family therapy is still that of healing through meeting. To Laing, diagnosis and therapy cannot be separated. "Diagnosis begins as soon as one encounters a particular situation, and never ends." Diagnosis means seeing through the social scene, and the way one sees through the situation changes the situation. In contrast to the nonreciprocal static model used by the doctor and the still predominantly medically oriented psychiatrist, Laing offers a reciprocal and dynamic model of therapy: "As soon as we interplay with the situation, we have already begun to intervene willy-nilly. Moreover, our intervention is already beginning to change us, as well as the situation. A reciprocal relationship has begun" [Politics of the Family].

In contrast to Sartre, then, Laing does not rule out fully mutual and reciprocal relationships a priori, and he uses Sartre, as we have seen, for illustrations of negative, pathological relationships. On the other hand, Laing is like Sartre in that he is at his most brilliant in describing the negative, while he has great difficulty in articulating the nature of trusting and positive interhuman relationships. The one example of the positive that I remember, in fact, is Laing's emphasis on what it means really to give someone a cup of tea!