What We Call "Normal"...
By: R.D. Laing
“Insanity -- a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world.”
― R. D. Laing
R.D. Laing (1927–1989), the Scottish psychiatrist and seeker of inner truths, was a bold voice challenging the rigid doctrines of traditional psychiatry. He rejected the cold, mechanical view of mental illness as merely a biological malfunction, seeing instead the human soul entangled in the complex web of social and familial struggles.
For Laing, conditions like schizophrenia were not senseless disorders but profound responses to the pain and alienation of existence, glimpses into the fractured unity of the human spirit.
The following is a passage from Laing’s remarkable book — The Politics of Experience. I hope you find it eye-opening as much as I did.
We all live under the constant threat of our own annihilation. Only by the most outrageous violation of ourselves have we achieved our capacity to live in relative adjustment to a civilization apparently driven to its own destruction…
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…
What we call ‘normal’ is a product of repression, denial, splitting, projection, introjection and other forms of destructive action on experience. It is radically estranged from the structure of being.
The more one sees this, the more senseless it is to continue with generalized descriptions of supposedly specifically schizoid, schizophrenic, hysterical ‘mechanisms.’
There are forms of alienation that are relatively strange to statistically ‘normal’ forms of alienation.
The ‘normally’ alienated person, by reason of the fact that he acts more or less like everyone else, is taken to be sane. Other forms of alienation that are out of step with the prevailing state of alienation are those that are labeled by the ‘formal’ majority as bad or mad…
Madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be break-through. It is potential liberation and renewal as well as enslavement and existential death.
As a schizophrenic myself, I have learned “behavioral health” and I appear normal, but I have symptoms that I hide on a daily basis. This world that humans have created is not a world we can live in and remain sane. I try to get back to Nature as much as possible and I practice mindfulness and living in the present moment. I’ve learned coping skills, and I do take some medication, but I spent a good part of 30 years being over-medicated. I have finally climbed out of the abyss and am trying to keep my symptoms at bay. It’s a struggle but life is good for now and I don’t take that for granted.
The split between soul and body is a big factor in diagnosed “disorders.” We have so much to work through, particularly in the Western world, to educate and invite people back into their own embodied, creative, fiery and alive connection.
I think of David Bowie and his schizophrenic brother. Bowie could’ve been labeled in that way, perhaps, but he channeled his energy and visions into his art. His brother did not. They ended up experiencing life very differently. Thank you for this. ❤️