50 Psychology Classics (39 page)

“Petrification” and “depersonalization,” the feeling that they may turn to stone, which has a corresponding effect of wishing to deny other people their feelings of reality so that they become an “it” that does not have to be dealt with.

While Laing noted that “hysterics” will do what they can to forget or repress themselves, schizoids are fixated on themselves. Yet the fixation is the opposite of narcissism, as there is no self-love involved, only a coldly objective, relentless inspecting and prodding of the self to see what, if anything, is inside.

Laing commented that many people experience a mental schism as a way of dealing with horrible situations from which there is no physical or mental escape (for example, someone in a concentration camp). If they can't accept
what is happening, they may withdraw into themselves or fantasize about being elsewhere. This “temporary dissociation” is not an unhealthy way of dealing with life.

The schizoid personality, however, feels that the dissociation is permanent. Their experience is
life, without feeling alive
. Invoking a literary allusion, Laing observed that Shakespeare's characters are often flawed types with significant personal conflicts, yet they still remain in the flow of life and in possession of themselves. The characters in Kafka's novels and Samuel Beckett's plays, on the other hand, lack this basic existential security and therefore recall the schizoid type. They cannot simply “question their own motives,” since they do not even have a solid, cohesive sense of self to question. Life becomes a daily battle to preserve themselves against threats from the outside world.

Because schizoid people do not have self-certainty, they often try to impersonate the sort of the person they think the world expects them to be, blending into their environment to a morbid extent. A patient of Laing's, a 12- year-old girl, had to walk across a park every night and was afraid of being attacked. To cope with the situation, she developed the belief that she could make herself disappear and therefore be safe. Such a defensive fantasy, he wrote, could only be contemplated by someone with a vacuum inside where we would normally find a self.

Laing made a distinction between embodied people—who have “a sense of being flesh and bones,” feel normal desires, and seek to satisfy them—and unembodied people, who experience a gap between their mind and body.

Schizoid people live such an internal, mental life that their body does not represent their true self. They set up a “false self system” through which they encounter the world, but in doing so their real self becomes more hidden. They have a great fear of being “uncovered” and so try to control every interaction with other people. This elaborate internal world enables them to feel protected, but because it is no replacement for real-world relations their interior life becomes impoverished. Ironically, their eventual collapse or breakdown does not come from the others they feared, “but by the devastation caused by the inner defensive maneuvers themselves.”

For the schizoid, everything is experienced as desperately personal, yet inside it feels as if there is a vacuum. The only relationship they experience is with the self, yet it is a relationship in turmoil—hence their extreme anguish and despair.

What makes someone with schizoid tendencies actually cross the line into psychosis?

Living with a system of false selves that are presented to the world, schizoid people are able to live an imaginary inner life. In the place of normal, creative relationships are attachments to things, trains of thought, memories, and fantasies. Anything becomes possible. Schizoids feel free and omnipotent, but as this happens they are whirling themselves further away from the center of objective truth. If their fantasies are destructive, these are likely actually to result in destructive acts, since without access to a real self there can be no guilt or reparation.

This is why schizophrenic people can apparently seem normal one week and psychotic the next, declaring that a parent or husband or wife is trying to kill them, or that someone is trying to steal their mind or their soul. The veil of the false self or selves that made them seem relatively normal is suddenly lifted, revealing the secret, tortured self that has been hidden from the world's view for so long.

The Divided Self
also presented Laing's controversial belief that if a child has a genetic predisposition to schizophrenia, there may be certain ways that a mother (or larger family) acts that will either encourage or prevent the condition from being expressed. Unsurprisingly, this angered parents of schizophrenics.

The more lasting effect of the book was to help lift the taboo around mental illness and create a better understanding about the schizoid mind. It was also important in its idea that psychology should be about achieving personal growth and freedom instead of mimicking the disease/symptom/cure paradigm of conventional medicine. Exploring who you were, even if the explorations were risky adventures, Laing saw as vital; the other route was to try to make yourself fit into society's regimented molds, with all the related anxieties of such a compromise.

Because of such ideas Laing became famous in the 1960s, attractive to anyone who felt marginalized by their families or cultures, or who wanted to be a part of the “self-realization” mindset of the human potential movement.

Drug use, alcohol addiction, depression, and an interest in unorthodox subjects such as shamanism and reincarnation all contributed to a lowering of Laing's professional reputation, and he was forced to resign from the UK's medical register in 1987.

Despite critics' attempts to devalue his work, his twin aims of changing attitudes to mental illness and helping to recast the ultimate aim of psychology were realized. Laing remains one of the major figures of twentieth-century psychology.

Born an only child in 1927 in Glasgow to middle-class Presbyterian parents, Ronald David Laing later wrote of a lonely and often frightening childhood. He excelled at school, reading Voltaire, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud by the time he was 15, and went on to study medicine at the University of Glasgow
.

