Resumo de The Politics Of Experience

If anyone has bid us, not to impute a hypothetical malady of unknown aetiology and undiscovered pathology to someone, it is the late R.D.Laing, the British existentialist psychiatrist.

It is his view that unless man is disposed to live in a cathectic channel, he cannot hope to be an articulate, social fragment in the chain of human causation. Moreover, by fragmentation and alienation, were are condemned to be deprived of the perennial possibility of being human; of thereby being relegated to the fibrillating heartland of a senescent civilisation.

This plunges us into the depair of ever "taking an unequivocal view of the sanity of common sense, or of the madness of the so-called madman". Alienation as our present destiny, is achieved only by morbid outrage perpetrated by human beings on human beings. And this proprioceptive experience occurs in a social field of reciprocal influence and interaction.

To be above and abreast of the passivity or foreordination of modern inhuman processes, man must interexperience and interact with his fellows in humane, human nexus of relationships. This will have an annihilating edge in the race towards catasptrophe.

Psychiatrists achieve, according to Laing, what may be termed, a transpersonal invalidation of the patient-agent, agent-patient relationship by overlaying it with a thick gilt - or, should it be said, guilt - of mystification and oversimplication.

He charges the run-of-the-mill psychiatrists as being borne by the dead hand if not, dead wood of the psychanalytical sciences.

This being so, his poser is that when one cannot speakabout diagnosis in a critical and unequivocal sense, one cannot also, by any means, speak either of prognosis in the potential and functional depths it needs to be critiqued.

It is his view that the datum of experiential schemata of early childhood is very often surmounted but never supplanted.

Psychiatrists, now generally are incapable of shedding enough light on the outer regions and realms of modern, situational ethics; thus they are deprived of the unity of the given and the construed. This is leading to a crisis of character and personality and calamity within the ecosystem.

Modern man is asked to react to pseudo-social and pseudo-religious realities, and is fobbed off with a vision less dimensionally and less spiritually satisfying.

We now need more than ever a new self-conscious and self-critical human account of man to suit our mind-set and subset of values. When we are dismayed by the normal condition of alienation and estrangement, we confront the fathomless and bottomless abyss of modern life and society with petulance and vehemence.

The different schools of psychoanalysis and depth psychology, have articulated this crucial, contrapuntal significance of both experience and behaviour, while leaving a-begging the definition of experience within the context of " the conscious".

The effort to find "aetiology" within the context of genetic-constitutional factors or intra-psychic pathology is praiseworthy, but must be surpassed by our rootedness in something more than this. This is Laing"s view,and definitely a great view at that.

--JOY OOMMEN

Resumos Relacionados