The Divided Self

R. D. Laing's first book sets out to make madness, and the process of going mad, comprehensible. Working from case studies of patients diagnosed with schizophrenia, Laing argues that psychosis is best understood not as a medical condition visited upon a person from outside but as an outcome of what he calls the divided self, the tension between two personas within us, one the authentic and private identity, the other the false and apparently sane self that is presented to the world. He proposes that sanity and madness be seen as degrees of conjunction and disjunction between two people, where one of them is sane by common consent, so that the judgement of madness is always made from within a relationship rather than read off an isolated individual. From this he develops an existential analysis of personal alienation. The outsider, estranged from himself and from society, cannot experience either himself or other people as real, and so invents a false self with which to confront both the outside world and his own despair. Laing's aim throughout is to render the inner world of the patient intelligible in its own terms, as a response to a situation rather than as unintelligible symptom.

Written from the publisher description, Penguin.

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