what is happening, they may withdraw into themselves or fantasize about being elsewhere. This “temporary dissociation” is not an unhealthy way of dealing with life.
The schizoid personality, however, feels that the dissociation is permanent.
Their experience is life, without feeling alive. Invoking a literary allusion, Laing observed that Shakespeare’s characters are often flawed types with significant personal conflicts, yet they still remain in the flow of life and in possession of themselves. The characters in Kafka’s novels and Samuel Beckett’s plays, on the other hand, lack this basic existential security and therefore recall the schizoid type. They cannot simply “question their own motives,” since they do not even have a solid, cohesive sense of self to question. Life becomes a daily battle to preserve themselves against threats from the outside world.
Because schizoid people do not have self-certainty, they often try to impersonate the sort of the person they think the world expects them to be, blending into their environment to a morbid extent. A patient of Laing’s, a 12-year-old girl, had to walk across a park every night and was afraid of being attacked. To cope with the situation, she developed the belief that she could make herself disappear and therefore be safe. Such a defensive fantasy, he wrote, could only be contemplated by someone with a vacuum inside where we would normally find a self.
The split mind
Laing made a distinction between embodied people—who have “a sense of being flesh and bones,” feel normal desires, and seek to satisfy them—and unembodied people, who experience a gap between their mind and body.
Schizoid people live such an internal, mental life that their body does not represent their true self. They set up a “false self system” through which they encounter the world, but in doing so their real self becomes more hidden.
They have a great fear of being “uncovered” and so try to control every inter-action with other people. This elaborate internal world enables them to feel protected, but because it is no replacement for real-world relations their inte-rior life becomes impoverished. Ironically, their eventual collapse or break-down does not come from the others they feared, “but by the devastation caused by the inner defensive maneuvers themselves.”
For the schizoid, everything is experienced as desperately personal, yet inside it feels as if there is a vacuum. The only relationship they experience is with the self, yet it is a relationship in turmoil—hence their extreme anguish and despair.
Pushed over the edge
What makes someone with schizoid tendencies actually cross the line into psychosis?
50 PSYCHOLOGY CLASSICS
Living with a system of false selves that are presented to the world, schizoid people are able to live an imaginary inner life. In the place of normal, creative relationships are attachments to things, trains of thought, memories, and fantasies. Anything becomes possible. Schizoids feel free and omnipotent, but as this happens they are whirling themselves further away from the center of objective truth. If their fantasies are destructive, these are likely actually to result in destructive acts, since without access to a real self there can be no guilt or reparation.
This is why schizophrenic people can apparently seem normal one week and psychotic the next, declaring that a parent or husband or wife is trying to kill them, or that someone is trying to steal their mind or their soul. The veil of the false self or selves that made them seem relatively normal is suddenly lifted, revealing the secret, tortured self that has been hidden from the world’s view for so long.
Final comments
The Divided Self also presented Laing’s controversial belief that if a child has a genetic predisposition to schizophrenia, there may be certain ways that a mother (or larger family) acts that will either encourage or prevent the condition from being expressed. Unsurprisingly, this angered parents of schizophrenics.
The more lasting effect of the book was to help lift the taboo around mental illness and create a better understanding about the schizoid mind. It was also important in its idea that psychology should be about achieving personal growth and freedom instead of mimicking the disease/symptom/cure paradigm of conventional medicine. Exploring who you were, even if the explorations were risky adventures, Laing saw as vital; the other route was to try to make yourself fit into society’s regimented molds, with all the related anxieties of such a compromise.
Because of such ideas Laing became famous in the 1960s, attractive to anyone who felt marginalized by their families or cultures, or who wanted to be a part of the “self-realization” mindset of the human potential movement.
Drug use, alcohol addiction, depression, and an interest in unorthodox subjects such as shamanism and reincarnation all contributed to a lowering of Laing’s professional reputation, and he was forced to resign from the UK’s medical register in 1987.
Despite critics’ attempts to devalue his work, his twin aims of changing attitudes to mental illness and helping to recast the ultimate aim of psychology were realized. Laing remains one of the major figures of twentieth-century psychology.
R. D. LAING