He worked as a psychiatrist with the British Army, and in 1953 took up a post at the Gartnavel Psychiatric Hospital in Glasgow. In the late 1950s, he began a program of psychoanalytical training at the Tavistock Clinic in London
.

In 1960s London, Laing counted among his friends writer Doris Lessing and rock band Pink Floyd's Roger Waters. In 1965 he established a psychiatric community, Kingsley Hall, in which patients were not coerced into particular behaviors or drug regimes, and were treated as equals by the staff
.

Laing's
The Politics of Experience
(1967), which criticized the family and political institutions of the West, sold millions of copies. Other books include
Sanity, Madness and the Family
(1964), and his autobiography,
Wisdom, Madness and Folly
(1985). His critical view of standard psychiatric practice has been echoed in the writings of Thomas Szasz (
The Myth of Mental Illness
) and William Glasser (
Reality Therapy
)
.

Laing has been the subject of at least five biographies. He died of a heart attack in 1989 in St Tropez while playing tennis
.

“On the whole I think it fair to say that human history is a record of the ways in which human nature has been sold short. The highest possibilities of human nature have practically always been underrated.”

“People selected as self-actualizing subjects, people who fit the criteria, go about it in these little ways: They listen to their own voices; they take responsibility; they are honest; and they work hard. They find out who they are, not only in terms of their mission in life, but also in terms of the way their feet hurt when they wear such and such a pair of shoes and whether they do or do not like eggplant or stay up all night if they drink too much beer. All this is what the real self means. They find their own biological natures, their congenital natures, which are irreversible or difficult to change.”

In a nutshell

Our view of human nature must expand to incorporate the features of the most advanced and fulfilled people among us.

In a similar vein
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Creativity
(p 68)
Viktor Frankl
The Will to Meaning
(p 100)
Carl Rogers
On Becoming a Person
(p 238)
Martin Seligman
Authentic Happiness
(p 254)

Though the term “self-actualized” was coined by another psychologist, Kurt Goldstein, it was Maslow who made the concept well known. It described those seemingly rare individuals who had achieved “full humanness,” a blend of psychological health and devotion to their work that made them highly effective. If there were many more such people, Maslow reasoned, our world would be transformed. Instead of putting all our energies into dreaming up faster and better things, we should be trying to create societies that produced more self-actualized people.

Before Maslow, psychology was divided into two camps—the “scientific” behaviorists and positivists, who felt that no idea in psychology was valid unless it had been proven, and the Freudian psychoanalysts. Maslow originated a “third force,” humanistic psychology, which refused to see human beings as machines operating “in response to environment” or as the pawns of subconscious forces. In his approach human beings became
people
again, creative, free-willed, and wanting to fulfill their potential. In addition, Maslow's studies of “peak experiences,” those transcendent moments in which everything makes sense and we experience a unity in ourselves and with the world, helped to lay the ground for transpersonal psychology. This “fourth force” lent a more scientific framework to the study of religious or mystical experience, and made Maslow a celebrated figure in the milieu of West Coast America in the 1960s.

Published after his death,
The Farther Reaches of Human Nature
is really a collection of articles rather than an integrated work. The first half is the more inspiring, and provides an excellent introduction to the thoughts of this psychological adventurer.

Maslow's study of self-actualizing people began with his admiration for his teachers, anthropologist Ruth Benedict and psychologist Max Wertheimer. Though not perfect, they struck him as fully evolved in every aspect, and he recalled his excitement that it was possible to generalize about such people.

What marked out these individuals from the rest? First, they had a devotion to something greater than themselves, a vocation. They devoted their lives to what Maslow called “being” values, such as truth, beauty, goodness, and
simplicity. Yet these “B-Values” are not simply nice attributes that the self-actualizer wishes for—they are
needs
that must be fulfilled. “In certain definable and empirical ways,” Maslow observed, “it is necessary for man to live in beauty rather than ugliness, as it is necessary for him to have food for his aching belly or rest for his weary body.” We all know we must eat, drink, and sleep, but Maslow argued that once these basic needs are met, we develop “metaneeds” regarding the higher B-values that also have to be fulfilled. This was his famous “hierarchy of needs,” which began with oxygen and water and finished with the need for spiritual and psychological fulfillment.

Nearly all psychological problems, Maslow believed, stemmed from “sicknesses of the soul,” which involved lack of meaning or anxiety about these needs not being met. Most people cannot articulate that they even have these needs, yet their pursuit is vital to being fully human.

To make self-actualization a less esoteric concept, Maslow was keen to show what it meant on a daily basis, from moment to moment. For him it was not a case of “one great moment” like a religious experience. Rather, it involved:

Experiencing with full absorption. Engagement with something that makes us forget our defenses and poses and shyness. We regain “the guilelessness of childhood” in these moments.