>On 2012-09-12, at 5:50 PM, mjchael sylvester wrote: >> Who was it that insisted that there were no crazy individuals,only crazy >> environments? > >On Wed, 12 Sep 2012 19:07:38 -0700, Christopher Green wrote: > >What Laing actually said, I think, was that madness is a perfectly rational >response to living in a mad society.
Laing is claimed to have said: "Insanity is a sane response to an insane world" However, Wikiquote, which contains a number of Laing quotes, says that it is disputed that it originated with Laing. See: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ronald_David_Laing Click on "Disputed". My favorite quote from the Laing page is: |We are all murderers and prostitutes — no matter to what culture, |society, class, nation, we belong, no matter how normal, moral, or |mature we take ourselves to be.Humanity is estranged from its |authentic possibilities. I think Laing would fit right in with positive psychology. ;-) Victor Daniels of Sonoma State University has a page on Laing and in his presentation of Laingian concepts, he does use "A sane response to an insane situation" as one of Laing's key concepts; see: http://www.sonoma.edu/users/d/daniels/R.D._Laing_Summary_.html I find the following from Daniel's webpage most interesting: |Laing himself grew up in a bizarre family setting. His parents |forbid him to go out of the house alone or play with other children |until middle childhood, they repeatedly conveyed the message to |him that he was "evil," and when he went out with them he was kept |on a leash with a harness. His childhood environment was such as | to cause him severe confusion about which thoughts and feelings |were his own, and which were "mapped onto" him by his environment. |As an adult, he was himself schizophrenic for periods of time, |spending some time as a patient in psychiatric wards. Having schizophrenic (psychotic?) episodes might have given Laing some insights into the experience of schizophrenia but one might view such experience with skepticism, as in the case of a clinical psychology with severe depression who believes he was cured by electroshock therapy. It should be noted that the use of the terms sane and insane is a little strange for a psychologist because these are legal concepts (another way of viewing them is that they are obsolete psychological terms or concepts). The versions provided by Sylvester and Green can be viewed as "updated" versions of what is attributed to Laing, though whether the updated versions maintain the original meaning might be in question. Finally, there have been variants of the statement and they have been used by various people; see: http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20110314091000AA4i8gs Among the people who have used the variants is a character from Alien 3, Mr. Spock from Star Trek, and Leonardo DiCaprio in Titanic. Honorable mentions to Akira Kurosawa and Kurt Vonnegut. ;-) -Mike Palij New York University [email protected] P.S. Laing cites Sartre as one of his influences and I believe that it was Sartre that distinguished between evil environments (i.e., environments that caused one to behave in evil, cruel ways) and non-evil environments and the need to avoid them (always good advice). --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: [email protected]. To unsubscribe click here: http://fsulist.frostburg.edu/u?id=13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df5d5&n=T&l=tips&o=20383 or send a blank email to leave-20383-13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df...@fsulist.frostburg.edu
