R. D. Laing uses the language of false and untenable positions to investigate a person’s place in their own life and in relationships. A false position concerns estrangement between the person and how they live or are defined. An untenable position concerns a situation in which available moves cannot resolve the predicament. These are concepts in his existential and interpersonal analysis, rather than diagnostic categories.
What does “position” mean?
In Self and Others, Laing explicitly distinguishes existential position from economic rank or place in a formal hierarchy. He starts from everyday expressions about being oneself, losing oneself, getting nowhere, being cornered and having room to move. Such language concerns how a person inhabits their actions and relationships. [1]
Laing treats ordinary expressions about being cornered or having room to move as clues to experience:
Everyday speech gives us clues we would be wise to follow.
R. D. Laing — Self and Others (second edition), p. 108 [1]
The chapter considers positions arising through a person’s own activity and positions into which others place them. These are related inquiries. Understanding someone’s experience requires investigating their actions, their interpretations of others and what those others actually do. The amount of room someone experiences depends on more than an internal state considered alone. [1]
Someone’s position is therefore not simply their location or outward role. A person can be busy, recognised and apparently successful while experiencing their activity as disconnected from a future that feels their own. Conversely, a constraining situation may be experienced within a relationship that outsiders regard as caring or supportive.
The false position
Laing asks how action can disclose or conceal the person acting. He contrasts experiences of fulfilment through what one does with activity that feels empty, counterfeit or circular. The concern is not whether an activity is impressive to observers, but the person’s relation to it. [1]
He develops this through the experience of moving constantly without getting anywhere. A false position can involve losing a starting point from which to project oneself into a future. The person may not fully recognise the position as false; recognising estrangement is itself different from being entirely absorbed in it. [1]
These descriptions should not be turned into a rule that effort, routine or social obligation is necessarily inauthentic. Laing’s question concerns a relationship between person and action. Outwardly similar activities can have different meanings for different people, and an observer cannot establish that relationship from appearances alone.
The limits of judging authenticity
Laing distinguishes the accuracy of a proposition from a speaker’s relationship to what they say. A statement may be factually correct while spoken insincerely; a sincere person may be mistaken. Everyday judgments about honesty, pretence and self-deception concern this additional dimension of action. [1]
He also acknowledges that there is no final assurance of correctly attributing another person’s relationship to their actions. This limitation matters when using the concept of a false position. The interpreter cannot simply claim privileged knowledge of someone’s “real self” and dismiss the person’s disagreement as evidence of further falsity. [1]
The chapter’s literary discussion of Dostoevsky’s The Double offers one interpretation of a character’s relation to his predicament. Laing then cautions against jumping to conclusions in actual cases and turns attention back towards the conduct of real other people. Literary intelligibility and investigation of a living relationship are different kinds of work. [1]
When a position becomes untenable
The discussion of positions imposed by others examines situations in which available actions are caught within incompatible demands. Laing uses the double-bind hypothesis associated with Gregory Bateson and his colleagues as one account of such a predicament. A person receives conflicting injunctions and cannot escape the situation or openly comment on the conflict. [1]
His account includes positions sustained through one’s own actions as well as those imposed by others:
One can put oneself into a false position, ultimately into an untenable position.
R. D. Laing — Self and Others (second edition), p. 116 [1]
This is more specific than having two unattractive choices. Consider an invented workplace example. An employee is required to use independent judgment, but each decision made without prior approval is treated as disloyal. Requests for approval are then condemned as dependence. If attempts to discuss the contradiction are themselves punished, the difficulty concerns the rules of participation, not simply a difficult decision.
The example illustrates a structure; it does not establish a clinical double bind or show that a particular workplace causes mental illness. The historical hypothesis concerned repeated patterns within consequential relationships, and its broader causal claims need separate assessment. Laing himself questions parts of its theoretical formulation and acknowledges uncertainty about the distribution of such patterns across families. [1]
Conflict is not enough
An important qualification appears in Laing’s discussion of Harold Searles. Laing argues that generating emotional conflict is not, by itself, sufficiently specific to explain disintegration. Some conflicts may sharpen a person’s sense of themselves. He is more concerned with interactions that confuse the participants about who they are, who the other is and what situation they are in. [1]
This distinction prevents the concept from expanding to cover every disagreement or challenge. A person can face criticism, incompatible wishes or disappointment while still being able to understand the terms of the relationship, respond and seek clarification. The more distinctive problem is a structure that undermines those possibilities.
Laing’s discussion also includes reciprocal patterns and speculative links between attachment, anxiety and communication. He ends the chapter by warning that speculation can move ahead of information. Those passages are historical proposals for investigation, not established explanations of a person’s condition. [1]
Reading positions relationally
These ideas are useful when they direct attention towards what a person can meaningfully do, what others permit or demand, and whether the terms can be discussed. They are less useful as labels applied from outside. An interpretation that declares a person false or trapped without investigating their account repeats the very problem Laing asks readers to examine.
Read this alongside mystification and invalidation, confirmation and disconfirmation, and the guide to Self and Others. The collection overview places these relational concepts within the development of Laing’s work.
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References and source notes
- Laing, R. D. (1969). Self and Others. Revised second edition. Pantheon Books.Cited: chapter 9, pp. 107–108, 116; p. 108; chapter 9, pp. 116–117; chapter 9, pp. 108–109; chapter 9, p. 113; chapter 9, pp. 110–111; chapter 9, pp. 111–112; chapter 9, pp. 114–116; chapter 9, pp. 125–127; p. 116; chapter 9, pp. 125–129; chapter 9, pp. 120–122; chapter 9, pp. 129–131.