Knots

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I do not experience your experience. But I experience you as experiencing. I experience myself as experienced by you. And I experience you as experiencing yourself as experienced by me. And so on. – R D Laing, The Politics of Experience Susan Laing, his second eldest daughter, in a 1974 feature on the children of celebrities, as quoted in "RD Laing: The Abominable Family Man" in The Sunday Times (12 April 2009) Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2012-08-14 18:26:49 Boxid IA164520 Camera Canon EOS 5D Mark II City Harmondsworth Donor Religion is a game. It was in our house. God may not have played dice with the universe but he did with us. I was told I had to have “a personal relationship” with God, something to this day I struggle to comprehend, and so I did what any other kid with any sense would do: I faked it. He was a parentally-sanctioned imaginary friend. So I played along. I went through the motions. I lied. No one taught me to and by the time someone told me it was wrong I had amassed so much evidence to the contrary that I just kept schtum and went about my business appearing to be what they expected me to be. No one even told me we were playing a game, what the rules were (but we still weren’t supposed to cheat). All I knew was what the prize was and I was supposed to keep my eyes on it:

Some facets of our world’s legal framework are grasped only by sophisticates. Be that as it may, when I ended my bitter tenure under much more experienced and cynical arbiters of law than I, I still would not recant. He suffered a massive coronary while playing a vigorous game of tennis. Like Custer, he died with his boots on. As for time. I wasted so much time in the past that I’ve very conscious of making the most of what time I have left. By ‘wasted’ I mean working ridiculously-long hours and letting doing my duty (or what I saw to be my duty) rule my life and now I’ve had enough. I have an enormous amount of catching up to do. If I’d applied myself to literary studies then I’d be a professor by now at least instead of the pretender that I am. Not everyone can afford to do what I’ve doing – I have bills like everyone else – but the simple fact is that you can live on a lot less than people would have you believe as long as you cut your cloth and prioritise. I have the time to research articles like this because I make the time and yet I still feel that every one is rushed. I feel like this article is basically just the outline for a proper essay but when am I going to find the time to write that? I have far too many other things to find out about. I started off talking about formulae and so let me finish there. Some people object to poems being viewed as problems to be solved. Formulae are not problems – they’re the answer to problems and that’s what many poems are, a working example. In Knots R D Laing presents us with scenarios but he’s not asking us to solve these so much as to see if we can relate to them. And isn’t that something we do with all poetry, look for ourselves in the lines and in between them?Laing, R.D. (1982) The Voice of Experience: Experience, Science and Psychiatry. Harmondsworth: Penguin. A poem by Daniel Goleman, modeled in style on R.D. Laing's "knots" and often mistakenly used as a quotation of Laing. D. Goleman (1985). Vital lies, simple truths. New York: Simon & Schuster, p. 24. The Divided Self (1960) [ edit ] The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness For all his inconsistencies, there is little doubt that Laing loved his children, in spite of the flawed manner in which he expressed it. In one of his later works, The Facts of Life, Laing wrote: 'Whether life is worth living depends for me on whether there is love in life.'

His third daughter Karen was born in Glasgow in 1955 and is now a pracitising psychotherapist. Burston, Daniel (1998), The Wing of Madness: The Life and Work of R. D. Laing, Harvard University Press, p.125, ISBN 0-674-95359-2Itten, T. & Young, C. (Ed.) (2012) R. D. Laing - 50 Years since The Divieded Self. Ross-on-Wye, PCCS-Books It’s a poem that still pleases me very much but I’m also not the only person to be inspired by Knots. In my researches I found this poem by Bruce Whealton: Adrian says he has now made his peace with the infamous RD Laing, especially since becoming a parent himself (he has five children). In his biography of his father, Adrian drily notes that his relationship with him 'has improved greatly since his death'. 'I'm very relaxed about him now,' he says. 'I had enough occasions before he died to let him have it. We were friends.' Among those considered to be his most celebrated admirers at the height of his influence in the 1960s when he was a regular feature on television were The Beatles, Jim Morrison, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. Miller, Russell (12 April 2009), "RD Laing: The abominable family man", The Sunday Times, London , retrieved 8 August 2011

Today they will scatter Adam's ashes over the ocean he knew so well. Despite his chaotic life, Adam Laing did have his family's love. Perhaps his father might have judged it a life 'worth living'. The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice. And because we fail to notice there is little we can do to change until we notice how failing to notice shapes our thoughts and deeds.

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Another psychologist who went down a similar road, although he was also focused on mind-body integration as well, is Arnold Mindell. I think you would his book "City Shadows" to be familiar territory; it's about how insane people are often actually just acting out the group's psychosis, acting out the buried shadow of the group, as it were. Another form of sane response to an insane world. My experience of you" is just another form of words for "you-as-l-experience-you", and "your experience of me" equals "me-as-you-experience-me". Your experience of me is not inside you and my experience of you is not inside me, but your experience of me is invisible to me and my experience of you is invisible to you. Elizabeth Day and Graham Keeley, 'Dad solved other people's problems - but not his own', The Guardian, 1st June 2008

I thought this one would be up your street, Lis. I really don’t envy you your job, I really don’t. The problem as I see it, and I’m sure you do, is that all we have are theories and every few years a sparkly new one comes along (a bit like a new diet fad) and we all go, “Ooooh, that sounds promising,” but after a few years we start to see the flaws. But the thing about people like Laing (and Freud especially before him) is that they ask the right questions. Even if they themselves can’t come up with the right answers they deserve credit for that at least.El amor (2016). Short film by Siddhartha García Sánchez, filmed around the book Knots by Laing. [ citation needed] I’ve never had a great deal of interest in the big three sciences – biology, chemistry and physics – but I do like formulae. I think it’s simply amazing that you can reduce things to a stream (and often a very short stream) of letters, symbols and numbers. The one I remember from school is something called the coefficient of friction– µ. (µ is the twelfth letter of the Greek alphabet which we pronounce ‘mu’.) It tells you how slippery things are. Ice on steel has a low coefficient of friction, while rubber on pavement has a high coefficient of friction. Under good conditions, a tire on concrete may have a coefficient of friction of about 1.7 where a value of 0 means no friction whatsoever. The coefficient of friction is, however, an empirical measurement – it has to be measured experimentally, and cannot be found through calculations. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have a formula, and here it is: I cannot experience your experience. You cannot experience my experience. We are both invisible men. All men are invisible to one another. Experience used to be called The Soul. Experience as invisibility of man to man is at the same time more evident than anything. Only experience is evident. Experience is the only evidence. Psychology is the logos of experience. Psychology is the structure of the evidence, and hence psychology is the science of sciences. Laing appears, alongside his son Adam, on the 1980 album Miniatures - a sequence of fifty-one tiny masterpieces edited by Morgan Fisher, performing the song " Tipperary". [32] Influence [ edit ]