Laing - Self and Others: Selected Works of R d Laing Vol 2

Volume 2

R D Laing

London and New York

First published 1961 by Tavistock Publications Limited

Reprinted 1999, 2001, 2002 by Routledge

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1961, 1969 R D Laing

This is a reprint of the 1969 edition

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

ISBN 0-415-19819-4

This book has been extensively revised, without being changed in any fundamental way. It remains an attempt to weave experience and behaviour into a consistent theory, since they are so woven in real life. The theoretical tendency to split the two still continues since this book was written. I would like to regard it as standing with those comparatively few efforts made in recent years to understand relations between persons in personal terms.

I hope the erudite reader will not be confused by my particularly parochial use of the term phantasy. Another study would be necessary to review the different usages of this term in Western thought, and even the different ways it is employed within psychoanalysis itself. Freud's use of the concept of unconscious phantasy has been critically reviewed by Laplanche and Pontalis (1964, 1968).

Some of the puzzles posed by the concept of unconscious phantasy may be resolved by bringing into play the theory of mapping. I have recently sketched how this may be done (Laing, 1969).

Briefly, if I project an element x from set A on to an element y of set B, and if we call the operation of projection or mapping , then y is called the image of x under . The operation is a function whereby acquires the -value of x. Johnny is the image of his grandfather. A set of relations may be mapped on to another set of relations, and elements of one set may be mapped on to themselves. This is not the place to develop this, but it is perhaps appropriate merely to suggest that this formula seems to me to clarify the double usage of phantasy, as in the expressions: the contents of phantasy, and phantasy as a function. As a function, phantasy can be regarded as an operation of mapping, from any domain of experience to any range of experience. It seems to me even possible to conceive of mapping desires (instincts), not experienced in themselves, as it were, on to experience, such that the range of experience so mapped acquires a (phantasy)-value, and to conceive that a person may not himself recognize that this range of his experience has acquired such a -value, usually called the unconscious content of phantasy.

R.D.L.

London, May 1969

I shall try to depict persons within a social system or nexus of persons, in order to try to understand some of the ways in which each affects each person's experience of himself and of how interaction takes form. Each contributes to the other's fulfilment or destruction.

This book is part of the outcome of research on interactional processes, particularly in marriages and families, with particular but not exclusive reference to psychosis, based on the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations and the Tavistock Clinic. I wish to thank these organizations for facilitating the work in all its aspects.

The latter stages in the preparation of the manuscript were greatly helped by a Fellowship from the Foundations Fund for Research in Psychiatry, which I gratefully acknowledge.

The book owes a great deal to many sources which are, for the most part, little discussed in the text itself psychoanalysis, particularly the work of Fairbairn, Melanie Klein, Bion, Winni-cott, Rycroft, Erikson, Marion Milner; analytical psychology; and American research in communication, person perception, and family process.

Over the past two years much of this book has been discussed by colleagues and friends. I should like to thank in particular Dr Karl Abenheimer, Mr J. A. Ambrose, Dr John Bowlby, Dr David Cooper, Dr A. Esterson, Dr Marie Jahoda, Dr P. E. S. Lomas, Dr E. P. Michell, Mrs Marion Milner, Professor J. Romano, Dr Charles Rycroft, Dr Dennis Scott, Dr Paul Senft, Dr J. D. Sutherland, Dr D. W.Winnicott; also my research colleagues, Dr A. Russell Lee and Mr Herbert Phillipson. Dr Lee is completing a monograph on Schizophrenia and the Family Nexus.

R. D. LAING

London, June 1961

Thanks are due to the authors and to the Editor of Behavioral Science for permission to quote from Toward a Theory of Schizophrenia by G. Bateson, D. D. Jackson, J. Haley, and J. Weakland; to the Editor of the British Journal of Medical Psychology in respect of The Effort to Drive the other Person Crazy an Element in the Etiology and Psychotherapy of Schizo-phrenia by H. F. Searles; to Professor M. Buber, George Allen & Unwin, and the Editors of the Hibbert Journal and Psychiatry in respect of Distance and Relation and Elements of the Inter-human Contact; to Jean Genet in respect of The Balcony, translated by Bernard Frechtman; to The Harvill Press in respect of The Double: A Poem of St Petersburg by F. Dostoevsky; to the Hogarth Press in respect of Trends in Psycho-Analysis by M. Brierley; to Librairie Gallimard in respect of Saint Genet. Comdien et Martyr by Jean-Paul Sartre (tous droits rservs); to The Melanie Klein Trust in respect of The Nature and Function of Phantasy by Susan Isaacs from Developments in Psycho-Analysis, edited by J. Rivfre; to Methuen & Co. in respect of Being and Nothingness by Jean-Paul Sartre; to The Olympia Press in respect of Notre Dame des Fleurs by Jean Genet; to Penguin Books in respect of Crime and Punishment by F. Dostoevsky; to The Psychoanalytic Quarterly Inc. in respect of Thalassa: A Theory of Genitality by S. Ferenczi.

The way out is via the door. Why is it that no one will use this method?

CONFUCIUS

We talk, in a rough and ready way, of acts and experiences in memory, in dreams, in imagination, and in reality. Some psychoanalysts propose that we can also talk about experiences in unconscious phantasy. But is unconscious phantasy a mode or a type of experience? If it is, it is with a difference. If not, what is it, if not a figment of imagination?

The psychoanalytic thesis can be stated thus: it is not possible to prove the existence of unconscious phantasy to the person who is immersed in it. Unconscious phantasy can be known to be phantasy only after the person's own emergence from it. This way of putting it is riddled with difficulties, and so is every other way. The situation is not assisted by the fact that the concept of unconscious phantasy has received very little scrutiny from an existential and phenomenological perspective. And yet no comprehensive account of human relations can ignore it.